Two teams of forest guards, each credited with capturing a tiger that had strayed near human habitation, were felicitated in the city on Friday.

As their stories were shared from the dais, the audience responded with applause. These are the unsung heroes at the frontline of conservation.

On February 9, a tiger sneaked out of Ajmalmari forest in the Sunderbans and sought refuge in a snake gourd field in a village across the river. The tiger, an adult male, mauled a member of the quick-response team before being captured in a trap cage on February 11.

The forest guard had intervened to save a man who had climbed a tree in fear of the big cat. The guard needed re-constructive surgery at SSKM Hospital.

On December 29 last year, tigress Zeenat was darted by foresters in Bankura, around 280km from Odisha’s Similipal Tiger Reserve from where she strayed on December 5.

Over the next three-and-a-half weeks, she covered hundreds of kilometres zigzagging through the forests of Odisha, Jharkhand and Bengal, often close to human habitation, as scores of foresters spent sleepless nights.

The forest guards were felicitated at Bagh Divas, hosted by the Society for Heritage and Ecological Research (SHER), at Rotary Sadan. The NGO works for conservation across Bengal.

One of the highlights of the evening was the screening of Project Tiger, a documentary by Kalyan Varma and Rohit Varma.

The film commemorates 50 years of India’s historic tiger conservation movement. Kalyan was present on Friday.

“Although it is a film about tigers, it chronicles the environmental history of India. How policies got shaped, the different players involved, the community involvement, the challenges... We wanted to show that journey. Tiger is the apex predator. If the tiger is doing well, the forests are thriving,” Kalyan told this newspaper on the sidelines of the programme.

The film has footage of colonial hunting expeditions — which had pushed the big cat almost to the brink of extinction — that needed to be digitised.

Launched in 1973, Project Tiger is widely recognised as a global success story in wildlife conservation, particularly for the Bengal tiger. India is now home to over 3,600 tigers, accounting for more than 70 per cent of the global population in the wild.

A group of grassroots conservationists also got awards on Friday.