Mountain tigers found

Thanks to Terrierman for bringing this camera-trapping news of mountain tigers to my attention.

Treehugger also gives it concise coverage.

It doesn't surprise me. Wild dogs have also been found way up there too.

Where there are ungulates and no poachers you will find large predators.

Enjoy.

Message from Tigerland

"The mango tree in which I sat and photographed this tiger in 1978 was in the Ministerguthi nallah about 2 km from Bandipur village, where I had established my base camp."

AJT Johnsingh

Drudgery makes the mind fly.

Tedious homeowner rituals send my thoughts sailing, and often they settle somewhere East of Suez to dwell on old friends and places, once so familiar, now far away and changed by time.

A recent message from A.J.T. Johnsingh, who has been traipsing through Indian jungles since boyhood -- reassured me that this old friend still lives an adventurous life.

AJT Johnsingh in Eravikulum National Park, Kerala, India

He shared these photos and wrote, "On 4th November early in the morning I was walking in Sigur Range (east of Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary) with four colleagues along a path that parallels the Moyar river.

"Lying and facing away, as we found her."

"We saw a tigress resting on the path about 20 m away, and stopped to observe and photograph."

"She became suspicious of our presence and was about to stand up."

"She had two cubs about the size of domestic cats that were playing behind a bush."

"Standing and growling at us before bounding away"

"When the tigress growled at us, the cubs in confusion almost ran towards us."

Seems we both still get our jollies getting surprises in the woods.

Johnsingh has logged years in the jungle studying large Indian mammals, has encountered elephants, gaur and tigers at close range, and owes his survival to keen senses, quick reflexes, and good jungle lore.

The young post-doctoral fellow who studied radio-telemetry at the National Zoo's Conservation & Research Center in the late 1970s grew into a senior wildlifer and an icon of jungle savvy admired by the younger generation.

We were both devotees of Jim Corbett's books about life in the Indian jungles, and when Johnsingh finished his postdoc I confessed that someday I wanted to see Corbett's old haunts -- and trek the Rudraprayag pilgrim trail together, where the famous man-eating leopard snatched sleepers from a crowded waystation without detection.

Johnsingh welcomed the prospect, but I never found the time to break free.

The good news is that my friend did go to see Corbett's haunts, and wrote a book about his adventures -- On Jim Corbett's Trail and Other Tales from Tree Tops.

Readers of Corbett can't help but wonder what if anything remains of the intimate places he described so well.

Read Johnsingh's book and you'll find out.

Camera trapping science and tigers

K. Ullas Karanth and James D. Nichols have produced an 8-part instructional series about monitoring tiger populations.

You can watch it here on You Tube.

The footage and animations are excellent, and three chapters deal with the use of camera traps.

It all builds on the efforts of Karanth and Nichols who have been worked hard over the past 3 decades to introduce science into the business of estimating wild tiger populations.

While few readers of this blog will ever have occasion to use the method, the camera trapping chapters are well worth viewing to appreciate the painstaking effort that goes into wildlife population estimation.

It's not quite as simple or easy as the general public, politicians, and most outdoors folks would like to believe.

But hey, you can trust the results.

Camera Trap Pioneers: Charles McDougal

[Chuck McDougal during a tiger drive in the 1980s. 

Photo by Chris Wemmer.]

Charles "Chuck" McDougal began photographing tigers with camera traps in the late 1970s. Not since F.W. Champion's camera trapping achievements 40 years earlier had anyone pursued this kind of photography with such devotion.

McDougal was trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Colorado and developed a keen interest in tigers and Nepalese natural history during Ph. D. research on the Rai people of eastern Nepal.

With fluency in Nepali and Rai, he was well prepared for work in the terai after graduate school.

That led to several years of hunting problem tigers in the late 1960s. With the passage of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES) in 1972 the era of sport hunting tigers came to an end.

McDougal devoted himself to scientific studies of tigers when he became the Director of Research at Tiger Tops in the 1970s. At the time, Tiger Tops had the distinction of being the only lodge in a national park where tourists could bank on seeing tigers in the course of a few days.

In my own experience at the time, tiger viewing at Tiger Tops usually interrupted happy hour or dinner.

When the bell rang, tipsy tourists gleefully scuttled into waiting Land Rovers. A tiger or leopard had just killed or returned to the bait -- a buffalo calf.

