BELLING THE CAT
Sanctuary | In The Field
Krrrrrrr... krrr... krrrrr... krsssshh...
About half past 12, the sun merciless
upon our backs, temperature just a
degree short of a half-century and not
a single upright shade of respite, as
we stood on a rugged barren hillock
in search of a slightly-less noisy but
more rhythmic beep from the radio-
receiver. However, all we could hear
was the lifeless static of the radio!
It had been 14 days since we had
released this lioness after fi tting her
with a radio-transmitter, and she had
miraculously disappeared from the face
of the earth! We had been trying to
locate her, day-in and day-out, with an
antenna attached to a radio-receiver as
our main weapon, but there was not a
single blip on the radar. We were tired,
confused and at a dead-end. About aSTOTRA CHAKRABARTIBy Stotra Chakrabarti
fortnight ago, we had captured four
adult lionesses living outside the Gir
forests in Gujarat, the last-remaining
stronghold of the Asiatic lion, and
fi tted them with GPS radio-collars to
study their way of life in a landscape
dotted with humans and lion-unfriendly
development. The collars provided us
with the cats’ location through a ‘here
I am’ very high frequency (VHF) beep
emitted every second. This signal could
be tuned into through a radio-receiver
and captured from even two to three
kilometres away. The beeps helped us
home-in to these regal cats and follow
them, as they prolifi cally (yet perilously)
survived in close proximity to humans.
With our earlier experience in tracking
lions within the Protected Area (PA),
we had thought this task would befairly easy even outside the PA, but,
we were mistaken! All the technological
nitty-gritties had failed us and
exhaustion and fatigue were taking
over man and machine.NOT AN EASY QUEST
I sat down in the shade of our four-
wheel drive and looked at my assistants,
a team of determined and experienced
lion-trackers who have bled-and-
sweated alongside my professor
(scientist at the Wildlife Institute of
India), Dr. Y. V. Jhala (see page 72), in his
lion studies that spanned over 20 years.
Over the last two weeks we had tried
our luck against the June-sun in Gujarat
and clambered-up every thorny vantage
point on our path to catch the faintest
of VHF signals. This was my fi rst stintUsing telemetry to study lions in people’s backyards