Close to three years after being sent to Satkosia Tiger Reserve in Odisha under the first inter-state tiger translocation project that has since failed, tigress Sundari or T-2 is back in Madhya Pradesh.
Late on Wednesday night, after her arrival from Odisha, the tigress was given a health check-up and released in Ghorela enclosure of the Kanha National Park in Mandla district of MP.
On Thursday too, the tigress was monitored by officials of KNP including the field director and was found to be active and healthy, the MP forest department said on its official Twitter handle. The process of rewilding (training for life in the wild) of the tigress will start soon, the department said.
The return of Sundari to Madhya Pradesh comes 15 months after the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) had directed shifting her back to Madhya Pradesh. A petition was also filed in the Madhya Pradesh High Court for her return and in November 2020, the high court had directed that she should be brought back to MP and trained for the wild again.
After much delay by both MP and Odisha governments, finally the move to bring Sundari back was expedited recently and a team from MP reached Odisha last weekend for the purpose. She was tranquilised on Tuesday and set on her journey back to Kanha National Park.
Tigress Sundari or T-2 has remained in the limelight as she was among the first couple of big cats to be translocated to Satkosia Tiger Reserve in Odisha from Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh in June 2018 as part of an ambitious inter-state translocation project.
The translocation project suffered a big blow as after being released in the wild, Sundari killed two persons in Satkosia (allegedly owing to lack of enough prey/food in the jungles), triggering violent protests by the inhabitants there. She was then captured and put in a small enclosure in September 2018 that experts found totally unsuitable for her. So, the NTCA, in December 2019, directed Madhya Pradesh to take back the tigress.
Meanwhile, tiger Mahabir, who had been shifted from MP just a week before Sundari, was killed by poachers inside the Satkosia reserve. This made the NTCA abandon the inter-state tiger translocation project and ask Odisha that had failed in monitoring and management, to send back the tigress to Madhya Pradesh.
