Ensuring the future of Rajaji Tiger Reserve

The article elaborates the beauty and importance of the Rajaji Tiger Reserve, along with suggestions to halt and rectify its drawbacks.

- DR. A.J.T. JOHNSINGH

The magnificent sambar stag was around nine years old. When alive he should have weighed around 300 kg and his robust hard antlers were each one meter long. He grew up in Dholkhand Range in the erstwhile Rajaji National Park, now Rajaji Tiger Reserve. Dholkhand Range has remained free of gujjars and their buffaloes, at least for the last 40 years. So the stag had abundant forage to eat and clean, and copious water to drink. Like all other sambar stags he came into active rut sometime in November. He discarded the velvet from his antlers by scrubbing against the tree trunks and marked the overhanging branches under large trees at heights around three meters above the ground by rubbing his pre-orbital gland secretions. His usual place of day time rest was under the dense growth of Bauhinia vahlii climber, which provides cool shade, up in the slope of the Goral Ridge, the highest ridge in Dholkhand, favoured by a large number of goral and sambar. Such resting sites of sambar are known as ‘forms’.

On a day in January 2016 he left his ‘form’ in the evening and courted a healthy doe who was in estrous. Fuelled by the hormones of rut, paying not much attention to food and water, he vigorously pursued the doe wherever she went, totally unmindful of the strong smell of the tiger that pervaded the area. The doe was going down towards the Dholkhand rau (stream or seasonal river is called rau in the local language) for a drink, the breeze was blowing from the Goral Ridge towards the