Early in October, a former colleague and current field biologist with one of our NGO partners called me, and when I didn’t answer, sent me a message. “Hi. Trying to contact you for some help. Please call me when you are free”. It was Ashtami, the 8th day of Durga Puja, and I was on leave in Calcutta, visiting puja pandals across the city. We take our holidays at TfW quite seriously, and amidst all the festivities, unable and unwilling to take a call, I asked him to send me a voice note or an email.

The email arrived. “Hope this email finds you well. This is to inform you that a tiger has killed two people in Valmiki Tiger Reserve [The only Tiger Reserve in Bihar]. These incidents happened on the fringe area of forest and sugarcane fields. Bihar Forest Department is trying to capture this animal using box trap cages and chemical immobilization method. Forest department has placed rescue teams and also installed several trap cages. It's difficult to locate the animal in the sugarcane field. We would need a drone with IR/thermal camera to locate the animals. Is it possible for you to visit and assist the rescue team of the forest department in tracking and locating the tigers in the sugarcane field?”

This sort of request is familiar to us; we’ve managed field operations for a similar project in Uttar Pradesh in 2017, and know of numerous other similar projects across India. However, at this point in time, we do not own our own drone+thermal camera. Aside from the prohibitive cost (~INR 6 lakhs), our core function as an organisation is not to respond to emergencies, but to help our partners amplify their conservation impact. However, receiving this request almost made me feel guilty about not acquiring our own drone+thermal camera.

However, It turned out that there was already a drone + thermal camera in the field, but with some software issues. It was now Dashami, the final day of Durga Puja. I took some time out before the day started to provide trouble-shooting advice via text messages. I was later informed that they were not able to get this drone to work.

The next day, with both Durga Puja and my holidays over, another former colleague at the same organisation messaged me: “Can you help with drone services there or get someone else who can on an emergency basis.” The message continued with the news that a young girl had been killed that morning, and that it was only a matter of time before the Forest Department would need to shoot the tiger dead. Locating the tiger was of the utmost importance, either to tranquilise it or to kill it, ideally before it killed more people.

As part of India Flying Labs, and with links to the Drone Federation of India, we are embedded in India’s drone industry and have access to a large network of drone operators and manufacturers. I put the word out that there was an urgent conservation mission in rural Bihar that needed at least one drone + thermal camera as well as trained operators. In terms of work, this involved numerous phone calls, emails and text messages, as well as assessments on our part of how capable we felt a drone operator was of working on this particular project. I finally spoke to someone from an organisation who, in our opinion, had the capacity to help. I gave them the full project brief, and then connected them to my former colleagues. Later the same day, the tiger killed another person.

The next evening, when I called the field biologist to check on the situation and how he was, he said, “Not good”. The tiger had killed a mother and her pre-teen son early in the morning, and had been shot dead during a Forest Department operation in the afternoon. This particular tiger, designated a man-eater and posthumously identified as the three-year old male T104, had killed between 9 and 12 people (there are conflicting reports), with four confirmed kills in its last three days alive. The impact of his actions on Bihar’s tiger conservation efforts will manifest in the future, and they are unlikely to be positive in any way. It is unlikely that these recent events have helped convince local communities around Valmiki Tiger Reserve that tiger conservation is in their best interests.

I wasn’t in the field for this project; my role was purely to network and connect people who believed that they needed drone services urgently with those who would possibly be able to provide it. In the end, matters escalated rapidly, and concluded before additional resources were allocated. I’m too removed from the situation to assess whether a working drone + thermal camera would have helped locate the tiger earlier, preventing the later human deaths. The fact remains that we’ll never know; many people, and a tiger, are now dead.

Note: The email and text exchanges detailed have been edited to maintain the senders’ anonymity.