A stint on the Stinchar

In the middle of October, we decided to take the opportunity to head north and make a quick visit to Scotland.

First stop was with family near Pitlochry. I love the wooded hillsides and deep river valleys that characterise this area. Great mountains loom blackly in the distance; a backdrop that confirms you are in the 'proper' Highlands. The salmon were leaping at the Linn of Tummel, but with low water levels there were few fish moving. We did not manage to find a capercaillie, which was not surprising and it was disappointing to see that this wonderful bird seems to have lost the nature conservation popularity contest. The forests around Pitlochry used to be 'badged' and branded as capercaillie country. Images of them were everywhere; not just postcards, but on the forest gateways, roadside billboards and everyone seemed to be committed to the return of this huge, charismatic grouse. Now, it is hard to get a sense that this area still holds any capers at all. All the signs have come down and the Forestry Commission has moved on. They are no longer managing their extensive forests for capercaillie. The only efforts seem to be made by a few private landowners.

Red squirrels, on the other hand, seem to be doing well. We had some lovely views of squirrels. It was dark, so the images are nothing to boast about, but we loved spending time with this delicate, agile little beast.

From Pitlochry, we moved down to Ayrshire and stayed at the Alton Albany B&B. This was a real find. A lovely room, great breakfast, welcoming hosts and ... most important for us ... right beside the River Stinchar.

Again, water levels were very low. The Stinchar can roar when it's in spate, but when we were there the pools were so low that the sea trout were trapped into them; waiting for some rain so that they could move up to their spawning grounds.

We were hoping to have some close encounters of the ottery kind, but that will have to wait for another trip to Ardnamurchan. While we were waiting out beside the water, a dipper came scudding up the stream to alight on a branch in the water. You don't often hear dippers sing, partly because it is a soft mellifluous song, but also because of the constant rattle and chatter of the water in the rocky streams where they live. The image below was taken at first light, so it's a little grainy.

The Alton Albany Farm B&B can be found here: http://www.altonalbanyfarm.com and we will be back to see them soon!

Ten Days in Tadoba Part 5: TIGER!

Pug mark, or footprint, of a female tiger (front right foot)

During my stay in Tadoba-Andhari National Park some of the treasured moments were when the rattling around in jeeps was interspersed with long waits beside water-holes and in the shade of teak trees; waiting for action. These are times when you can sit quietly and let your senses reach out into the jungle around you; listen to the crackling-dry forest floor that alerts you to even the smallest animal movement, the thrum of insects in the forest canopy and the constant chorus of doves, parakeets and other small birds. I never tired of the dusty smell of the jungle at dawn, the sweet, cloying scent of flowering trees and vines and the sudden delight of coming across trees such as Flame of the Forest (Butea grandis) and flowering vines that relieve the grey-green of bamboo thickets.

The Ghost Tree (Sterculia urens) is a member of the mallow family and one of the most prominent trees at Tadoba. 

But when all that is said and done, I had come to see tiger. Those two syllables had come to take on a huge significance after I had saved for years, spent more than I cared to think about and invested a huge effort in planning the trip.

When I arrived at the lodge for my stay close to Tadoba, one of the first things I noticed was the live feed to closed circuit cameras around the area. In order that I should be in no doubt that I was in the very best place to see tiger, the past high-lights were played for me. It was great to see the footage of tigers walking within a few metres of the lodge, but it built my expectation to an almost unbearable pitch. My first three days were tigerless, and to return to the lodge to see that tigers had been caught on camera walking almost beside my room increased my sense of loss.

Guests are joined by the naturalists for dinner, the sights and experiences of the day can be shared and plans for the following morning discussed. Sometimes, before the lights are turned off around the lodge grounds, a tiger or leopard gets up from it’s resting place nearby, disturbing a muntjac that will suddenly start barking. Everyone freezes around the table, listening intently, staff come out quietly from the kitchen to listen as well: everyone rapt by the sounds of the nightly jungle drama getting underway.

