IWN Report — Friday, 25 September 2026
A tiger cub rescued near Kaziranga National Park broke out of its forest department holding crate and disappeared on 19 September, leaving pugmarks four days later as the first solid evidence that it is surviving alone in the wild.
The cub, thought to be around three months old, turned up in the early hours of 17 September in a kitchen garden in Natugaon village, within the Assam Forest Department‘s Biswanath Wildlife Division, tangled in agricultural and fishing nets. According to the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), strong currents on the nearby Brahmaputra had most likely swept it away from its mother, who lives with the park’s tigers on the river’s riverine islands.
WTI worked with the police, forest staff and district administration to guide the cub into a transport crate without tranquillising it. “The rescue was accomplished without the use of chemical immobilisation, considering the young age of the animal,” said Dr C. Ramesh, Field Director of Kaziranga National Park & Tiger Reserve. Teams searching the neighbouring islands found no trace of an adult tigress.
On the evening of 18 September, WTI’s Dr Panjit Basumatary — from the trust’s Centre for Bear Rehabilitation and Conservation (CBRC) — led an attempt to reunite the cub with its mother, ferrying it by motorised country boat, a bhut-bhuti, to an upstream island in the Murkhuwa and Bhawani stretch of the Brahmaputra. A camera trap went up at the site, and the team left food and water behind. CBRC usually rescues Asiatic black bears — it’s run jointly by the Arunachal Pradesh Forest Department and WTI, with support from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) — though its mobile veterinary service reaches other wildlife emergencies across the landscape too.
A drone survey the next afternoon, requested by Biswanath DFO Ritu Paban Borah, found the cub still there, but the river was rising fast enough to threaten the crate. Rangers moved it again, this time somewhere with better cover. “The cage was positioned beneath a tree to provide shelter from direct sunlight and rainfall,” said Assistant Conservator of Forest Nayan Jyoti Gogoi.
By 19 September, the cub had let itself out. Rangers found no pugmarks near the cage and no movement on the camera trap, so they went by what the cage told them instead. Its ventilation slats had been torn, its bamboo barrier broken through, and the food and water inside eaten and drunk, and nothing about the scene suggested a larger predator had been anywhere near — evidence enough that the cub had gone on its own steam, unharmed.
Camera traps have stayed up around the site since. On 23 September, rangers found pugmarks 200 metres from the abandoned crate. “While pugmark evidence was found on the 23rd of September, 200 meters from the release crate, we are still hopeful to get the pictures of the tiger cub in the coming days,” said Dr Basumatary, who expects the camera trapping to continue for weeks yet.
Sources: Wildlife Trust of India