Ten minutes later they were deposited on a sandy trail in the jungle, where the guide requested you to remove your shoes and remain silent. (I believe the banishment of clodhoppers was a brilliant marketing ploy.)

Then they padded up a sandy jungle path, and five minutes later were viewing the tiger feeding in the light of a torch 100 feet away.

[Photo by Chuck McDougal]

Chuck had been studying tigers in the vicinity of the Lodge when the Smithsonian Nepal Tiger Ecology Project commenced in 1973, and in due course he became a key collaborator with the young American and Nepali scientists who studied tigers and their prey in the park.

McDougal's initial investigations were based on jungle lore -- tracking animals by their pugmarks as popularized by the legendary colonial naturalist Jim Corbett.

Most footprints of young animals are not sufficiently distinct for irrefutable identification of individual tigers. His studies required the ability to individually identify the members of the tiger population. Camera traps were the logical solution.

Tigers left their pugmarks on trails, jeep tracks, and riverbanks throughout the park. Getting pictures was only a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Sooner or later a tiger would amble down the path again.

Chuck's earliest camera trap was a Nikon F2. The model had an accessory electronic shutter release, and this he wired to a switch in a home-made pressure plate. It was built from two wooden planks from the local sal tree (Shorea robusta), and compression springs held the electrical contact apart.

He buried the pressure pad in a shallow depression on a game trail. When an animal stepped on the wooden pad the battery-powered circuit was closed, triggering the camera and its flash.

Here's the story in Chuck's words.

"In early 1972, I started working at Tiger Tops. In 1977, inspired by Champion's tiger photos from the 1920s Mike Price, a Anglia Survial cameraman and still phographer started using a Nikon F2 linked up to a homemade pressure pad. I continued this after he left a few months later and photographed about 20 different tigers in the course of a few years.

"I started using Trailmasters in 1995. The first one I had I put out on the ridge behind Tiger Tops, and I left it there for 3 days. When I went to collect it I found that the tripod had been knocked over and the camera was missing. A young but large male tiger had attacked and carried the camera in his jaws about 80 meters down the path before dropping it. The slide had been knocked off and the camera had canine dents in it. But the photo of the tiger, giving the camera a dirty look before attacking it, came out fine. I sent it to Bill Goodson who put it on his website and gave me a new camera. I still have 2 guys on my payroll camera trapping with the Trailmasters."

Chuck steadfastly improved the system to capture truly outstanding images. He eliminated, for example, the flat appearance rendered by head-on lighting of the electronic flash by placing a slave-activated flash at a 45-degree angle to the trail.

I recall my befuddlement in 1981 when he completed the preparation of a camera set on a trail near the Lodge. He dressed the camera in two quilted mufflers, which made it look like a black effigy on a tripod. The mufflers were beautifully made by the local tailor and stuffed with the unseeded fiber of the local simal or silk cotton tree. (And like all locally made pillows, the muffler was highly attractive to rats hungry for oily seeds.)

Why make the camera look like a black scarecrow?

Well, it solved a vexing problem. In the 'pre-muffler period' Chuck noticed that tigers were often photographed in unflattering moments. They were either frozen in motion veering away from the camera, or they had that unmistakable look of the 'possum-in-the-headlights'.

These responses were testimony to the tiger's lightning reflexes. The big cats actually reacted within microseconds to the sound of the camera's shutter.

As for the pillow-headed scarecrow on the side of the trail, the big cats didn’t seem to notice.

Chuck and his team of two Nepalese camera trappers tallied 8,683 trap-nights of effort and identified 119 individual tigers. They captured a total of 1,309 tiger photos. Most photos were of resident males and females, but each year new tigers appeared, some for a fleeting period and never to seen again, others to challenge and defeat incumbent territory holders.

Over the years he also accumulated an impressive inventory of other wildlife, including yellow-throated martens, several species of civets, and striped hyenas. The rarest find perhaps was a ratel or honey badger. Nowadays it’s an extremely rare species in the subcontinent.

Dave Smith and Chuck McDougal will soon have their book published on the ecology of Nepal's tigers, and I am sure some of Chuck's photos will adorn the pages.