I was awake at 12.30 am on the morning of Day 3 at Tadoba, listening to the humming of the nightjars, the gentle buzz of insects and breathing in the nightime smells of the jungle as it cooled down after a hot day. A sambar belled on the other side of the water hole, the honking call denoting that it had seen or smelled a tiger close by. Later that day I looked at the trail cam images, but nothing showed. Tigers slip through the jungle unseen even by modern camera technology, but a sambar’s sensitive nose can pick up the tell-tale scent drifting on the breeze. Molecules of moisture that carry the sweat, hair fibres and skin cells of the tiger are drawn into the wide black nostrils of the sambar, coming to rest against it’s super-sensitive mucosal membranes in the deer’s long muzzle. Olfactory nerves are instantly triggered, firing into the animal’s brain so that images of tiger flash across its imagination, eliciting immediate responses from the muscles and adrenal glands as the whole animal prepares for flight. That loud call, bursting from its chest, holds in it all the terror and the excitement that the great predators inspire.

Having had to wait for three days to see Maya and her cubs (see Ten Days in Tadoba Part 2), I was prepared to endure a similar wait to see Sonam and her three cubs. Sonam is not such a mega-star as Maya, being a lot more fussy about the company she keeps and I had been told that seeing her would be more difficult. So when we arrived at the waterhole at ten to nine in the morning I was prepared for a long-ish wait and when she appeared out of the jungle at five past nine, strolled down the water’s edge, turned and reversed gracefully into the water, I was completely unprepared. In comparison to Maya, who was always over one hundred metres distant, Sonam was close, about fifty metres.

Tigress Sonam eased herself into the water.

Sonam, in all her glory 

She soaked herself in the pool for forty minutes, having been joined by three cubs. Each cub had walked down the steep bank to their mother and briefly greeted her, making the obeisance that is customary between young tigers and their elders and betters.

One of her cubs approaches to make the proper obeisance to her mother

However, when Sonam lifted herself clear of the water and made her way back into the jungle, she was followed by just two cubs.

The smallest cub stayed behind. He could hear his mother calling softly to him and he replied with a few yowls and a complete refusal to follow. He walked through the water, free to explore a bit now that his siblings and parent were no longer there. As he waded through the green water and mud of the pool he put one paw onto something buried in the mud.

The Something moved.

It wriggled and tried to escape, so he dug his claws into it and sat on it.

Bubbles surround the cub as her fumbles in the mud for the Something he had found

I could see his shoulders moving as he kneaded whatever The Something was, a look of intense concentration on his face as tried to work out what it was that he had caught.

A large catfish?

Perhaps a terrapin?

He ducked his head down and tried to see it, but that was no good because the water was a thick algal soup and The Something had disturbed the mud. Each time he ducked down below the surface, he came back up quickly looking particularly bedraggled, snorting and sneezing the water out of his nose and blinking it out of his eyes.

He tried to look down to see it.

It was no good, so he went down for a closer look.

Eventually, The Something slipped from his grasp and he lost interest. At this point, he decided that he might as well obey his mother and follow her off in to the jungle.

The following day, Sonam appeared again at almost precisely nine o’clock in the morning. This time, the cubs came to the pool before their mother. They lurked under a fallen tree trunk for a time, staring across the water at the large crowd on the opposite bank.

Sonam's three cubs, the naughty cub is in the front.

 When Sonam came to the water she dipped herself in a few metres away from them. Each cub then came up to her in turn to rub heads with her a reassure her of their devotion. Devotion undoubtedly, but not always obedience and as I suspected, the naughtiest cub came out on his own and swam about yowling, making faces at us and being a generally bad little tiger. He tried out some proper snarls on the battery of lenses pointed in his direction.

Snarling at the photographer's didn't work. But if he does it in a couple of years time it will get a much more satisfying reaction.

