For four months between November 2008 and February 2009, the Uttar Pradesh Forest Department chased a ‘young male maneating tiger’ in a bid to shoot it. When the tiger, originally from Pilibhit in UP, was finally shot more than 500 km away in Faizabad in February, it turned out that the animal was actually a young tigress, and the Forest Department had got its basic field work all wrong. Last week, another ‘maneating male tiger’ in the Lakhimpur Kheri district was captured after a long chase. This too, turned out to be a tigress, unlike what the Forest Department had claimed.

Clearly, the Uttar Pradesh Forest Department, armed with a team of experts and vets, did not know how to read the basic, and oldest, indicator of tiger presence: the pugmark. But the failure of the Forest Department comes with some consolation: experts hold that the future of tiger conservation lies in technology and software, and not complete reliance on field signs.

Tiger scientist Ullas Karanth, working with the Lex Hiby of Conservation Limited and a team of scientists, has created a new software which can identify tigers by their unique stripe pattern, a first in tiger science. “The method of recognising a tiger by its pugmark has no efficacy and is prone to error. The new software has pattern recognition which can help match two photos of a tiger and identify individual animals,” Karanth says.

The software will also plug a loophole in the present system: identifying where a poached tiger originated from. “This software will be very helpful in long term research, and it will also help in identifying where a poached tiger was poached from provided we have an existing picture of the animal,” he says. “The software can be downloaded for use by anyone, and is currently being used in Karnataka,” he says. The team is now working on a spot identification pattern for leopards.

... contd.