Tiger-escapa-phobia

The plot thickens as the investigation of the fatal San Francisco zoo tiger attack continues. It seems the three young men were drinking, but the two survivors haven't been forthcoming about the details. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, a respected Northern California zoologist, Dr. Richard Tenaza was expelled from the Oakland Zoo last week for questioning the chainlink containment of the tiger enclosure. You may read about it here.

Professor Tenaza has long made use of the bay area's museums and zoos to teach courses in zoology at the University of the Pacific. Instead of welcoming dialogue, zoo officials asked him to leave the zoo. I've known Tenaza for 40+ years, and he is not an uppity guy. It seems the Oakland zoo is suffering from Tiger-escapa-phobia.

On escaping zoo tigers

I would like to weigh in with a few remarks about the recent tragedy at the San Francisco Zoo where on Christmas Eve a Siberian tiger escaped, killing a young man and wounding two others.

So far there are no witnesses to the escape, but Police Chief Heather Fong did not exclude the possibility of intentional or inadvertent human activities and called for a criminal investigation.

Such a notion is reinforced when a television zoo celebrity like Jack Hanna states that the tiger's leap from the moated enclosure would be "virtually impossible". Apparently he was under the impression that the moat was in compliance with AZA standards.

If working with wildlife teaches you anything, it teaches you not to underestimate the abilities of animals.

The depth of the tiger moat at the outer wall is now said to be 12.5 feet, which is less than 16 feet with a two-foot overhang -- the height recommended by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). The width of the moat, as shown in a diagram in the SF Chronicle on Dec 27 -- is 15 to 25 feet, but SF Zoo Director Mollinedo reports that it is 33 ft.

This brings me to 2 observations which are common knowledge among zoo biologists.

First, the leaping or escape abilities of tigers or any other species obey the principle of the bell-shaped curve. A barrier may stop most animals--the ones with average abilities, but an exceptionally athletic or clever animal may be able to breach it.

Second, when an animal is strongly motivated to escape, it may perform feats perceived as "virtually impossible". Years or lifetimes may pass before rare circumstances compel a previously complacent animal to attempt escape. Designing an escape proof enclosure must take these realities into account.

Dave Rentz, a childhood habitue of the SF zoo recently posted a good example of the motivational factor at work. In 1959, Carey Baldwin, then the zoo's director tempted the resident tiger with a chunk of meat at the end of a pole. It motivated the cat to take the tremendous leap, which it accomplished on the first attempt. Fortunately, it ricocheted back into the enclosure. That was enough to decide the director to curtail the tiger's access to the outdoor enclosure.

That was nearly 50 years ago, and since then the zoo and the tiger exhibit have changed a lot.

It is possible that Tatiana simply decided to make her break at the time the three young men were outside the enclosure, and then the cat went into predation mode.

It is also possible that one or more of the young men crossed over the public guard rail and taunted the cat, thus giving it motive to breach the barrier and "pursue the prey". I have a feeling that the survivors of the attack may know some things that haven't yet come to light.

Zoo workers must protect the public from the animals and the animals from the public. In reality they are called upon to check the escape tendencies of their charges far less often than they are called to protect people from the consequences of their own ignorance or stupidity.

In any event, the zoo is ultimately held accountable when an animal escapes. More often than not, animal escape policies kick into practice and disaster if not embarrassment is averted. But now and then an animal escape takes a tragic turn, as did this one, and the zoo director's worse nightmare comes true. It remains to be seen whether the AZA accreditation team that routinely reviews the practices and conditions of member zoos, actually failed to note this deficiency and/or enforce its recommendation.

All of this reminds me of a similar tragedy that Dr Theodore Reed, former Director of the National Zoo in Washington DC related to me before his retirement. Nearly 50 years ago, a small child in the care of an inattentive grandparent squeezed through the public barrier and walked up to the lion cage. The cat reached through the bars and killed the child instantly. It took this tragedy for the US Congress to finally respond to the zoo's standing request to fund major renovation and safety upgrades.

That smell of dead meat

[Huay Khao Khaeng National Park, Thailand, April, 2005]


"Tiger kill." said Dave.

We were jeeping down a track in the forest when we smelled it.

"Back up and let's see if we can find it. It's coming from down there."

"Prem and I used to try that all the time, and we never found the kill." (Prem Bahadur Rai: the chief shikari on the SI-Nepal Tiger Ecology project.)

