Information about the Bengal tiger
The solitary cat and the Bengal tiger are territorial animals. They hunt at dusk and dawn and regularly mark their territory with scent to keep other tigers away from their hunting and breeding grounds. In some national parks where they are protected, tigers have been recorded to be active during the day. Generally, tigers prefer to stay in the shade during daylight hours, especially in the hot summers of South Asia. Due to the shrinking tiger habitat in India, territories are smaller than those of Siberian tigers. Males roam an area of twenty square miles and females hunt in a slightly smaller area of seventeen square miles. Often a single male's territory overlaps with several females, with whom he copulates frequently. Tigers usually have multiple dens in their range to choose from as their prey for a given period of time.
Bengal tigers are at the apex of their ecosystem and play an active role in maintaining the delicate balance of India's endangered natural fauna and flora. They prey on a wide variety of animals, including wild boar, sambar, barasingha, nilgai, gaur, and water buffalo, although the spotted dear, also known as chital, forms the bulk of their diet. Sometimes small animals are also eaten, including rabbits, peacocks, langurs, and monkeys. Tigers are not above scavenging and often feed on carrion. Extremely powerful, Bengal tigers are known to attack and kill India's largest prey animals, including Asian elephants and rhinoceroses. They are estimated to have the strength of twelve full-grown men and can carry a full-grown cow over a ten-foot fence. Aggressive animals, these big cats often kill adult crocodiles in confrontations. In fact, nothing in the jungles of India is safe from a wild tiger if he decides to hunt him down.
India's most indomitable tiger lives in the world's largest natural delta - Bengal's Sundarbans forest where the holy river Ganges empties into the Bay of Bengal. An estimated three to five hundred tigers live on the Indian and Bangladesh sides of this vast mangrove swamp. Amidst the ever-changing tide of hunting by the Maharajas and colonial British of the last century, these wild tigers never learned to respect humans. These tigers are expert swimmers and are the most notorious big cats for eating people. Their victims are often honey collectors and fishermen from the Sundarbans (literally beautiful forest). Although core areas and buffer zones are designated to separate predators from humans, extremely poor villagers venture deep into tiger territory to hunt for honey and fish.
As a result, there are so many deaths every year that the local people have learned to live with the constant cycle of life and death in that part of the world. Yet the conflict backfires badly for the tiger, which runs the risk of being poisoned and killed, as in other parts of the subcontinent, where it is hunted for revenge by villagers and for profit by poachers. Despite its fearsome reputation, the tiger is considered a gentleman with a big heart, which is generally avoided by most experts, including the famous hunter-conservationist Jim Corbett, who wrote about big cats more than half a century ago. According to him, most of the killings by tigers were due to surprise, excitement, old age, injury, loss of prey, or coincidence. Once tigers learn that humans are relatively easy and defenseless prey, some tigers become man-eaters.
Recorded in parts of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Tibet, the Bengal tiger is originally the pride of India and Bangladesh where it is given the status of national animal. The largest number exists in scattered reserves in India, where their numbers have declined from several thousand a century ago to less than fifteen hundred today. Tigers live in a variety of tropical habitats, including swamps, brush, and grasslands.
The Bengal tiger's mating season is between winter and spring. Females are acceptable for three days to one week. Gestation lasts about three months after which an average of three cubs are born. The young are particularly vulnerable to nearby adult male tigers, who often kill cubs that do not give birth to bring the female into estrus and establish continuity of their own genetic line. At eleven months of age, the cubs are capable of hunting for themselves. They live with their mothers until they may be to a few years old, and then they strike out on their very own and take over various their own. Lifespan within the wild is fifteen years and in captivity seventeen years.
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