Forest team tracks cheetahs as villagers film; summer heat is managed with sprinkler system
Bhopal: Five cheetahs on Sunday strayed out of their home in the Kuno National Park (NP) in Madhya Pradesh’s Sheopur district and hunted four goats in a village. They were first seen near the Pagara dam in Jaura of neighbouring Morena district at around 6.45 am on Sunday and were later seen moving towards a foothill near Khakhapur, a forest officer said.
Passersby and the local villagers were seen taking video of the cheetahs. The felines have hunted four goats of a farmer in the village, the forest officer said.
They were later spotted near Deogarh village, and the forest staff and the ‘cheetah mitras’ (friends of cheetahs) have been keeping a watch on them, the local forest ranger Vinod Kumar Upadhyay told the media. Efforts were on to bring them back to the Kuno park.
Meanwhile, the sprinklers installed at 15 locations in the Kuno NP have helped the cheetahs beat the blistering heat this summer.
A solar-powered system installed in the park pumped water from Kuno river for supply to the sprinklers and water saucers set up inside the park through an 8.6-km-long pipeline and the provision of water at several places inside the park had helped the cheetahs encounter successfully the scorching heat experienced this summer, a senior forest officer said on Sunday.
This was the second successive summer that the cheetahs in Kuno NP had encountered successfully. In May 2023, which was the first summer in the Kuno NP for the cheetahs, three cubs born to Namibian cheetah Jwala died due to the extreme heat.
“Lifting water from Kuno river, taking it kilometres away, using sprinklers extensively to create green spaces, and improving water availability, especially for mother and new-born cubs in a planned way, have proved quite successful”, Kuno national park field director Uttam Kumar Sharma said while posting a video on X on Sunday.
Eight cheetahs were brought to Kuno NP from Namibia in September 2022 in the first-ever intercontinental translocation of carnivores under the cheetah introduction project of the country.
Six months later in February 2023, 12 more cheetahs were brought to Kuno from South Africa. The cheetah population in the Kuno NP has increased to 31.
Two of them were shifted to the Gandhisagar wildlife sanctuary in Mandsaur district in Madhya Pradesh recently, taking cheetah count in Kuno at 29.
