In a first, UP to conduct study on Bijnor’s ‘sugarcane leopards’

Lucknow: To deal with increasing numbers of ‘sugarcane leopards' in Bijnor, and a resultant human-animal conflict, the state govt has sought help from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) to find out the district's "carrying capacity" in terms of leopard population. The study may be the first of its kind for UP's wildlife.
Bijnor DFO GP Singh said that the forest department has identified over 87 villages as "sensitive" in the district from the point of view of human-leopard conflict.
Since January 2023, more than 20 human lives have been lost in the conflict and over 80 felines got either caged or killed in "accidents". As many as 14 leopards have been rescued from Bijnor this year alone.
Bijnor has fertile agricultural land because it lies in the terai region with several rivers crisscrossing it. Being a buffer of Corbett, which has a high density of tigers, transient leopards keep crossing over, taking home to thickets along the rivers and sugarcane fields. Bijnor also has Amangarh tiger reserve, the fourth UP tiger reserve notified in 2012 to manage the transient big cats from Corbett. Since Amangarh has a noticeable presence of tigers, this further leads to leopards getting dispersed to sugarcane fields along villages, several kilometres away from the tiger reserve. While they mostly come chasing the prey to these fields, it often leads to chance encounters with men.
Secondly, Bijnor has a lot of agroforestry thriving, with trees like eucalyptus and poplar being grown. "A leopard does not need a vast territory like a tiger. A dense plantation with tall trees over a small area near the source of water is all it needs," said one of the officials. What further takes away the leopard's habitat is the farming done along the banks of the rivers. The naturally grown thickets along the riverbanks are where the leopards have always taken shelter, but mechanised farming has led to these patches getting cleared.
The man-leopard conflict in Bijnor was also taken up by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) sometime back. One of the recommendations made was to castrate leopards that are rescued before releasing them back in the wild to control the population. But that will require changes in the laws. Notably, leopards are critically endangered and protected under Schedule (I) of the Indian Wildlife Protection Act.