End near for Ranthambore national park's famous tigress Machhli?

JAIPUR: Once the queen of all she surveyed at the Ranthambore national park, legendary tigress Machhli, or T-16, might just be on the last leg of her long journey. Machhli, probably the world's most photographed tigress, has not eaten for the past five days and has been lying quietly on a ground on the fringes of the park.
"A team of the forest department along with a doctor has been posted on a constant watch over Machhli.We are trying to provide her some food too but she has not eaten at all," said YN Sahu, field director, Ranthambore.
And though the signs are ominous but optimism lives on. For Machhli, at 19 years, has not just cheated death a number of times but also proved conventional that tigers in the wild have an average life span of 13-15 years.
It is this trait of the tigress that wildlife activists are pinning their hopes on. "I first saw her in 1998 when she was roaming about the Jhalra area with her mother - the original Lady of the Lake - a title Machhli inherited after occupying the Rajbagh, Tambakhan, Padam talab and Mallik talab - an area that she never really left since then," says Rajpal Singh, member, National Tiger Conservation Authority and the state wildlife board.
In fact, it was the large territory that helped her bag 'honours' such as the lifetime achievement award by the Travel Operators For Tigers in 2009 April which calculated then that Machhli, called so because of the marks on her face that resemble a fish, in the past 10 years had contributed more than $10 million per annum to the economy of Ranthambore.