Tiger count aims to prevent extinction

Wildlife experts in India have begun the largest census of the endangered tiger to prevent it from being poached to extinction.

Hundreds of officials armed with radio collars and night-vision cameras fanned out across the largest natural tiger habitat of West Bengal's sparsely populated Sunderbans, a 10,000sq km area of mangrove marshland on the eastern coast.

Using speedboats, the experts are employing high-tech methods to do the count based on sightings of tell-tale footprints, or pugmarks.

A century ago, there were about 100,000 tigers world-wide but now numbers are less than a few thousand.

The tiger is protected in India but this has failed to prevent it from being poached by heavily armed criminal gangs, who can earn up to US$50,000 ($72,831) for each carcass.

Last March, it emerged the entire tiger population of up to 28 animals living in the famous tiger reserve of Sariska had been wiped out by poachers, who make money from the illegal trade in skin, bones and dried organs used in Chinese medicine. Poaching and official indifference have blighted many Indian tiger reserves, such as Sariska, which are poorly protected.

Conservationists have criticised the pugmark system of counting tigers, which they argue gives an inaccurate assessment of the true size of a breeding population.

In response, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has formed a special taskforce to suggest ways of saving tigers and improving on the census.

For the first time the census will employ computer programs, camera traps and radio-collars tracked by satellite to avoid any duplication in recording pugmarks.

"This census is the world's biggest and the most scientific to date," said Pradeep Vyas, the census chief in the Sunderbans.

The last census in 2003 estimated there were between 260 and 280 tigers in the Indian part of the Sunderbans, home also to hundreds of saltwater crocodiles and rare river dolphins.

THE DECLINE OF A PREDATOR

* A tiger can weigh 450kg and measure 3m from its nose to its tail.

* Tiger numbers in the wild are thought to have plunged from 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century to between 5000 and 7000 today. They now range in the forests of south Asia, southeast Asia, southeastern China and the Russian far east. Fewer than 1000 tigers are in zoos worldwide.

* A century ago, India had some 40,000 tigers. Now, officials estimate they number about 3700, although some environment groups put the number at less than 2000.

* The Bali, Javan, and Caspian subspecies, have become extinct in the past 70 years. The five remaining subspecies, Amur, Bengal, Indo-Chinese, South China, and Sumatran, live in Asia. All are threatened by poaching and habitat loss. The South China tiger is on the verge of extinction, with just 20 to 30 remaining in the wild.

- INDEPENDENT,  REUTERS