Elephant behind six deaths gets radio collar

GULARIYA:  The Bardiya National Park (BNP) has installed a radio collar to a marauding wild elephant in a bid to track its movement and prevent it from entering the human settlements.

The BNP team on Sunday fixed the GPS-equipped collar on the wild tusker named Jangali that killed six persons in Bardiya last year.

“The constant emission of radio signals from the device will enable us to track the animal’s movement. It helps to chase away the tusker immediately after it strays out of the park forest,” said acting Chief Conservation Officer Ashok Kumar Bhandari.

The BNP team darted the elephant as it entered Dakela village in the buffer zone of the BNP. Rangers from the BNP, officials from the National Trust of Nature Conservation and Nepal Army were involved in installing the radio collar. The pachyderm was later released in the BNP forest.

The BNP administration are planning to install the radio collar on another wild elephant believed to have entered the human settlements. The wild elephants from the BNP and Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary of India had entered the settlements in Thakurbaba and Barbardiya municipalities and wreaked havoc a month ago. They destroyed more than two dozen houses and damaged wheat planted in hectares of land in the area.

Local people complain that the authorities concerned paid no heed to their repeated requests for stopping the recurring menace of wild animals. They have been demanding that an electric fence be installed to prevent the wild elephants from entering the settlements.

As per the data available at the BNP, 36 people were killed by wild elephants in Bardiya district in the past 18 years.

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