Nagpur: Foresters attend prank call, no clue of leopard yet

NAGPUR: With no clue of the leopard even on the sixth day, the forest teams are leaving no stone unturned. On Wednesday they even attended a prank call about the animal sighting but it probably turned out to be a civet cat.
After killing a pig near Maharajbagh zoo on Monday-Tuesday night, it was expected that the leopard would return again to the kill but it didn’t.It is changing places and hence it is becoming difficult to track it.
“The leopard did not enter any of the three cages placed to lure it with goats as baits. The animal was also not captured in any of the camera traps near the zoo area. We are puzzled with its behaviour,” said Dr Bharat Singh Hada, deputy conservator of forests (DyCF), Nagpur division.
Hada said they also attended a prank call when a security guard at the edge of the VNIT campus said he saw an animal jumping from one tree to another and there were dogs near the spot. “But as per the description given by the guard, it seems to be a civet cat. Had it been a leopard, dogs would not have been near the tree. There was also no indirect evidence found about the animal,” said Hada.
“Now, we have an increased number of cages and camera traps. For a change, these cameras will be deployed near the openings of the nullahs. As a strategy, we have also asked officials to break up into small teams so that the animal is not disturbed. It is possible that due to the crowd it is changing locations frequently during the night,” Hada said.
The leopard was first sighted by Narendra Chakole and Kishor Jagtap on their residential premises in Gayatri Nagar neat National Power Training Institute (NPTI) on May 28. Since then the leopard has traveled 5km (as crow flies) to reach Maharajbagh zoo. The CCTV footage of the animal is the only evidence with the forest department as of now.