Response teams gain momentum!

We have good news to share again in this update - June 9th saw another report on tiger attack incident on the newspapers. A fisherman named Saiful along with two others from Shayamnagar Upazila in Satkhira district had gone fishing in a creek inside the forest. Suddenly a tiger attacked them and killed Saiful while his other two mates fled from the spot. Later in the evening when the members of Kolagachia village tiger response team, Enamul, Liton, Asgar, Mannan and others, heard this news from Saiful’s two other mates, they immediately offered to help. This team was formed just a week earlier and yet, new as they were, they helped their fellow villagers recover the victim’s body safely from the tiger and handed it over to the deceased’s family for burial.



Modinul, Ashraful and Yasin have completed forming the village based response teams in Satkhira range. These teams are made up of local villagers who step forward as volunteers to provide this service to their community.

With the help of such teams the Sundarbans Tiger Project hopes to provide field level assistance to the villages adjacent to Sundarbans during different tiger attack incidents. It is likely that the village tiger response teams of Sundarbans will become an effective way for the villagers to deal with conflict situations.

Field trip knocking at the door

After holding a series of workshops and meetings, it is now time to test the information on various tiger related issues that we have so far collected from our different partners. Until now we had only engaged secondary stakeholders (NGOs, media, local school teachers) in our workshops and discussions, sitting in air conditioned rooms. Now we are going to step out of this urban comfort and wear the shoes of our primary stakeholders in the grass root level, i.e. the honey collectors, fishermen, golpata collectors and many more – after all they are the principal groups who affect and are affected first by tigers and the Sundarbans. So we can’t possibly exclude them from anything that we do for tiger conservation. On the contrary, we must work with them and engage them in our activities.

From KAP survey pix

We are going to approach these local communities of the Sundarbans to test our assumptions of some burning issues in which their behaviours are involved. For instance we guess that villagers beat stray tigers to death because of animosity toward the animal. Then again our field experience says that villagers’ attitude toward the stray tiger is not always that of animosity - many young men believe that it is very macho and brave to kill a tiger. However, all of these are only assumptions. If we are to do any campaigns in future about tiger conservation, we have to use the right message and for this right message we need facts not assumptions. This is why we need to uncover the truth by doing an important survey that will test the Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) of these people about tigers.

Travis and Rezvin are working upon the research methodology of this survey, which, once peer reviewed and finalised, will give a green signal to the rest of the team to move ahead. Iqbal is taking care of the logistical support and will be running focus group discussions during the survey. Interviews will be conducted by the local youths, preferably by members of the village tiger response teams. All interviewers will be trained for this task by Rezvin, Iqbal and Nazneen. The survey will run through mid-July till mid August in four villages namely Mirgang, Kalabogi, Sarankhola and Chandpai from four forest ranges.

However, this is not the end. After finishing the village survey, we will again embark on a national survey in four divisions - Dhaka, Khulna, Barisal and Chittagong.

All the while the survey team will be lodged on a boat and plunged into a raging coastal monsoon and rolling waves! Bon voyage!

Meeting with the FD

On June 10, Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh (WTB) had a meeting with the Forest Department (FD) at their office in Bana Bhaban located in Agargaon.

The purpose for the meeting was to offer our strategy development process for FD’s review and to collect their feedback on it. Though the Bangladesh Tiger Action Plan (BTAP) has provided guidelines to conserve tigers in the next eight years, it hasn’t given any detailed strategy and implementation plan that includes activities, responsibilities and budgets. So in order to keep up with the BTAP’s conservation rules, WTB is developing another strategy to complement the BTAP.



Our core areas for review were assessment of target (tiger, prey and habitat) viability, threat prioritization and behaviour change process. We also introduced Miradi software that we are using to manage our work with the FD team.

Some suggestions that came up from the workshop included merging our strategic action plan with those of the FD and other partners, namely USAID Integrated Protected Area Co management (IPAC) and SEALS who are presently working in the same region. In that way instead of having three different action plans, we would have one for every one to focus upon. It was also recommended to train more FD field staff and include them in all types of surveys conducted by WTB.
The meeting consisted of the WTB team, FD staff including regional Mr. Md. Abdul Mutaleb (Chief Conservator of Forest), Mr. Tapan Kumar Dey (Conservator of Forests, Wildlife & Nature Conservation Circle), Mr. Md. Akbar Hossain(Conservator of Forests, Khulna) and Divisional Forest Officers (DFOs). We are developing an action plan that will specify the exact actions needed to conserve tigers.


Nazneen Ahmed
Dhaka