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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