{Note : All photographs are google Borrowed. and not stolen or taken by me or any of the people who work at the CWS.
Danke` }
Roar.
More than sounding scary , a Feline Roar sounds so enigmatic and powerful that if i were to ever encounter a tiger i would just freeze in awe.
I spent my December vacation volunteering at the Centre For Wildlife Studies, Bangalore.
If someone asked me to rate my vacations based on how the learning:enjoying quotient fared, id say 'o8 would ...and by a mile! stands Numero Uno.
I approached them in Late november in hope of interning either in the Field or at the office for desk-based research. After going through my CV they requested that i head over to their office for a chat. Turns out two weeks in their opinion was too short a time to go to any of the sites if i wanted to get any learning done. So it was settled, that id be 'stuck with them' with a 9am-5pm slot for two weeks at the office. But nah! to me, i struck Christmas Gold.
okay just to warm you up a bit, the Center for Wildlife ( CWS) initiated by Mr Ullas Karanth is the Indian wing of the Wildlife Conservation Society. They dedicate their lives to protect the 'charismatic' endangered megafauna in the protected Reserves of our country and in doing so , preserving the rich biodiversity that we have been blessed with.
During my time there i worked under Mr Samba Kumar , who has been instrumental in the implementation of Project Tiger in India. However, i worked more closely with two very brilliant and down right FUN people, Pallavi and Mr Patil. The office was very nice and the least bit...office like! Despite the line of computers sitting in each room, the fact that there would almost always be an oriole , a bulbul or a warbler sitting outside my window could make me smile like sheep all day. Just like Pallavi. i began to look forward to our daily rounds of coffee, turns out it really gives you the Kick that you need!
The work i had to do was pretty monotonous...is what i WOULD have said , had i been a painful MCC noob. I totally freaked out with joy each day like i was eating a heap full of Mousse and pretzels.
Well, one of the projects they undertake is Predator and Prey census, following camera trap methods or simply by conducting line transect surveys respectively. By predators typically that would include tigers and leopards. Since each of them have unique patterns on their skin , comparing them using photographs makes it easy and greatly accurate in terms of figuring out how many of the species are currently surviving and thriving (Our forests are simply exceptional) if i might add. The catch here however is that, to manually compare the stripe/spot patterns taken in that year with those that had been, in the previous years can be quite tedious. ha! But yes, that has been the protocol over the past years.
Until ofcourse, this year ..when the CWS has begun to use a software which uses a database that records, extracts and gives a unique identity to each stripe pattern thus making the whole differentiating process automated.
The three main sites that they focus on are the Nagarhole, Bandipur and Bhadra reserves. Of the three mentioned, the first two had been added to the database earlier and is now fully functioning. However adding to the database for the third remained pending. And thats when yours truly comes into the picture.
According to Pallavi, everything in an area like this is greatly connected and correlated, that my friend sometimes can really test your patience.For instance if you encounter a problem while calculating One parameter, it is most likely that someone entered it in wrong, which in a way could be because the values fed wrong in the first place, which means the raw data must be checked , subsequently the original datasheets must not be ignored either..... and all this just because you wanted to see if the animal was male or female.
I encountered that problem in the very first minute of my job which pretty much changed my job description completely. I focused mostly on the Bhadra reserve data. i had to update their original records starting from the year 1997. Then i had to work on
their raw data spreadsheets and photo albums. I had to prepare material for a leopard comparison software test run (which was seriously Cool)The concept of camera trapping is very interesting. It seems easy when looked at superficially but once you sink in , even ankle deep into the whole method one will begin to see how there really is NO room for error. Go two paragraphs up to know what happens when errors decide to crop up.
CWS currently uses Roll based active infrared cameras, that have both pros and cons. Pros being the Active nature of the camera almost always gaurantees a picture of the animal being taken. It is cost effective as these cameras are placed at the risk of being stolen or sometimes trampled by our Jumbo friends when they feel like it. On the other hand , the fact that the camera is not digital makes the process of acquiring the photographs tiresome and highly multi-staged. what with the click + develop roll + print roll + scan (each photograph) + coding for each roll of each block in each site , each year. And not always does a tiger or a leopard get captured. there are so many amusing pictures of procupines, rabbits, wild board, sloth bears, poachers inquistive villagers and sometimes even A leaf.
One might wonder, WHY? why go through all of this drama only to count tigers? Well to answer your question, look at a picture of a full grown lean female tiger (okay say with her cubs) resting cosily in the brilliant greens and browns of our Western Ghats, she looks so majestic, she leaves you in a trance. Then check her stripe pattern with those in the confiscated tiger skin records. I did that, and i found a match.
www.wcsindia.org
