A leopard reportedly spotted in footage from a CCTV camera of a residential building in Goregaon's Gokuldham area has been identified by the forest department as C-33 Delta, whom they had collared in November 2021.
The female sub-adult leopard C-33 is the sibling of leopard C32 which was responsible for the spate of human-animal conflicts in Aarey Milk Colony in which nine people were injured in a span of two months.
Meanwhile, Forest Department has assured citizens to stay alert and not to panic. "We have come across CCTV footage of a leopard roaming in the premises of the building in the Gokuldham area in Goregaon East. The animal spotted in the video is one of the radio-collared leopard C33-Delta.
The Forest department and team of researchers are continuously monitoring its activity and there is nothing to panic about at all. The forest department teams have been instructed to do patrolling in the area and also create awareness. We request all to cooperate with the Forest Department," G. Mallikarjuna, Conservator of Forest and Director of SGNP. C33 - Delta, aged around two years, was the first to get trapped in the cage set up to capture the problem leopard C 32 at Aarey Milk Colony.
However, it was only a day later the forest department found that she was not the problem leopard they were looking for but the sibling who was innocent and had no role in the attacks on humans in the Aarey colony. C 33 which was later named Delta was captured on October 1, 2021, since then she was kept at the nursery in Sanjay Gandhi National park away from humans.
However, C 33 was not Radio collared as part of the first phase of the two-year-long project to radio-collar leopards in association with the Wildlife Conservation Society – India (WCS) to track and understand the animal’s movement. She was instead radio-collared by Senior scientist Bilal Habib from Wildlife Institute of India (WII), before being released in the wild on November 9, 2021. This is also the first time that a radio-collared leopard was spotted through CCTV footage in a residential area in Mumbai.
