Camera traps caught a tiger on the buffer land

A camera trap on the replanted buffer in the Western Ghats recorded an adult tiger this month. Five years ago the ground it was walking across was coffee monoculture, open and quiet of almost everything. The image stopped the field team in its tracks when it came up.

A tiger is not an animal that wanders onto unsuitable ground by accident. It needs prey to hunt, cover to move and rest in, and quiet from people, and it does not waste its energy on land that lacks any of them. Its presence is therefore a verdict on everything beneath it.

Work it backward and the chain is clear enough. A tiger here means the deer and the wild boar it hunts are back. The deer and boar are back because the undergrowth they browse has returned. The undergrowth returned because the shade trees the Kodagu coffee growers planted closed the canopy and changed the ground beneath.

It fits the rest of what these plots have been telling us, the leeches, the long-lost shrub frog, the slow filling-in of a once-empty slope. The tiger is the animal at the top of that recovering food chain, and it does not arrive until the rest is in place.

We have passed the image to the state forest department, which tracks individual tigers by their stripe patterns, as unique as fingerprints. This animal is a new record for the area, not one they already had on file from elsewhere.

We are keeping the exact location to ourselves. A confirmed tiger draws attention of several kinds, not all of it welcome, and the surest way to protect an animal that has only just arrived is to not announce precisely where it sleeps.