"Yeah, well, that was in tall grass. C'mon, man, let's try. At least here we can see where we're going."

We walked into the forest parallel to the road, but the stench came and went.

Time to study the situation. The land sloped gently downhill toward a shallow drainage. It looked like the kind of place a tiger might settle to feed. We moved in, picked up the scent again, and suddenly there it was: a heap of decaying flesh, an adult male sambar.



It's a strange feeling standing next to a tiger's half-eaten kill. The cat could be watching you, or it could be dozing on a full belly.

We took pictures, and followed the drag mark to the scene of the takedown, about 50 yards upslope, next to a fallen tree. The viscera were near by, so we knew the tiger had fed before dragging it into the drainage. We took more pictures and left.

The next morning a swarm of blue bottles rose into the air as we approached. The tiger had returned to finish the remaining haunch. We were pleased with ourselves.

Okay. So I was sitting here typing last week, and I kept seeing vultures out the window. They were cruising just above the trees at the edge of the ravine next to the house, and when I went outside, there was that smell of dead meat again. Plus there were 4 black-tailed bucks up the road by the mailboxes--where they hang out when a puma cruises the ravine.

I packed a camera trap, and slowly headed down the deer trail. Confident from our sniff-out in Thailand, I was going to find that puma's kill and stake a camera. I sniffed audibly like a dog, and periodically tested the air with a wet finger like Romar of the Jungle (which wasn't much help).

A vulture flapped out of the canopy, a good sign. I made sniffing sorties to the left and right. The air currents kept changing and the smell was elusive. I checked the small drainages where a carcass might come to rest, and looked for brush piles where a puma might have covered its prey. Nothing.

"Forget it. You need a bloodhound." I settled on checking a camera trap farther down the ravine.

It was a fine day. The poison oak and shrubs had dropped most of their leaves, the visibility was good, and except for a family of nuthatches, which alternately twittered and beeped, it was very quiet.

I was sitting there next to camera with water bottle in hand, when I heard intermittent walking. I shouldered the pack and padded quietly up the trail where I paused behind two large oaks. When I heard the sound again, I slowly peeked around the trunk. About 30 yards away was a small bear, probably the two-year old I've referred to here as Scruffy.

She stood motionless looking in my direction as I slowly reached for the pipe and toy hammer in my back pocket.

I tapped 5 times and nothing happened.

Again: tap tap tap tap tap. Her senses were completely focussed.

Hmmm, I wondered. Am I between mother and cub? Or is Scruffy going to romp up for a friendly look-see? . . . and then it was time to tap again.

Immediately the bear bolted down the hill. Man-the-tool-user smiled with self satisfaction.

I have a sneaky feeling that Scruffy knew exactly where the carrion was, and that reminded me of my own deficient nose. Hers had led her unerringly to the dead meat.

I could only sypathesize with Larry McMurtry's fictional Indian, Magic Shoes the Kickapoo. How he lusted for the Eagle's Eye -- as he called the white man's telescope.

I envied the bear's nose. Maybe it's time to get a dog.

Tiger wallah wins Getty Award

[The radio-collaring of the leopard "Buddy McKay"; Ullas Karanth (center) with veterinarian K.A.Nanjappa (left) and range warden K.M.Chinnappa (right). Nagarahole National Park, Feb. 13, 1990]

We're celebrating the achievements of a good friend this week. K. Ullas Karanth was just named the 2007 winner of the J. Paul Getty Award for Conservation Leadership. The highly esteemed award is WWF-US's way of recognizing outstanding contributions to international wildlife conservation.

Mel Sunquist and I witnessed Ullas's development as a conservation biologist for nearly three decades. Since Ullas's accomplishments have already been enumerated (here), we'll talk a bit about the early days and events that led to his success.

Ullas (pronounced Oo-las) was an engineer-turned-farmer when we first crossed paths with him at the centennial anniversary of the Bombay Natural History Society in 1983. Before switching to the farmer's life, he worked as a planning and industrial engineer for a motor company, and as a sales engineer of agricultural machinery. But job satisfaction he didn't have. His real interest was India's wildlife.

He began to drift more and more to his avocation, and soon he was attending international symposia and conferences in India, where he quickly developed a reputation for asking embarrassing questions.

