ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Pilibhit Tiger Reserve Conservation Opportunities and Challenges PRANAV CHANCHANI Vol. 50, Issue No. 20, 16 May, 2015 Pranav Chanchani ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate in ecology at Colorado State University, United States, and was a research associate at WWF-India between 2011 and 2013. Home to a sizeable tiger population and several other endangered species, the Pilibhit Forest Division, an erstwhile timber yielding reserve forest, was notified as a tiger reserve by the Uttar Pradesh state government in 2014. To successfully protect and perpetuate the tiger species in this area, noted for its "exemplary wildlife values", the administrators will have to preempt discord that is likely to arise between the forest department and human communities whose livelihoods are affected by the creation of the new reserve. In June 2014, the Government of Uttar Pradesh (UP) notified Pilibhit Forest Division (PFD) as a tiger reserve. Pilibhit Tiger Reserve (PTR) is noteworthy because it supports a notably large tiger population even though it has been an important timber yielding reserve forest for over 100 years. This situation, which is unique to PTR, raises a series of questions. What factors have enabled the persistence of tigers in the erstwhile PFD? How will its conversion into a tiger reserve benefit the species’ long term conservation in this region? And what must administrators and managers do to conserve this endangered species while also accommodating the needs of human communities dependent on forest resources? ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Map of Pilibhit Forest Division (Tiger Reserve) showing the locations of productive grassland habitats, forest-edge habitats, and the locations of key wildlife corridors. (Pranav Chanchani) A Nationally Significant Tiger Population Although PFD has had a long association with tigers, its importance for conservation was ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 highlighted in 2004, when scientists from the Wildlife Institute of India concluded landscape-wide surveys for tigers and noted the area’s “exemplary wildlife values” and the presence of a resident tiger population. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF-India) concurrently established a field office in Pilibhit and initiated a tiger conservation program. Taking cognizance of the area’s importance, the National Tiger Conservation Authority recommended that PFD be recognised as a tiger reserve in 2008. Extensive surveys using motion sensing camera traps to monitor tiger populations between 2010 and 2013 established that PFD harbours one of the largest tiger populations (22-30 tigers) within the 1,500 km span of tiger habitat between Ramnagar Forest Division in Uttarakhand and Kaziranga Tiger Reserve in Assam. Moreover, the estimated density of tigers in PFD (2.3-4.5/100 km2) was close to the mean estimates of population size and densities reported from 30 prominent tiger occupied forests in India, as reported by the National Tiger Conservation Authority and the Wildlife Institute of India from nation-wide surveys in 2010-2011. It is likely that PFD supported a larger tiger population than several tiger reserves, including Satpura in Madhya Pradesh and Melghat in Maharashtra[i] Bustling with Human Activity The forests of PFD, covering a 700 km2 area, were disturbed due to several factors. Foremost among these is the fact that from the 1870s until 2014, PFD was primarily managed as a timber yielding forest. The importance of historical forestry operations is evidenced by the railway line that bisects it. Laid out in the late 19th century to transport sal (Shorea robusta) trees to stockyards and saw mills, the railway line today services rural populations. PFD is also striated by an extensive grid of unpaved roads, designed to allow foresters easy access to timber lots. This grid, not unlike that of a planned city, was frequented by tractors and teams of labourers involved in logging operations. ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Residents of forest-edge villages harvest Phalsa (Grewia asiatica) berries in Pilibhit Forest Division. (WWF-India) Additionally, since the late 19th century, Pilibhit and its neighboring districts have been transformed by policies aimed at converting segments of the Terai’s swampy wilderness into fertile agricultural land. Through the colonial period, and in decades that followed, administrators encouraged farmers to settle in the region and occasionally encouraged the removal of dangerous wild animals. Furthermore, sustained efforts to eradicate malaria that were undertaken for several decades after 1947 have been very effective in containing the disease. Assisted natural regeneration (ANR) and other practices have drastically altered PFD’s forest structure and composition. ANR