 All that happened was a flurry of shutter-clicks, so he stopped that and waded a little further away. He found a good depth, where he was up to his shoulders in the water, and then proceeded to roll and splash about, getting thoroughly muddy in the process.

Rolling one way ....

... and then the other.

 Two days after that wonderful morning, I was sitting in the jeep with the tiger tracking team of Bonay, the naturalist, Lohoo our very experienced driver, and the Forest Service tourist guide. It had rained heavily the night before and the jungle was full of puddles and all the water holes had expanded. Bonay had warned me in the morning that the chances of seeing anything when there was so much water about were very low. The morning drive had been quiet and I had low expectations in the afternoon. We parked beside the forest road with the jungle on one side and an open meadow on the other. Lohoo stopped the engine and we waited. A sambar called very close by, about thirty metres from us in the dense bamboo. It was so loud that it felt like five meters. The sambar continued to call, honking like an air-horn with a peculiar squeak at the end.

“Leopard!” said Lohoo with a serious look on his face. “Definitely leopard”. He nodded sagely.

I asked him how he knew. He explained that the distinctive squeak denoted ‘leopard’ rather than ‘tiger’ in sambarese.

I felt that I had learned a bit of esoteric tiger-tracking knowledge. Anyone could hear alarm calls, but now I would be able to interpret them too.

I made sure that the camera was ready and took some test shots to adjust the exposure. I started systematically scanning the jungle edge. I wanted to be the first one to ‘spot the leopard’ (pun intended) when it approached the open area. There was no breeze. No leaf was stirring on the branches or on the ground.

Just one leaf moved gently to and fro. I stared at it for a while, wondering what would make just one leaf move in that regular metronomic manner. I began to suspect that I was not looking at a leaf or indeed any part of a plant but an animal or part thereof. Could it be a snake’s head, swinging side to side as it searched for prey in the leaf-litter? Not wanting to make a fool of myself, I slowly lifted my binoculars up to my eyes and focussed in on the “leaf”. Not a snake, but a nightjar.

A nightjar running away. Nightjar legs are widely spaced and very, very short. So short and wide-apart are they that ‘running’ is a very loose description of what this bird was doing. What I had thought was a leaf swaying in situ was in fact this small bird racing away from me as fast as it could go and making no discernible progress. I wondered if nightjars have nightmares where they think they are not running very fast but actually are? I pointed him out to the team. Bonay saw him, but Lohoo and the Guide could not see it which made me feel very smug. It’s not often that you spot things before your guides.

The tension brought on by the sambar calls had started to bleed away. Our leopard-expectation had reduced and we had returned to our usual state of relaxed watchfulness. Bonay looked up at me and said,

“Maybe you should go into the jungle now? You could introduce yourself to nice Mr Leopard and ask to take his picture!”

There was much Indian tittering at this. I put on my thoughtful face, as if I was considering this deeply, then smiled at him and responded with,

“Hey! I’ve got a better idea! Why doesn’t Bonay go into the forest instead? He could make a noise like a lost baby chital … and then get killed photogenically.”

This was poo-pooed as a ridiculous suggestion of the kind that someone who sees running nightjars might come up with.

It was fortunate that neither of us took up the other’s dare, because just at that moment a very large male tiger stepped out of the forest and glowered at us.

Tiger Madkasur, a young and comparatively unscarred territorial male.

He was huge. So close that I could only get part of his face into the frame of the 600mm lens. I fizzed off a few dozen frames, thankful that I had kept re-adjusting the exposure levels as the light subtly changed.

I glanced down at Lohoo who was turned round in the drivers seat, “Definitely a leopard then, Lohoo? Absolutely and for sure a leopard!” More Indian titters and sniggers, quickly silenced by some dark looks from our driver.

The tiger’s name was Madkasur and he chuffed through his whiskers as he walked close by the jeep, almost touching it with his massive striped flank. It is a soft, gentle sound that must be heeded by those for whom it is meant.