He was a nitpicker about methodology in general, and his pet peeve was the unreliability of pugmark surveys used by the Indian government for censusing tiger populations. Project Tiger was India's new initiative at the time, and the high priests of tiger biology were a mixed bag of officials, panjandrums, and retired experts. They held forth and tilted at one another endlessly like the heroes and villains of a Bollywood epic. Ah, but how they squirmed when the young and then unknown engineer asked the hard questions. Few of them knew what he was talking about, so his plea for scientific rigor fell on deaf ears.

Ullas knew he needed "the union card". Getting advanced degrees in biology meant taking undergraduate courses while pursuing graduate studies, but it would also give him the opportunity to immerse himself in field studies.

Fortunately, in 1984, Rudy Rudran accepted Ullas for his Wildlife Conservation and Management Training Course at the National Zoo's Conservation & Research Center. This was an intensive immersion course and a chance for students to meet many specialists who were the course's staff and guest instructors.

Mel Sunquist was one of those specialists. Ullas had read his monograph on the social organization of tigers in Nepal's Royal Chitwan National Park, and Mel had recently joined the faculty of the University of Florida. Mel agreed to be Ullas's advisor in the masters degree program.

The research commenced. His home in Mysore was only an hour's drive from Nagarahole National Park, which had a marvelous community of large mammals and a full complement of predators. He started collecting data on the tiger's prey using his recently acquired skills in wildlife censusing. He also established his own non-government organization -- the Centre for Wildlife Studies so his research would be eligible for funding.

Fast forward 3 years to Gainesville, Florida: Mel is making a case for Ullas's admission to grad school with a graduate assistantship. The committee votes in favor, but the chairman has a concern: "Since this student lives in India, how soon can he actually begin?

Mel's answer, "He's on the plane right now", raises a few eyebrows. The next day Ullas arrived in Gainesville with his thesis data in his carry-on baggage. He was ready for course work and writing up.

A year and a half later he had his masters degree in wildlife biology and was ready to go home. Separation from family made him decide to pursue his Ph. D. closer to home at the University of Mangalore, where Mel could still serve as his co-adviser. Residence in India also augered better for obtaining funds for radio-telemetry studies.

Before departure, he presented his results at WCS in New York. Bill Conway, then General Director, recognized promise when he saw it, and offered Ullas support for his continuing work. The result? Ullas become a WCS staff member, and with the added support his Center for Wildlife Studies expanded its programs.

There would be challenges to studying tiger and leopard ecology in India, because he proposed to do the country's first radio-telemetry study, and this was a nation where some viewed the technology as a shadowy tool of US espionage.

That wasn't all. When he was in the US, Ullas's mentor and Nagarahole's range warden, K.M. Chinnappa, had been framed on a false murder charge, arrested, humiliated, and shifted out of the park. In his absence timber and wildlife poaching had taken its toll. An exemplary warden, Chinnappa was subsequently vindicated and returned to his post, but the bitterly aggrieved offenders were waiting to even the score.

Ullas did his homework. He got approval in principle for the study from the state and central government, and he used it to bolster a detailed project proposal for funding, which he submitted to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, WCS, and the National Geographic Society. By mid-1989, all clearances were in place. Then a key official in the Ministry of Environment was transferred, and the paperwork was suspended. It delayed the capture operation by three and a half months. Any longer would have put if off another year.

Mel joined Ullas in early December, delivered the equipment, and taught the capture team the fine art of staking buffalo baits, spreading funnel fences of muslin cloth, and selecting strategically positioned trees for darting passing tigers. These were proven methods used in Mel's Nepal studies, but they were thinking on their feet, and added a new innovation--radio-collaring the bait animal. Finding the kill was a always nagging problem. With a transmitter on its neck, it could easily be located wherever the tiger dragged it.

They caught and collared 4 tigers in the first 22 days. Then three leopards joined the ranks of the collared study animals. The study was off and running, and so was Ullas, who had to radio track the 7 animals daily.

Then came reports of dead tigers from Nagarahole. By May, 1 of the 5 radio-collared tigers had died from a fight. Then four uncollared tigers were found dead. It was clear that Nagarahole had a large number of transient or landless tigers that were challenging resident tigers for space. There were professional necropsies. A broken tiger canine was extracted from the shoulder of one victim, and fighting wounds were found to be the cause of all the deaths.