involves clearing the forest understory of trees, vines and shrubs that compete for space with the commercially valuable sal. To reduce the likelihood of destructive summer forest fires, large portions of the understory are also burned each March. Sal dominated patches today resemble well manicured plantations. As in many other reserve forests in India, the forest department staff posted at PFD were primarily invested in managing these operations. In contrast, wildlife protection was a more peripheral management responsibility in PFD. The footprint of fuel wood supply from Pilibhit forests extends primarily to 350 villages located within three km of its perimeter. Today, these villages are populated by ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 approximately 3,34,000 people. Fuel wood from Pilibhit forests was also transported to the district towns of Pilibhit and Puranpur and to the agricultural hinterland on heavily loaded bicycles. Grass harvesters, mushroom pickers, pilgrims and pastoralists are daily visitors to the forest, and cattle are grazed in large numbers in grasslands along the Khannot, Mala and Sharda Rivers. The peculiar geography of Pilibhit's narrow, linear forests, which are surrounded by densely populated villages, also contributes to heightened disturbance. Owning to its narrowness, only 28% of its total area was located at distances greater than 2 km from the forest edge. By contrast, the adjacent Corbett National Park and Bardia National Park (Nepal) have notably larger “core zones”, removed from disturbed forest edges. About 40 km of paved roads and 650 km of unpaved forest roads dissect PFD. This excludes the network of well used bicycle and animal trails that criss-cross the forests. Furthermore, the Lalpur-Deoria forest patch (ca. 200 km2) is disconnected from other tiger habitats in Pilibhit by a 1.5 km wide breach. This breach is crowded with farmlands, homesteads, fences, a highway, a canal, and a timber depot. Finally, like other forests along the India-Nepal border, Pilibhit’s wildlife may be highly susceptible to the risk of poaching and illegal wildlife trade. Tigers, Surviving Against all Odds Despite high levels of human use, intensive forest management, and other forms of anthropogenic pressure, PFD supported a notably large tiger population. This may be attributed to the region’s unique habitat and geography, to the concentration of human activity in the forest only during daytime hours, and to specific habitat features that have sheltered tigers from some forms of human disturbance. ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 A male tiger furtively strides along one of Pilibhit Forest Division's many unpaved roads. (WWF-India) Geographically, unlike Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan, Pilibhit did not exist as an isolated forest “island”. Instead, it is imbedded in a larger 1,200 km forest complex, which includes, in addition to PFD, a large portion of the Terai East Reserve Forest in Uttarakhand, Kishanpur Wildlife Sanctuary and South Kheri Reserve Forest in UP. Pilibhit’s tigers are therefore members of a larger population that occupy this large forest complex. Data from camera traps has revealed that tigers both disperse out from and emigrate into Pilibhit forests from these surrounding habitats and also from Shuklaphanta Wildlife Sanctuary in Nepal. In all, this forest complex supports a population of about 50 adult tigers. Possibly only nine Indian tiger reserves have populations that are as large, or larger. Unlike many tiger-occupied areas in India and Nepal, Pilibhit has only one small forest- interior village. Therefore, most people who enter this forest on a regular basis are residents of villages beyond the forests’ boundaries. These visitors spend the daylight hours in the forest, collecting fuel wood and other resources, and return to their homes at dusk, when tigers emerge from their daytime hideouts. In PFD, tigers appear to be resilient to daytime disturbance, at least to a degree, and may have benefitted from the near absence of humans within their habitat at night. This scenario is in sharp contrast to many tiger habitats in India within whose perimeters are populous villages. Such settlements may ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 restrict wildlife access to grasslands and river edges. Additionally, they generate noise and light, and harbour livestock that often compete with wild herbivores. Recent studies have identified that tracts of tall grasslands and swamplands that are located primarily along the Khannot, Mala and Sharda Rivers, and Kheri canal may act as refugia (defined as “geographical locations where natural environmental conditions have remained relatively constant or stable during times of great environmental change”) that have sheltered tigers and enabled their persistence in Pilibhit’s highly managed