Word: forester
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...owner, a local landlord named Mahadeswara, had hired Raju to poach deer and other game favored in local feasts. Gun owners often hire tribesmen as shooters because of their knowledge of the forest. One evening last spring, Raju, the landlord and two other poachers hid near a water hole. At dusk a tiger approached within a few yards. Raju claims he was reluctant to shoot it, but the landlord insisted. He promised, but never delivered, payment of 110 lbs. of millet -- worth...
...soon, dreams may be the only place where tigers roam freely. Already the Nagarahole tigress is not free. If she hunts during the day, she may run into a carload of tourists, cameras clicking. At night, it may be poachers, guns blazing. Once the rulers of their forest home, she and the park's 50 other tigers are now prisoners of human intruders. More than 6,000 Indians live inside the 250-sq.-mi. refuge. And crowding the borders are 250 villages teeming with tens of thousands more people who covet not only the animals that the cats need...
Whatever the outcome, it may be too late to save the tigers. They once rambled across most of Asia, from Siberia in the north to Indonesia in the south to Turkey in the west. Now they are confined to small, shrinking pockets of their forest habitat. The Caspian subspecies became extinct more than a decade ago. So did the Balinese and Javan cats. The survivors are impossible to count with any precision, but fewer than 650 Sumatran tigers remain and maybe 200 of Siberia's Amur, the world's largest cat. China has a few dozen left, and these isolated...
...reserves has proved increasingly susceptible to human predators. Over the past five years, the parks' tiger populations have dropped 35% on average. In one notorious killing spree between 1989 and 1992, Ranthambhore National Park in Rajasthan lost 18 tigers to poachers, even though 60 guards were patrolling the forest...
Only a few years ago, the tiger was considered a conservation success story. Centuries of legal tiger hunting and forest destruction had raised the specter of extinction, but in 1972 governments rallied to rescue the cats. Taking up the issue as a personal cause, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched Project Tiger, which established the country's network of reserves. Western nations joined with several Asian countries to ban hunting and the trade in skins. By 1980 populations on the subcontinent had recovered to the point where B.R. Koppikar, then director of Project Tiger, could boast to the New York...