Lord of the jungle
Inam Ahmed is cheered by a revealing study on tigers
14 October 2011, 18:00 PM
Tigers in the Mangroves
M. Monirul H. Khan
Arannyak Foundation
Distributed by The University PressAway in the south, there lies a vast area -- 5,770 square kilometers to be exact -- of a mangrove forest -- the Sundarbans. The world's largest and most biodiverse mangrove swamp, it has a fragile and intricate ecosystem that depends on many components such as tides, salt content in water and soil and duration of sunlight
Here roams a majestic animal -- the Bengal tiger. Walking like a shadow, this large cat sneaks upon the deer and sometimes humans too. The mention of the tiger can send a shiver down the spines of those who live around the mangrove forest.
A zoology professor had criss-crossed this forest many times. With his uncanny sense of observation, he has searched the forest floor, scanned the trees, and eyed every crevice and corner of the forest looking for this wonderful animal. The end result: a glorious book called Tigers in the Mangroves.
Anyone who knows M Monirul H Khan also knows about his knack for details and his keen powers of observation. He can spot the most difficult bird in the most difficult setting. He can pick up the most indistinct sound. And so when Monirul did this job on tigers, on which he also did his doctorate, the end result was bound to be good.
Bengal tigers were once found in all the forests and even in some village groves of Bangladesh. They were present in 11 of the 17 civil districts of eastern Bengal until the 1930s. Today they have been limited to the Sundarbans other than the occasional ones sighted in the mixed evergreen forests in the Sangu-Matamuhuri and Kassalong-Sajek areas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
Monirul has mentioned one George U Yule of the Bengal Civil Service who killed 400 tigers in 25 years in Bengal after which he did not keep count of his kills. The government also used to pay a bounty for tiger killing. Today, despite their protected status, poachers are active. They either poison the tigers to death or use poison bait to kill them. And of course, more than three tigers are killed every year when they enter villages in search of food.
Monirul had set up camera-traps and also counted the number of prey and pugmarks to arrive at his own estimate of the numbers of tigers in the Sundarbans. He thinks about 200 tigers exist in the mangrove against the forest department's claim of 440. That is a number too small to be worried about.
And yet except for a few villages in the Indian part, there is no permanent human settlement in the Sundarbans. The earliest reference to the Sundarbans can be traced back to the epic Mahabharata (300BC to 300AD) where it was mentioned as Gangasagar. Fourth and third century BC Maurya and sixth to fourth century BC Gupta age relics are found in the forest. The Malangis or salt manufacturers set up their plants here between the 18th and 20th centuries.
Whoever the settlers may be, they all looked upon the tigers with respect and fear. People of all religions worship Bonbibi, a deity, to save themselves from tigers. Muslims do not enter the forest on Fridays as they think Bonbibi goes to Mecca on that day.
The reason for the fear is understandable as quite a few humans are killed by tigers each year. Monirul has concluded that the tigers prefer to attack from the back and hence the honey collectors strap a mask on the back of their heads to confuse the tigers. He thinks the man-eating habit of tigers might simply be a behavioural character but it is exacerbated more by humans and scarcity of natural prey.
Although he is not sure how man-eating became a behavioural character in some tigers, he thinks in the remote past, tigers of the western Sundarbans encountered a large number of human carcasses probably as a result of a cyclone or epidemic disease. When they tasted it they realized that humans were edible. The trend then transferred and spread from generation to generation.
But Monirul has shown that tiger-prey ratio in the Sundarbans is quite low compared to other forests in tiger range countries and this may be a reason for hungry tigers to get close to human habitation.
He has mentioned some interesting facts about the tiger's food habit. Tigers prefer to catch big animals like spotted deer because it is most profitable. But the Sundarbans tigers also eat porcupine, monkey, wild boar, leopard cat, dolphins, red jungle fowl, adjutant storks, crabs and even fish. A camera-trapped tiger carrying a fish in its mouth published in the book is proof to such behaviour.
But Monirul has also found good quantity of soil in the tiger's scat and he has deducted that tigers eat soil probably to supplement mineral needs or to cure infections.
Throughout the book, one gets a good feel of the life and biodiversity of the Sundarbans with splendid pictures. At every step you can feel the danger the writer went through in collecting information. He once told me he had met tigers fifteen times, sometimes at close range. (I have only one experience of a close encounter with a tiger and I don't want to meet another in my life.)
Monirul has made sure that both experts and laymen find the book useful and interesting. This is the kind of book that Bangladesh had been waiting for, for such a long time.
Inam Ahmed is Deputy Editor, Internet Edition, Business Section and Special Projects, The Daily Star.
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