GUWAHATI: The world celebrates International Tiger Day today. Here are some interesting facts about the tigers in Assam’s Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve.
- There is evidence that Kaziranga tigers share their prey with other tigers. In a camera trap video it was seen that a single prey (a dead rhino) was shared by three different tigers within one night.
- Most likely in the case of Kaziranga and Orang, tiger density is so high that probably many of them overlap their territory.
- Unlike many other tiger reserves, tigers in Kaziranga and Orang are well adjusted to annual floods. Though there is a very high density, there are very few numbers of “straying” cases during flood times. Many forests guards reported that they have seen tigers taking shelter in tree branches for days during the peak flood times.
- Prey density is so high here that tigers probably don’t have to spend much energy hunting here. Scavenging on dead biomass by tiger is very common here. As Kaziranga is an assemblance of mega herbivores, tigers do easily feed on dead biomass of these mega herbivores.
- According to the park authority tigers here are very very shy. When people enter the park they may not sight them, but tigers surely see the visitors as Kaziranga has tigers in every 4 square km of the park. Though KNP is about 885 sq km, the effective landmass for tigers is about 480 sq km. Almost half of the park is the river Brahmaputra.
(Source: Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve)
