There are Mangrove tigers and Bengal tigers, but can there possibly be a “sugarcane” tiger? Evidently, there can be — and there is.

In Uttar Pradesh’s Dudhwa tiger reserve, tigers which spill out of the reserve and take up seemingly permanent residence in adjoining sugarcane fields, have been christened, by locals and some scientists, “sugarcane tigers”. The unfortunate bit is that the circumstances aren’t a happy quirk of nature.

Today, there is an urgent need for part of the focus of conservation policies to shift from tiger reserves, national parks and sanctuaries, to the areas surrounding them. The landscape around some of India’s best, oldest, and most pristine forests, is changing. And there are two immediate threats: farmers selling land to private players who open up blingy, eyepopping resorts in no time; and poachers, who know the optimum place to strike for ivory, tiger and leopard skin is not the actual tiger reserve or the national park, but the forest (or civil) land around it.

Tigers and elephants, derivatives from which form the pinnacle of Indian illegal wildlife trade, are animals best identified by how much they move. Tigers will routinely patrol an area they themselves demarcate and choose, while elephants will move in herds to areas usually over the same corridors, in search of food and water. And this is the weak link in the chain of protection that poachers are exploiting. This month, elephant ivory was seized from Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnore and Uttarakhand’s Laldhang, both of which are forests, and both of which adjoin celebrity counterparts — Corbett and Rajaji National Parks. And this August, a notorious tiger poacher admitted to killing tigers which originated from Corbett but were trapped, and killed, in the adjoining Ramnagar Forest Division, which has a rich animal population but not the vigilance limelight that Corbett enjoys. Shockingly, the same man was caught in the same area for poaching in 2003. Tigers in Corbett today are dying, and being killed, in areas outside the reserve in much greater numbers than inside the reserve.

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