Wednesday 14 November 2018

The rare-leopard spotter who accidentally caught gunmen in her traps


26 September 2018
Priya Singh spent months in the wilds of north-east India tracking elusive clouded leopards and marbled cats, but caught more than she bargained for in her camera traps
By Adam Popescu
WORKING in the bamboo forests of Mizoram, north-east India, isn’t easy. Alongside torrential monsoons and poachers, there are armed separatist groups to contend with. Yet independent wildlife biologist Priya Singh, currently funded by UK conservation charity the Rufford Foundation, spent months at a time here to deploy and maintain 160 camera traps in an effort to spot the country’s most elusive cats. Her persistence paid off: she produced the first ever estimate of the marbled cat population in continental Asia and discovered one of its highest recorded densities of clouded leopards.
Her three-year study, published last October with zoologist David McDonald at the University of Oxford, involved combing the thick jungle of the Dampa Tiger Reserve, which borders Bangladesh and Myanmar. It is a protected park – on paper, at least – but Dampa is a tiger refuge where she found scant evidence of tigers. Singh’s results suggest that the lack of bigger cats has allowed both marbled cats and clouded leopards to spend more time on the ground and grow in numbers – her estimates put both populations at about five individuals per 100 square kilometres.
Gunmen regularly traverse the forest. While Singh was there in 2015, one armed group kidnapped 22 local people who were building a road in the park, and held them hostage until a ransom was reportedly paid. Along with images of cats, Singh’s cameras spotted many gunmen, and the cameras themselves were routinely stolen.

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