Operation Bhediya: Five down, one to go
Forest teams in Bahraich captured another wolf, bringing the total to five. Efforts continue to trap the last wolf, which may be a man-eater.
After a gap of about two weeks, teams of the forest department successfully trapped another wolf in the Mahsi Tehsil area of Bahraich on Tuesday.
People in the area heaved a sigh of relief as the news of another wolf’s capture spread.
Giving information about the operation, additional principal chief conservator of forests (PCCF) Sanjay Pathak said that the team had noticed the location of a wolf in Hari-Bakhshpurwa village, under the Hardi police station area, late on Monday night.
According to divisional forest officer (DFO), Bahraich, Ajit Pratap Singh, the forest department team had found wolf footprints in the area on Monday night. However, since it was night, four forest department teams arrived in the morning and surrounded the area.
“For the past few weeks it was as if we learned from the wolves as they escaped our effort, and under pressure, they learned from us. They sensed danger from the tools we used and we learned from their movement,” said Renu Singh, principal chief conservator of forest, heading the capture operations in Bahraich.
The first wolf was caught on August 3, and then August 8, August 18, August 29, and fifth on September 10. The fifth over 3.5 years in age one took about 10 hours to be trapped after being spotted first.
Parallel to the forest department’s ‘operation bhediya’, the locals of Mahsi tehsil, also made their own effort. They placed a bait, a goat, to attract the wolf.
“The first proof about this wolf came at night where a villager told us that the wolf ate a goat in Nathupurwa village. We cautiously used a drone and the pugmarks that led us to the location where it was hiding,” said Singh.
All the teams were sent to the village on Tuesday morning to corner the wolf. The wolf tried to escape but was trapped in a net laid by the forest department. With the help of villagers, the forest workers managed to capture and cage the wolf, the DFO said.
Pathak said that the captured animal was shifted to the Gorakhpur zoo because the male captured earlier is already there.
Earlier, it came to be known that out of the two wolves, one was said to be lame. On being asked, Pathak said that the wolf captured was not lame. He assured that the sixth wolf would be captured soon.
When asked whether the captured female wolf was a man-eater, Renu Singh, said, “It must be, because when one wolf becomes a man-eater, the whole pack tends to follow. However, the final conclusion on whether it is a man-eater will depend on observing its behaviour.”
Dr Deepak Verma, a veterinary expert who had examined the animal said that the animal was exhausted but physically fit and no injury mark was found on her body.
Earlier, heavy police force including 2 companies of PAC, PRD and home-guards were deployed in about 35 affected villages under Mahsi Tehsil area. Besides, forest teams of seven districts including, Gonda, Sultanpur, Shravasati, Barabanki, Ayodhya, Bahraich and Katarniyaghat were pressed into service to trap the two elusive wolves.
The district administration also deployed Gram Panchayat secretaries, Rozgar Sewaks and sanitary employees to make people aware and to ensure that no one sleeps in the open and unsafe places. The district administration also turned Gram Panchayat buildings and primary schools as night shelters to save people from wolf attacks.
Equipped with thermal drones, camera traps, the forest department was making all possible efforts for the past fifty days to trap the two elusive wolves. The forest teams succeeded in trapping the fifth wolf of the pack of six on Tuesday.
The Six Rouges
The forest department had first trapped three wolves from different villages under the Mahsi Tehsil area.
Unfortunately, the first one died of a heart attack. Dr Verma said that the animal was under stress and hit himself hard twice at the time it was shifted in the cage. The animal died within a few minutes after it was shifted in the cage. He said a post-mortem examination of the animal was conducted and it was found that the animal died of a heart attack.
The remaining two wolves were shifted to Lucknow zoo. The fourth wolf, captured on August 29, was shifted to Gorakhpur zoo.
A pack of six wolves had claimed the lives of 10 people including nine children in the area in the past few months. Meanwhile, about four dozen people, mostly children, were attacked and injured in the villages located along the Ghaghra River Basin under the Mahsi Tehsil area.
Strategy to capture the sixth
Additional PCCF, Sanjay Pathak said a howling sound will be used to trap the remaining wolf of the pack. He said each wolf howls to communicate with the other pack mates.
He said that arrangements had been made for howling sounds to attract the remaining and only free wolf of the pack. As soon as the animal would respond to the howling, the team would locate it and try to capture the animal.
Besides, scat (the excrement of a wild animal) will also be put on the cages to lure the free wolf in the area. For many animals, particularly predatory ones, scat is a calling card that marks territory and leaves information. Sensing the scat a predator assumes that one of its pack members is in the cage and enters the cage, Pathak added.
Wildlife Institute of India (WII) expert Shaheer Khan, who is camping in Bahraich said, “The wolf is the most difficult among wild animals to catch and the behaviour of the lone wolf will be even difficult to predict.”
“The minimum territory it can cover is 20-sq km and maximum 300-sq km,” said Khan, who has done a PhD on wolves and is working in the field of animal ecology and conservation biology at the WII.
“If the lone wolf is a female, it might move out of the present territory to find a new pack and if it is a male, it might now try and make a new territory with a new partner,” he said.
In the next two months it will be mating season for wolves, hence the chance of moving away or making a new territory is high which might take the difficulty level up of trapping the lone wolf.
Asked if wolf terror is over and the search operations will end now, Singh said, “We will catch the last one too. The entire pack needs to be shifted away.”
With input from agencies