Cubs of Tigress Avni, shot for killing 13, spotted

NAGPUR: Days after T1 was shot dead on November 2, her cubs were sighted after a gap of 14 days by monitoring teams in the wee hours of Thursday at Vihirgaon. They were later spotted near the Anji dam.

Like T1 was lured by tigress’ urine and Calvin Klein perfume in Borati for capture, the two elusive cubs were lured by playing a voice recorder of a tigress calling her cubs. These calls were originally recorded a year back from a forest area open for tourism. The technique worked wonders.

Sources said the voice recorder with portable speaker was activated at every two kilometre near the Vihirgaon dam by a team-led by monitoring team from Nagpur. The first sighting of cubs from around 300m was at 1.30am. The team saw two glaring eyes in the dark and suspected it to be of one of the cubs.

A team from Akola monitoring the cubs saw the cubs at 2am from 150m near the same spot. The teams were overjoyed when both the cubs were caught on camera near Anji dam at 7.41am.

“The cubs look healthy and travelled 7.5km to Anji from Vihirgaon during the night, which is astonishing,” officials said.

Additional principal chief conservator of forests (APCCF) for wildlife Sunil Limaye confirmed both the cubs were sighted near Vihirgaon and also caught on camera.

In Pimpri-Chinchwad, forest minister Sudhir Mungantiwar too confirmed spotting of two T1 cubs while talking to mediapersons after inaugurating HortiPro 2018 in Pimpri on Thursday. Mungantiwar said the forest department will take appropriate action in their regard.

Five days ago, even chief wildlife warden AK Misra had confirmed trail of pugmarks of cubs near Vihirgaon but there was no sighting.

Officials, who were part of the operation, said the cubs moving around the mother’s trail seem did not consume meat put by department to lure them, but it is possible they must have killed any small animal to feed themselves.

According to Misra, post capture, the two cubs will be shifted to a big enclosure in Pench Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra, where they will be trained to hunt and later released back in the wild.