New Delhi: She was the dowager queen tigress of Rajasthan’s Sariska Tiger Reserve, fondly known as the ‘Rajmata of Sariska’. But ST-2, India’s oldest tigress who passed away at the age of 19 Tuesday, was so much more.
As one of the two big cats enlisted to repopulate Sariska with tigers after poaching caused their extinction there, she became the face of India’s will to fight back for its tigers.
“Sariska was our first battle of tiger conservation, and ST-2 was kind of like our first soldier,” said Y.V. Jhala, former dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, who closely worked with Project Tiger, the government campaign launched in 1973 to protect India’s national animal.
Rajasthan’s Sariska Tiger Reserve lost the last of its tigers in 2004. As the central government rallied to solve the problem, a ‘Tiger Task Force’ was formed in 2005, along with the National Tiger Conservation Authority under the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
The force, led by Centre for Science and Environment director Sunita Narain, conducted a detailed study and suggested an innovative measure that was seen as somewhat outlandish — reintroducing tigers from the Ranthambore National Park, just over 150 km away, into Sariska.
A young tiger ST-1 along with ST-2 were thus airlifted from Ranthambore to Sariska in 2008.
The plan was to follow a controlled pattern of reintroduction, with three tigers introduced the next year.
As the world watched with bated breath, ST-2 gave birth to two cubs in 2012, setting Sariska Tiger Reserve on its journey of revival. She went on to birth two more cubs, establishing her legacy in the reserve.
Now, 16 years later, Sariska boasts of 30 tigers in total, 25 of whom are direct descendants of ST-2.
She passed away due to a wound on her tail, owing to which she was kept in an enclosure for the past three months.
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India’s first reintroduction at Sariska
According to Dr Uma Ramakrishnan, an ecologist and professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, when “apex predators like tigers go extinct, there are cascading effects on the ecology of a region, its prey base, and other predators”.
“Reintroductions are a way to prevent that and try to restore ecological balance,” she said.
Speaking to ThePrint, Sunayan Sharma, a former field director at the Sariska Tiger Reserve, recalled the day ST-2 was brought in. She was three-and-a-half years old at the time, and acclimatisation took time, he said.
“She was given bait by forest officials, but she refused to eat, probably out of anxiety. We were out of our minds with worry on how to get her to eat?” he said.
Finally, Sharma asked the officials to release her from the enclosure, hoping that going back into the wild would relieve the tigress of her stress and help her adapt. It was a risky move, he said, but it paid off.
“Thankfully, she ventured into the forest and made a kill by the next week or so, letting us breathe a sigh of relief,” he added with a laugh. As the tiger travelled within — and sometimes beyond — the valleys of the Aravallis that make up the Sariska reserve, forest officials soon became confident that “she was a fighter”.
Sariska’s tiger reintroduction project in 2008 was a novel, entirely India-led, strategy that set the stage for tiger conservation in India over the next 15 years.
“We had relocated smaller animals before, but nothing of the sort of modern translocation that happens nowadays,” said Jhala. “We looked at everything from the age and gene pool of tigers to the availability of prey, to even the drugs used to tranquilise the animals.”
Since Sariska is the westernmost tiger reserve in the country, the source population needed to be from a geographically close region, he added. That’s why Ranthambore Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan was chosen, so that the tigers would have an easier time adjusting to the climate and topography.
The project altogether involved Ranthambore and Sariska forest officials, the Wildlife Institute of India, and the National Tiger Conservation Authority.
New life to tiger conservation after ST-2
ST-2’s adaptation and survival in Sariska was important not just because India’s first reintroduction project needed to be a success. After the shock that tiger extinction at Sariska posed to India’s wildlife watchers, it was also necessary to revive a healthy tiger population in the region and ensure their longevity.
“By reviving the tiger population in the Sariska reserve, ST-2 also, in a way, revived our hope in our fight to bring tigers back into the country,” said Sudarshan Sharma, the former divisional forest officer of Sariska Tiger Reserve.
In 2006, a tiger census conducted by the National Tiger Conservation Authority revealed that India had 1,411 tigers, much lower than before.
By that time, though, the Tiger Task Force had sprung into action, and had submitted a report detailing the reforms needed in tiger conservation mechanisms in the country.
“We were to fix Sariska’s extinction problem, as well as ensure something like that never happens in another tiger reserve in the country,” said Jhala.
The measures suggested by the Tiger Task Force in their report — submitted in 2005 and titled ‘Joining The Dots’ — included a complete overhaul of tiger monitoring, counting, and data collection systems. After troubleshooting the reason for the extinction of tigers in Sariska, it also recommended better cooperation between forest management and villages surrounding the forest reserves in the country.
“The success of Sariska helped us be more confident when launching a reintroduction project in Panna in 2009, and we were successful there, too,” Jhala said.
The Panna reintroduction project was hailed by the NTCA for being successful “in the shortest possible time”.
Sunayan Sharma, who worked at Sariska Tiger Reserve for over seven years, said the model launched by ST-2 should be followed across the country.
“Reintroduction is one of the best conservation strategies for tigers. You cannot keep tigers isolated in one reserve — overpopulation doesn’t help them, and deficits in other reserves don’t help either,” he added.
“ST-2 brought in a new era for tiger conservation in our country, and our flourishing tiger population continues to honour her legacy.”
Latest government data released last year showed the number of tigers in India had increased to 3,682 in 2022.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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