On this page
Jim Corbett is famous for hunting tigers that killed people. He is also the name on India's first national park and an early voice for protecting the animal he hunted. This post looks at how he reasoned about tigers, what changed after him, and how scientists count tigers today.
Who was Jim Corbett?
Corbett lived in Naini Tal (Nainital) in the Kumaon hills, and many of his stories begin there. Local officials repeatedly asked him to deal with tigers and leopards that had begun killing people. He later wrote about these hunts in Man-Eaters of Kumaon, first published by Oxford University Press in 1944. The first story is the Champawat tigress. Following her trail after she had killed a girl, Corbett wrote that this was her "four hundred and thirty-sixth human kill".
Why did Corbett think tigers became man-eaters?
The most scientific part of the book is its author's note. Corbett argued that a man-eater is a tiger "compelled, through stress of circumstances beyond its control, to adopt a diet alien to it," and that the stress is, "in nine cases out of ten, wounds, and in the tenth case old age." A badly fired shot or a fight with a porcupine could leave a tiger unable to catch its usual prey.
He backed this with a case. The Muktesar tigress had lost an eye and had about fifty porcupine quills embedded in her foreleg; starving and lame, she struck a woman cutting grass beside her, then killed again, and became a man-eater. Corbett also asked for post-mortems before any death was recorded as a tiger or leopard kill, because he knew of deaths wrongly blamed on carnivores.
How did a hunter become a conservationist?
In the same note, Corbett wrote that a tiger's role is "to help maintain the balance in nature", and warned that tigers would be exterminated "unless public opinion rallies to his support". A chapter called "Just Tigers" compares shooting tigers with a camera and with a rifle, and he wrote about filming tigers.
Historian Vijaya Ramadas Mandala's chapter on hunters-turned-conservationists examines this double role in colonial India, arguing that a simple hunter-versus-protector story does not fit Corbett's life.
What happened to the park that carries his name?
The Corbett Tiger Reserve's official site gives the timeline:
1936: set up by a special Act as Hailey National Park, mainland Asia's first national park, with an initial area of 323.75 square kilometres.
1954 to 1955: renamed Ramganga National Park.
1956: renamed Corbett National Park after Corbett's death.
1 April 1973: the park became the launch site for Project Tiger.
2010: notified as Corbett Tiger Reserve, now 1,288.31 square kilometres.
How do scientists count India's tigers today?
Corbett tracked tigers by pugmarks and kills. Today's count uses camera traps and the fact that each tiger's stripe pattern is unique. The NTCA's Status of Tigers 2022 summary report gives the numbers. Here is a short worked reading of them.
Camera traps were placed at 32,588 locations. Of about 4.7 crore photographs, 97,399 were of tigers.
From those photos, 3,080 individual tigers older than one year were identified. In 2018 the figure was 2,461.
Change in photographed tigers: 3,080 − 2,461 = 619, or 619 ÷ 2,461 × 100 ≈ 25% more.
The minimum population estimate for 2022 is 3,167. It is higher than 3,080 because it is a statistical estimate (capture-mark-recapture), and in some areas DNA from tiger scats was used where cameras could not go.
Project Tiger began in 1973 with 9 reserves covering 18,278 square kilometres and now has 53 covering 75,796 square kilometres. 75,796 ÷ 18,278 ≈ 4.1 times the area, still only 2.3% of India's land.
A common mistake is to read "photographed tigers" and "estimated tigers" as the same number. One is a count of identified animals; the other is a statistical estimate of all of them. The report also says India holds more than 70% of the world's wild tigers.
What can a student take from Corbett's way of working?
Corbett's most useful habit was asking why before acting: why this tiger, why now, what evidence supports the story. That is the same habit that drives modern camera-trap surveys, which replaced guesswork with individual identification. Our post on biodiversity and conservation covers in-situ conservation and protected areas, and you can compare Corbett with the field biologist George Schaller, who studied tigers in Kanha a generation later.
When a calculation like the percentage change above trips you up, the Fermi Problem Library has worked problems with a step-by-step solver that explains the reasoning, so you can see where your method went wrong.
Open the 2022 summary report, pick one landscape table, and calculate its percentage change from 2018 yourself.