Madkasur was assuring us that he was happy and that just so long as we stayed where we were and didn’t do anything too repugnant then all would be well; any lapse of etiquette with a tiger can end very badly.

He crossed the forest road and stopped to briefly cast his eye over the scene. Then he headed out onto the meadow. Great head swinging, he plodded forward in deceptively slow stride that took him quickly away from us.

Walking out into the grass.

Lohoo spun back round and started the engine.

“Hang on!” cried Bonay as we lurched back onto the road and drove down to a small track that cut out onto the meadow. We managed to cut around in front of him and stop just as he came out of some long grass in front. I was able to get a whole series of full body shots that show how the tiger walks with a swinging gait.

A tiger's gait is a perfect combination of stealth, power and grace.

This is caused by his forepaws being pushed out in front of him as he takes each step and placed carefully with the side of the paw striking the ground first, then rolled flat as he transfers weight onto it. This cautious step allows him to feel dry twigs, loose stones and crackly leaves before he puts his full weight down. As he walks, he is subconsciously changing the way his weight is distributed across each foot. In this way he can walk silently across the forest floor, sliding his great frame through the thickest jungle without a sound. Before disappearing from view he looked over at me, handsome face rimmed by the ruff of fur characteristic of male tigers, then went on his way.

During my stay at Tadoba I had a brief sighting of a leopard. A female sitting about fifty metres inside the jungle, partly obscured in the bamboo. There was a crush of jeeps and buses on the narrow forest road, everyone was pointing and cooing and sharing the experience; apart from me. For the life of me, I could not see the leopard. Bonay got increasingly frustrated with my inability to see the beast.

“There! There! There! Beside the bamboo. There. Can you see the bamboo? Right beside the bamboo!” he cried in desperation, clutching my arm. As we were inside a bamboo thicket, none of his directions really picked out any one particular spot. Then he tried to tell me gently. Then he took my camera off me and took the pictures himself. Then I saw her. Not a good image to be had, but a lovely sighting of the most delectable of all the big cats.

One of Bonay's hand-held, manually focussed images - great stuff!

Towards the end of my stay, I was rewarded by more tiger sightings in the Moharli Beat of “New Tadoba”; an area that has only recently been added to the Park. It borders a very large lake. We saw Madrihuri, a female, crossing and re-crossing the forest road as she went to her unweaned cubs, fed them from her body and returned to the lakeside to stay cool.

Tiger crossing road pic 0181

In the afternoon we watched another female, Aishwarya, take a quick dunk in a little man-made tank and then go over to the male Waghdoh and tell him to get up and go and fend for her and her cubs. I never saw him properly, which was a shame because “Scarface”, as he is known, is the largest male in the Park.

Tigers are addictive. If you have read all the way to this last paragraph then you might just be as addicted as me. Don’t fight it. The only thing you can do is feed the addiction. See you in the jungle!

Mesmeric

Cover pic 9571

Ten Days in Tadoba - Part 4

Ten days in Tadoba

Part 4: The Supporting Cast or What tigers like to eat.

Chital, or Spotted deer, are the deer species that have got it all. Saying that does not come easily to me. My first memory of wildlife, and one of the earliest memories I have, is of roe deer. I was riding on my father’s shoulders on a family Sunday afternoon walk when we were startled by a roe buck and a roe doe charging across the path in front of us. Their loud barking alarm call, the sight of them flying across the path and off through the trees, is one of the things that sparked my interest in natural history. Roe have been a constant interest and fascination for the intervening 46 years since that time. So to admit that my wonderful lifelong companions, by far the prettiest and most interesting of the British deer, might be second in the “Best in Class” category is a real wrench.

