Searching for Tigers in Kanha, India

by WV_No_Author, published Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 11:56 am

Again, the daily routine went something like this. Get up very early, go for a game drives through the park trying to spot a tiger on your own… .have some hot coffee while waiting for the rangers to call in with any tiger spotting..View image….if a tiger was spotted, the usual routine of getting a number and waiting your turn….back to Kipling for a late breakfast…

The rest of the day was spent watching all the monkeys around Kipling Camp …View image…reading…talking with the other guests and staff…and at dusk, head back into the park. The parks are not fenced in and there was always a chance that a tiger would wander through Kipling Camp, but it never happened.

coffee in Kanha

Even driving to and from the park, we’d see other birds (great bird viewing if you are a birder) and animals. The blue bull called a “Nilgai” (looked brown to me)..

Nilgai

Hundreds of Peacocks everywhere…on the ground…sitting in trees (I never thought of peacocks in trees)….

strutting their stuff …spreading those beautiful tails trying to attract a nearby female.

The park workers were burning leaves along the road perimeters or just be sitting around, eating lunch or resting. There seems to be safety in numbers and usually a tiger wouldn’t attack if there was more than one person present. I personally was not about to test that theory.

burning leaves

On our first game drive, there was a tiger not far off the road. And the rangers had a “tiger sighting.” We waited our turn, watched others going off into the forest (there were two elephants), saying fervant prayers that the tiger wouldn’t move.

into the forest

Our turn, the elephant approached the thicket with the mahout whispering, “there”…but we couldn’t see a thing……View image….the elephant moved a little and there it was, so unimaginably beautiful!

this tiger had no intention of moving

Our naturalist taught us to listen for deer calls as a warning to other animals that there was a tiger around. … View image… We also saw a tiger’s ears sticking up out of the grass. When I saw “we”, I mean our naturalists…they could pick out a tiger from great distances away. They’d say…”over there, between the trees”… I’d say, “which two trees”… I ask you…would you know that these are tiger’s ears?