Tigers rediscovered in Maharashtra rainforest

By Krittivas Mukherjee

MUMBAI (Reuters) - At least 20 tigers have resurfaced in a tropical rainforest in western India, almost three decades after it was thought that poaching had wiped them out there, experts said on Tuesday.

The big cats were sighted over an 800 square kilometre mountainous forest range in Maharashtra, bringing rare good news in a country that is rapidly losing its wildlife to poaching and habitat destruction.

"There was good forest cover, an ideal habitat and an ideal prey base but tigers were not sighted in the Sahyadri range since the late 1970s," Vishwas Sawarkar, former head of the state-run Wildlife Institute of India, told Reuters.

"My estimate is there are at least 20 of them now," said Sawarkar, adding that the discovery was made during an ongoing nationwide tiger census.

India is believed to have half the world's surviving tigers, but according to a census in 2001 and 2002, their numbers have dwindled to 3,642 from 40,000 a century ago.

Conservationists say the actual number of tigers is between 1,300 and 1,500, based on the initial findings of the current census due to be made public later this year.

No sightings of the big cats led many -- including poachers and conservationists -- to believe the tigers had been wiped out from the Sahyadri range, an unbroken chain of mountains that stretch along India's western edge.

Experts said the last remaining tigers could have benefited with poachers moving on to other areas in search of their lucrative prey, whose body parts are used in traditional Chinese medicines and whose skins fetch thousands of dollars.