Alipurduar: Barely five days after being captured and brought back to the Buxa Tiger Reserve in north Bengal’s Alipurduar, tigress Dooars Rani has again fled towards Assam.
What made this escape exceptional was that she dug a tunnel under the concrete wall of the enclosure where she was kept after being brought back.
Dooars Rani, the tigress who was part of West Bengal’s first relocation programme, escaped from Buxa in October and was tranquilised and caged near the Raimona National Park in Assam on November 3.
After being brought back to Buxa, she was kept inside a 2.2-hectare acclimatisation enclosure.
However, the tigress dug into the soil under the two-foot-thick and four-foot-deep concrete foundation of the enclosure’s fence to escape from the enclosure, forest department officials said.
“The tigress somehow dug into the soil under the enclosure’s foundation and made a tunnel to escape from the enclosure. Its absence was noticed at around 2 pm on Sunday. Its radio collar is working, and we are tracking it,” an official said.
The tigress has already crossed the Bala river and is moving towards Assam again, sources revealed, as reported by The Indian Express.
She was last located near the 27-mile forest village inside the tiger reserve, but tracking gets difficult through radio signals since it sometimes moves through shadow zones inside the forest.
The tigress is now being tracked by sixty forest guards, three elephants, and senior officials..
Earlier in November, forest department officials used nets, three elephants, earth movers, and teams with tranquiliser guns to cage the tigress in Gilaguri in the Dotma area of Assam’s Kokrajhar district.
The three-year-old tigress had strayed into the Raimona National Park on October 24, travelling over 100 km from Buxa.
Dooars Rani was brought from Bihar’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve and released in Buxa Tiger Reserve – a protected forest and national park spanning over 760 sq km.
During her last visit to Assam, she was first spotted near Assam’s Hatigarh village, where she killed three domesticated pigs and four piglets. It then strayed to Narayanpur village in Gossaigaon subdivision in Kokrajhar district, following Barsijhora village near Dotma town in Kokrajhar, which was then cordoned off.
Tigress Zeenat, hailing from Simlipal in Odisha, had travelled over 300 km and crossed Jharkhand to enter Bengal in December, 2024. It was later tranquilised and caged in Bankura.