West Bengal: Villagers in Lalgarh tense as Royal Bengal Tiger spotted after 100 years

In a bizarre development, a Royal Bengal Tiger was spotted at Lalgarh in West Midnapore which had been a Maoist stronghold till 2012.

Rabindranath Saha, Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) of Madhupur Forest Range said that for some time area residents had been complaining of regularly missing cattle and that their pet animals were being
attacked by some unknown animal. After that a camera trap was laid in which picture of a full-grown tiger was caught. “Some of them claimed that it was a tiger but since there was no history of sighting a tiger here in the last 100 years, we did not pay too much heed to their statements but at the same time we installed seven cameras at different places of Lalgarh area and in one of the cameras the picture was caught on Friday morning at 4.28 am and 6.15 am.

From the picture we can say that it is between 12 and 15 years old,” Saha said. Tiger specialists said that there had been no tiger spotted in the area but it was a good sign that it was seen there. They said that the tiger must have come from Odisha or Jharkhand but the exact corridor needed to be known because it could be nurtured in that case. Saha also said that they would set up traps to catch the tiger and take it to the Sunderbans.

Forest officials have been going around in vehicles and announcing that a tiger has been spotted and asking villagers to be cautious. According to the last census, there are 26 tigers at Simlipal, the nearest tiger reserve, about 130 km away from Lalgarh.