Chital can be found in most of the forest habitats in India. They have a similar lifecycle to European deer. The males grow new antlers each year. The bone is covered in blood-rich furry skin or ‘velvet’ until fully grown when the velvet dries out and starts to peel away. The males rub it off by thrashing their antlers against trees and bushes, giving vent to their increasing aggression as they come into breeding condition. They put on weight, especially around their forequarters and neck, their coats become thick and sleek and the colours deepen. They enter the breeding period, or rut, and look for females in oestrus with whom to mate, calling repeatedly to attract attention and challenging any rivals. The big difference between India and Europe is that this process is seasonal in our cold northern climes, but in the heat of Maharashtra it goes on all the time. So at any one time you can see males in full rut, males that have just shed their antlers, males with new antlers in velvet and fawns of every age.

Chital can be appreciated in the full panoply of their behaviour and biology. You can always see the most charmingly pretty fawns, massive, darkly handsome males and winsomely beautiful females. The males, in rut, have a dark chestnut coat that sets off the bright white spots. They have a black gorget patch on the throat and pale markings on their faces that make them seem to be frowning ferociously at you. The fawns are born all year round, so there are always delectable lamb-like deer gambolling around the females as they walk gently through the jungle.

A male chital, in full breeding fettle.

A group of female chital at the water's edge, wary of tigers and crocodiles, they didn't hang around.

The other common deer is the Sambar. This is a large, bony deer. Not handsome, but very impressive. They have long, shaggy coats that are a uniform brown, but can show up with a coppery tinge in evening light. They have long faces with very prominent scent glands at the corner of their eyes. These large, puckered holes are bare of hair and look more like a deformity than an organ. Their legs are very long and they move with a grace that implies huge strength. For all that strength, their gait is uncertain. The weight always on the hind legs, head and neck nodding as if in trepidation of what lies underfoot or just ahead. They move as if they are walking through a minefield. The males can get very big, with thick broad antlers that give them a grandeur that puts the Monarch of the Glen to shame.

A full grown male sambar

A young male sambar, very much at home in the water.

Gaur are called Indian Bison, but as is so common with mammals, it is a misnomer. It is not a bison but a true bovine, a wild species of cattle and the most impressive of its kind. The bulls run to weights in excess of a tonne. They stand over six foot at the humped shoulder and their massive frame supports a truly prodigious gut.

Gaur have the most gorgeous chocolate coat colour, lighter in the female (which is like Green & Black’s dark milk chocolate) and almost black in the male (90% cocoa solids). Both sexes have white bobby socks that make them look as if they got dressed up specially and the calves are just very lovely with huge brown eyes that would melt the heart of a pantomime villain.

Female gaur.

Male gaur, showing the huge gut that hangs from their massive frame. The white socks which are characteristic of the species can be seen.

The first thing that strikes you about Nilgai is their size, they are bigger than a horse, and they
are gracefully beautiful. It is a true antelope, but it’s meat is forsworn to Hindus as for religious purposes the animal is regarded as a cow; which just goes to show that irrational bureaucracy is not a new thing on the sub-continent and can’t all be blamed on the British. They are also called Blue Bull. The male is a magnificent beast with impressive horns and a slaty-grey coat colour that looks a bit bluish in the right light. They have an interesting arrangement with the local birds at each waterhole. I watched a female sidle up to a stand of bamboo in which several rufous tree-pies were hopping about. As soon as she stopped they hopped onto her back then walked jauntily down to her rear end and inspected under her tail for insects. Another alighted on the ground under her and peered upwards, springing up to her belly whenever it saw something crawl through her fur. When they finished taking ticks and flies off her, she moved away.

Like kudu, which they resemble in many ways; they have the most terrific ears. Huge, sensitive, mobile, fringed organs that definitely have minds of their own as they swivel about, twitch up and down expressing emotions as much as capturing sounds.

An adult female nilgai and two juveniles take a quick drink at the waterhole.

