New Delhi: Finally an attempt has been made to estimate the country’s leopard population by the government’s Wildlife Institute of India (WII). We are given to believe that there are anywhere between 12,000 and 14,000 leopards roaming in India’s wilderness.
These are good numbers for a large carnivore in a crowded country. Compared to its cousin, the tiger, the leopard seems to have done well in the age of development. But how good are these numbers?
This study is a spinoff from the tiger census published earlier this year, which has been contested in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Further, a majority of the data came from camera traps deployed between 2011 and 2013 in areas where tigers are to be found. Since then, some leopards have died (natural death and poaching) and some were also born.
Leopards generally avoid areas dominated by tigers and recent studies by wildlife biologists show that leopards live and breed in farmlands such as sugarcane fields, which provide adequate cover. They are a highly adaptable species, surviving well in human-dominated landscape in rural India as well as in towns and cities such as Thane, Guwahati and Shimla, to mention a few.
These places can’t be called wilderness by any stretch of the imagination. The pace of development also puts the species in direct conflict with humans. According to the 2012 WWF-India report-Illuminating the Blind Spot, at least four leopards are poached every week in India. Even today hardly a month passes without news of leopards being spotted in urban settings from across the country. The film Leopards: 21st Century Cats (widely available on social media) is a must-watch to understand how the big cat lives in and shares our space.
The leopard census study was restricted to only tiger states. Here also it excludes West Bengal, the entire northeast and parts of Rajasthan. No surveys were done in Himachal Pradesh (a state known to have a high density of leopards), Jammu and Kashmir (Dachigam National Park harbours a good population of leopards which is said to be preying on the endangered Hangul), Gujarat (Gir National Park itself has over 400 leopards), Haryana and Punjab.
WII reviewed its tiger census data and came up with a total of 7,910 leopards in tiger-dominated landscape. This was put through little-understood complex mathematical models, known as extrapolation, to project leopard numbers as ranging between 12,000 and 14,000. This WII extrapolation method has been earlier contested in peer-reviewed science journals by wildlife biologists.
The conservation community is not impressed, “Leopards are spread across the country, in all kinds of terrain, from the high Himalayas to the coast; this is a wild, wild guess. We all know that there are a lot of leopards out there, much more than tigers, but the numbers are steadily going down due to poaching and human interference,” said a wildlife biologist seeking anonymity.
An organization of the WII’s stature should have refrained from such a short cut to glory. The leopard deserves better treatment.
