Africa and India set up their nature reserves very differently. In Africa reserves that house lions and leopards, and animals such as this, are very large, often covering more than 500 square miles of land. Indeed there are a handful of reserves that are large enough to contain 500 or more wild lions.
This is not the case in India, in India reserves tend to far less land. While this does not stop the animals roaming (I’ve encountered lion tracks outside the Kruger National Park albeit within a couple of 100m of the gate), it does mean that in all normal situations the animals do not have to roam outside the reserve to survive.Â
The problem with reserves generally only covering 100 to 200 square miles is that when natural disasters hit there may not be space for the animals to get away from the problems that ensue. There are some reserves of similar size in Africa but they do tend to cause problems, for instance Nakuru National Park, a reserve in Kenya close to Nairobi covers only 73 square miles, consisting of a soda lake which is popular with flamingos and an area of land around it. 50 years ago the animals would have easily been able to migrate and out of the park, but these migration routes have been increasingly cut-off in recent years, and it is relatively common that the parks remaining lions roam outside the boundaries of the park and need to be caught and returned by Kenyan game rangers.
Recently Kaziranga National Park in India has been hit with floods and 95% of the park is underwater. The tiger had strayed out of the park and had sought shelter in a nearby settlement. It entered someone’s house and lay down on their bed, thankfully the owner was not surprised by this tiger as the neighbours watched it go into the house. It had been spotted a couple of times en route to the settlement having been seen crossing a highway nearby. It is thought that this crossing spooked the tiger which climbed the wall and then entered the house it was found in.
In this instance they were able to have the tiger correct its own mistake. It was tranquilized until dark and then it was shepherded back into the park. It is thought that it was simply looking for shelter from the noise around it. As well as significant damage done to local property and people, around 43 animals are thought to have been killed, and this is the problem with small reserves. While small reserves are infinitely better than no reserve at all when a natural disaster strikes, in Africa the animals can simply move out of the affected area, in most reserves in India this moving out of the affected area generally means moving out of the protected area and into a human landscape.
Obviously with the population in India growing fast this is not something that can be corrected anytime soon, however if in the future there is more space available giving these national parks a larger area of land and would allow for a more hands-off approach from the people who run it. Having said all that in countries with little money and rapidly growing population this is not likely to happen soon, and it is far better to have small islands of wilderness in the sea of human activity than to have no space for these animals at all.
