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Forest Dept count paints a bright picture of the state of tigers in Bengal
The Forest Department of the Bengal Government has painted a bright picture of the state of tigers: camera traps have photographed 84 adult tigers over the past several months across the 2,800 square kilometre (sq km) of the mangrove forests of the Sunderbans.
According to a senior official of the department, the camera trap technique is more reliable than the traditional methods of counting like scanning pug marks or looking for scats.
This number is eight more than that pegged by the 2014 Central Government-mandated study jointly conducted by National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and Wildlife Institute of India (WII).
The number is encouraging. If sub-adults and cubs are included, according to tiger experts, the number could be as high as 103. At least 50 of the tigers caught on the camera traps are likely to be males.
The all-weather camera traps with night vision, of which there are 120 pairs, had been set up across the Sunderbans. Several hundred photographs taken by the cameras were studied and the tigers identified by their stripes to arrive at the current number.
