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Facts |
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Orientation |
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Sunderbans National Park is the amogst the largest mangrove forest
in the world. Most of the plot of prize winning anthropologist
Amitav Ghosh's 2004 novel "The hungry tide" is set in
Sundarbans. In which there is a famous quote is:- "The rivers
channels are spread across the land like a fine mesh net, creating a
terrain where the boundaries bet land's water are always
unpredictable. Some of these channels are mighty waterways, so wide
across that one shore is invisible from the other, others are
no more than two or three Kms. long. When these channels meet it is
often in clustered of four, five or six; at these confluences, the
water stretches to the far edges of the landscape and the forest
dwindles into a distant rumor of land."
One of the first things that the tourist to Sunderbans must
appreciate is that it is not a zoo. The tiger will not come
obediently to the wire-mesh netting and pose for the camera. By the
last count, in 2004, there were 274 tigers in the area that
stretches over almost 1,500 sq km. Before the netting was put up
about a couple of years ago, the tiger was known to slip into the
waters and come calling on its biped neighbours |
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across the river. This would usually happen during
the breeding period from November
to February, when the mother is on the lookout for food for the
cubs. Sometimes the tiger would carry away a goat or a cow — when it
was less lucky, it would be cornered by irate villagers and stoned
or speared to death. There is now more awareness about the need to
conserve tigers and a beast that strays into human habitation
nowadays has a better chance of ending up with a tranquilliser dart
than a bullet.
The second thing to appreciate is the rich diversity of flora and
fauna even if the tiger remains elusive. Cruising along the
sanctuary is a non-stop lesson in biology. At the edge of the water,
kingfishers, herons, egrets, sandpipers, whimbrels and plovers
pinwheel through the air or wade daintily through the sand. What
looks like a piece of dead wood suddenly turns out to be an
alligator when viewed through binoculars. A deer pauses, mid-graze,
and turns to look at a passing boat. A water monitor (or tarkel, as
it is locally called) worries a drifting carcass by the shore. A
shoal of dolphin surfaces tantalisingly and then vanishes in the
eddying, churning waters of the mohona. And the mangrove forests
themselves are absolutely unique — clumps of small, leathery,
gnarled trees with names like sundari, hetal and gorjon. The
riverbank is pierced by legions of breathing roots — the
pneumatophores — like shapes out of a Van Gogh painting. If you are
observant you might also spot clumps of hetal bushes, much beloved
of tigers, and appropriately called tiger bush. When you actually
get off the boats at the tiger observatory camps, you can see the
even smaller holes made by the eternally busy fiddler crabs.
Sunderbans may have received bad publicity due to its man-eating
tigers, but it is the wetland habitat, among the largest and most
unique in the world, which is the main draw of this biosphere
reserve. Waterbodies crisscross the forest and separate the hundreds
of islands that dot the delta. You can visit the Sajnekhali
Sanctuary and the buffer areas, which can be reached only by boat.
 History:
The sunder bans Tiger Reserve, created in 1971 is part of the then
24-Parganas forest division. Subsequently, the area comprising the
present Tiger Reserve is constituted as a Reserve Forest in 1971
incorporating some 2,585 sq km of the huge mangrove swamp, which is
about 260 km from the Bay of Bengal to the Meghna River Estuary in
Bangladesh.
-- Facts
-- Map
-- Orientation |
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