International Tiger Day 2018:

Global Tiger Day, often called International Tiger Day, is an annual celebration to raise awareness for tiger conservation, held annually on 29 July. It was created in 2010 at the Saint Petersburg Tiger Summit. The goal of the day is to promote a global system for protecting the natural habitats of tigers and to raise public awareness and support for tiger conservation issues.

Tigers:

Background:

The tiger (Panthera tigris) is the largest cat species, most recognizable for its pattern of dark vertical stripes on reddish-orange fur with a lighter underside. The species is classified in the genus Panthera with the lion, leopard, jaguar, and snow leopard. It is an apex predator, primarily preying on ungulates such as deer and bovids. It is territorial and generally a solitary but social predator, often requiring large contiguous areas of habitat that support its prey requirements. This, coupled with the fact that it is indigenous to some of the more densely populated places on Earth, has caused significant conflicts with humans

Distribution and Habitat:

At the end of the last glacial period about 20,000 years ago, the tiger was widespread from Eastern Anatolia Region and Mesopotamia, in Central Asia to eastern Siberia and South and Southeast Asia to the Indonesian islands of Java, Bali and Sumatra. Today, tigers are regionally extinct in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Pakistan and Singapore.

The tiger occupies a wide range of habitat types, but will usually require sufficient cover, proximity to water, and an abundance of prey. It prefers dense vegetation, for which its camouflage coloring is ideally suited, and where a single predator is not at a disadvantage compared with the multiple cats in a pride. A further habitat requirement is the placement of suitably secluded den locations, which may consist of caves, large hollow trees, or dense vegetation.

Diet:

In the wild, tigers mostly feed on large and medium-sized animals, preferring ungulates weighing at least 90 kg (200 lb). They typically have little or no deleterious effect on their prey populations. Sambar deer, chital, barasingha, wild boar, gaur, nilgai and both water buffalo and domestic buffalo, in descending order of preference, are the tiger's favored prey in Tamil Nadu, India, while gaur and sambar are the preferred prey and constitute the main diet of tigers in other parts of India. They also prey on other predators, including dogs, leopards, pythons, sloth bears, and crocodiles.

Global Population:

The global wild population is estimated to number between 3,062 and 3,948 individuals, down from around 100,000 at the start of the 20th century, with most remaining populations occurring in small pockets isolated from each other, in which about 2,000 tigers live on the Indian subcontinent. In 2016, an estimate of a global wild tiger population of approximately 3,890 individuals was presented during the Third Asia Ministerial Conference on Tiger Conservation. The WWF declared that the world's count of wild tigers has risen for the first time in a century

Major Threats:

Habitat loss (habitat destruction and habitat fragmentation)

Poaching

Effects of climate change

Human wildlife conflict

International Tiger Day 2018 at Chitwan, Nepal:

Conservation of Royal Bengal Tiger (Pate Bagh) has become more challenging because of increasing encroachment and unregulated activities of locals at the Chitwan National Park (CNP), a habitat to 140 of the endangered wild cats, stakeholders say.

Chief Conservation Officer at the CNP, Bed Kumar Dhakal stated that the conservation of the endangered wild animal was becoming more challenging due to increasing human population and wanton encroachment on forests and the buffer zones.

Dhakal shared that the tigers in CNP sometimes were tracked in the Parsa National Park and the Balmiki Tiger Reserves in the neighboring areas in search of spacious habitat.

Moreover, unregulated activities of locals in buffer zones such as fishing, fern picking, cutting Bumbershoot and uncontrolled invasion by wild weeds such as Mikania among others are also posing threat to the depletion of water sources and decrease of carnivore wildlife making the protection of the wild cats tougher.

Narrowing habitat, fragmentation of forest, poaching, illegal trade, lack of institutional structure, shortage of competent human resource, lack of scientific research and study and short of effective monitoring among others are the challenges for tiger conservation of late, shared CNP?s former Chief Conservation Officer Shivaraj Bhatta.

Chitwan National Park, including the buffer zone, sprawls across 1,300 square kilometers.

Dr Chiranjivi Pokharel, a tiger specialist at the National Trust for Nature Conservation?s Central Zoo, opined that the loss of habitat, poaching and smuggling of the body parts of the wild animals and depleting food were the major challenges facing tiger conservation.

Nepal had counted 198 tigers in 2013 Survey. Among them, the highest numbers (120) were found in Chitwan National Park, 50 in Bardiya National Park, four in Banke National Park, seven in Parsa National Park and 17 in Shuklaphanta National Park.

The Royal Bengal Tiger is listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Let's protect our species. Live and let live. 😊 😊

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