Buxa tigress digs out of enclosure again, heads back towards Assam

The young tigress at the centre of West Bengal's tiger reintroduction programme at Buxa has escaped from her enclosure for a second time and was last reported moving east, towards Assam, The Times of India reported on Sunday night.

The three-year-old animal, identified as T-138 and later named BTR-TF1, got out of her 2.2-hectare acclimatisation enclosure at around 1.30 pm on Sunday, according to the report, which cited sources. She is said to have dug a hole under the enclosure's foundation and crawled out. This was only four days after forest teams returned her to Buxa from Assam's Raimona landscape.

Moving east again

By the last update, the tigress had crossed the Bala river, the report said. If she follows the route she took last month, she will have to cross the Jayanti and Raidak rivers before reaching the Sankosh, which marks the border between Bengal and Assam. Beyond the Sankosh she could go deeper into Assam or turn north towards Bhutan.

Neither the West Bengal nor the Assam forest department had made a public statement on the escape in the reports available so far. Earlier this month, when she was in Assam, the Kokrajhar district administration declared a 5-km zone around a village where she had been sighted as restricted, The Sentinel reported at the time. A fresh crossing would put teams on both sides of the border back on alert.

A former Wildlife Institute of India scientist told the newspaper that a tiger can get under a fence if the foundation has not been built properly, although tigers are poor diggers compared with dogs or hyenas.

A month on the move

The tigress was brought from Bihar's Valmiki Tiger Reserve and released at Buxa's 25th Mile enclosure on October 2, the first animal in Bengal's tiger reintroduction project. She walked out two days later and crossed the Sankosh into the Raimona landscape in Kokrajhar district. At one point her radio-collar signal went silent for more than 32 hours before it came back.

Her movements near villages, with Kali Puja approaching, led Bengal to seek clearance from the National Tiger Conservation Authority to tranquillise her again. Teams from the Bengal and Assam forest departments, with researchers and trackers, finally darted her at Gilaguri in the Dotma area, about 30 km from Raimona National Park, and took her back to Buxa on November 3.

That was the third time she had been tranquillised in 34 days. The first was at her capture in Valmiki on September 29, and the second was on October 1, to refit a collar that had slipped off on the way to Buxa.

The latest escape raises questions about how secure the acclimatisation facility is. What happens next depends on where the tigress heads and whether the authorities decide on another capture.