By
Surendra Phuyal, BBC Nepali
Forest
and nature protection officials from Nepal and India have started their first
ever joint survey of tigers.
The
survey will take place in a dozen or more wildlife preserves and forests spread
across the Terai Arc region that the two South Asian nations share.
The
project aims to identify the exact number of Royal Bengal tigers residing in
this zone.
It
will also study the availability of prey to assist with conservation
strategies.
The
Terai Arc Landscape spreads over 950km (600 miles) across the Indian states of
Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand and into southern Nepal.
The
region is estimated to be home to 500 tigers at present - one of the world's
densest concentrations of tigers, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature
(WWF).
WWF
is one of the organisations involved in the survey, which is being led by the
governments of India and Nepal.
As
part of the survey, officials are installing hundreds of camera traps (remote
motion-sensitive cameras) along the wild paths frequented by the tigers,
allowing tigers who come into the cameras' range to be identified.
"The
same tiger trapped by a camera here on the Nepali side could cross over into
India, but that tiger will be trapped by another camera there," Megh
Bahadur Pandey, the director general of Nepal's Department of National Parks
and Wildlife Conservation, told the BBC.
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