A view of Sitabani area in Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve (File Photo)

HARIDWAR: Forest department officials announced on Saturday that they have commenced the fourth phase of the annual tiger estimation exercise at Corbett Tiger Reserve (CTR) deploying more than a thousand cameras.

They added that Rajaji Tiger Reserve (RTR) will also undergo a similar estimation activity with the help of 350 cameras. The officials claimed that they are confident that the numbers of the big cat will register an increase in both reserves as compared to the previous estimation exercise. CTR is home to around 206 tigers while RTR is home to about 34 tigers as per the previous annual estimate conducted by the department in the year 2017.

Directors of both the reserves told TOI that they had “followed a number of good conservation practices and usage of modern techniques like drones and rapid response teams for protecting the forests” as a result of which they were confident about increased big cat numbers. “At CTR, cameras will be deployed at Ramnagar in the first phase while in the second phase, the cameras will be put up at Kalagarh for fifty days each,” said Rahul, director of the reserve, who uses only his first name. He added that the entire reserve had been divided into 541 parts with two square kilometer grids, with each grid having two cameras. “Installation of camera traps in smaller grids is helpful because our reserve has a dense tiger population,” the director added.

RTR authorities said they are gearing up for the exercise spread over 25 days in all the three ranges of the reserve -- Laldhang, Kotdwar and Shyampur, which they say were missed out in the 2017 count. “In our earlier estimate in 2017, three ranges of our two buffer zones — Lansdowne (Laaldhang and Kotdwar range) and Haridwar (Shyampur) were not scanned for the big cat but this time, each and every part will be monitored,” said PK Patro, director of the reserve.