Now anti-wildlife agitators seized the moment, and certain officials and members of the press joined the campaign, blaming capture and tranquilization for the deaths. Accused of trafficking tiger hides, Ullas became a target of ridicule and death threats.

But he didn't throw in the towel, and in the end, several years later, a special government committee vindicated him of any blame. He had learned an important lesson: there is more to field work than research. And in 1993 he finished his Ph. D. on the predator-prey relations of Nagarahole's large mammals.

Ullas had been thinking about tiger populations and census methods now for several years. Ever since Paul Joslin had demonstrated his own Polaroid camera traps (veterans of his Peace Corps days in Iran) Ullas realized that camera traps could be used to census tigers. Tiger stripe patterns are as good as bar codes, provided you photograph both sides of the cat.



This led to an ongoing and fruitful collaboration with Jim Nichols, and in due course they published a statistically robust census methodology for tigers and prey. Then, Ullas and colleagues examined data trends from pugmark surveys, and compared current figures across much of India's tiger range with those from the new methodology.

They showed that years of pugmark surveys were in fact a textbook example of self-fulfilled prophecy. Pugmark surveys had proven Project Tiger's success: tiger pugmarks had increased throughout the country, as expected and desired. The results were artifacts of a flawed method, and the authorities still defend the method blithely. That's why wildlife conservation is so hard; it's really about managing the Earth's most stubborn species.

So there you have a few glimpses of Ullas's transformation. The rest of the story--represented but partially in the references below--is history.

Congratulations, Ullas. You have earned it.

[wallah defined here]

References

Singh., L.A.K. 1999. Tracking tigers. Guidelines for estimating wild tiger populations using the pugmark technique. WWF Tiger Conservation Programme, New Delhi

Sunquist, F and M. Sunquist. 1988. Tiger Moon. University of Chicago Press.

Sunquist, M. 1981. The social organization of the tiger (Panthera tigris) in Royal Chitwan National Park, Nepal. Smithsonian Contributions of Zoology, 336:1-98.

Karanth, K. U. 1987. Tigers in India: a critical review of field censuses. Pages 118-132 in Tigers of the World: The Biology, Biopolitics, Management and Conservation of an Endangered Species (eds. R. L. Tilson and U.S. Seal). Noyes Publications, Park Ridge, NJ.

Karanth, K.U. and M.E. Sunquist. 1992. Population structure, density and biomass of large herbivores in the tropical forests of Nagarahole, India. Journal of Tropical Ecology, 8:21-35.

Karanth, K.U. March 6, 1992. Oral History of tiger research recorded by C. Wemmer.

Karanth, K.U. and M.E. Sunquist. 1995. Prey selection by tiger leopard and dhole in tropical forests. Journal of Animal Ecology, 64:439-450.

Karanth, K.U. and J.D. Nichols. 1998. Estimation of tiger densities in India using photographic captures and recaptures. Ecology, 79: 2852-2862.

Karanth, K.U. and M.B. Stith. 1999. Prey depletion as a critical determinant of tiger population visibility. Pp 100-113 in Riding the Tiger: Tiger conservation in human dominated landscapes. (J. Seidensticker, S. Christie, and P. Jackson, eds). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK

Karanth, K.U. and M.E. Sunquist. 2000. Behavioral corrlates of predation by tiger, leopard and dhole in Nagarahole National Park, India, Journal of Zoology, 250:255-265.

Karanth, K.U., J D. Nichols, N. S. Kumar, W.A. Link, J. E. Hines, G. H. Orians. 2004. Tigers and Their Prey: Predicting Carnivore Densities from Prey Abundance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(14):4854-4858

Karanth, K.U., J.D. Nichols, J. Seidensticker, E. Dinerstein, J.L.D. Smith, C. McDougal, A.J.T. Johnsingh, R.S.Chundawat, and V. Thapar. 2003. Science deficiency in conservation practice: the monitoring of tiger populations in India. Animal Conservation, 6:141-146.

Karanth, K.U. and J.D. Nichols (editors). 2002. Monitoring tigers and their prey, a manual for researchers, managers and conservationists inn tropical Asia. Centre for Wildlife Studies, (With support from WCS, USGS and WWF-US).

Karanth, K.U. 2006. A view from the machan, how science can save the fragile predator. Orient Longman.