Chausingha have got four horns – how cool is that? Count ‘em. Two more than any other antelope on Earth. Except in the female of course and I didn’t get any shots of a male so you’ll just have to believe me. They are delicate, fragile, silent creatures that prance and tip-toe through the jungle thickets, rarely seen during the day. This lovely female and her grown-up daughter came out of the jungle when I was in a crowd of jeeps watching over a waterhole for a tiger. I was so excited that I immediately swung the lens around and started to take pictures. No one else was in the least interested. They saw a small, brown deer-thing that isn’t even tiger-food. I saw a rare, uniquely adapted animal that blessed me with a wonderful view of it’s beautiful self.

Female chausingha with young.

Indian muntjac are not like the smaller, more aggressive Chinese Reeve’s muntjac that we get in the UK. They are slightly bigger – about roe-sized – with huge eyes (adapted to night-time life) and an even deeper pre-orbital gland. I had some great views of these pretty little deer. Unlike Reeve’s muntjac, you tend to see the females more often that the males. From the verandah of my room at the Lodge, after 10 pm when the external lights were put out, it was muntjac, the “Barking Deer”, that I listened for. Their alarm call is far more reliable than chital or sambar. When they bark you know two things: a tiger or a leopard is definitely there and the ‘there’ is close to the deer because they inhabit thickets and can only see their predators at close quarters.

Female muntjac, showing the deep pre-orbital and forehead glands with which she scent-marks trees and shrubs to mark her territory and communicate her readiness to mate.

Now, talking of tigers ...

The next instalments of Ten Days in Tadoba will return to our favourite subject!

Dhole! Part 3 of Ten Days in Tadoba

Dhole

So there we were, at the end of Part 2, watching Maya and her three cubs cooling off in a shady pool during the afternoon heat. The German family who were also staying at the Lodge were in the next jeep and we were sharing what we had done that day. They asked me if I had seen the dhole.

I should explain at this point that dhole have always held a special fascination for me. I came across them in Rudyard Kipling's short story "Red Dog" which is in the Second Jungle Book collection. In that story they are depicted as the very worst kind of villain, a contagion that sweeps through the jungle, killing indiscriminately.  In later years I took the trouble to find more about these fascinating canids. To many Westerners, their deep red colour is reminiscent of our native red fox; but a dhole is no mere fox. Their large feet allow them to run down large fast prey and their impressive teeth will chew through tough hides and thick tendons. They are ferocious and resolute predators. Yet, for all their impressive dental armoury and voracious habits, they are not habitually aggressive to each other. They live in large packs based on extended families and all the adults care for the pups and young dogs. They communicate with a variety of whistles, clucks, yaps and whimpers. Their close familial relationships allow them to hunt large prey like chital and even the mighty gaur by coordinating their attack, chasing the panicked prey until it is weakened and can be pulled down. They are not really 'like' any other dog, although they are similar in their habits and social structure to African hunting dogs.

 

Long canines and huge shearing carnassial teeth - definitely not a fox!

We left Maya (it took me a while to convince my team that I really did want to forsake the longed-for tiger in favour of the dhole) and found them about twenty minutes later in the deep shade of some tall trees next to a stream, curled up in the leaf litter. There were eight adults and four pups. The pups were boisterous and kept annoying the adults; leaping on them, licking their faces, rubbing alongside them, whining and whimpering querulously. 

The dogs were constantly getting up, pattering about before lying down and resting again.

A puppy is greeted by two resting adults that it just woke up.

Red dog in the shade

As the afternoon was getting on the pack soon started to move up towards the road: it was time to be on the move, it was time to hunt. They walked off down the road, allowing us to follow closely. The puppies played with the adults, demanding attention. Both pups and adults continued to play together, yawning, grinning and tumbling in the dust beside the road, as they began to spread out down the road. 

A male and female rub up against one another, affirming social bonds.

The time to move. The time to hunt.

Then the adults began to whistle to each other. Although it was a soft sound like the squeal of bicycle brakes, it made their heads snap up and their attitude changed. Sharp muzzles were raised, large triangular ears pricked up and they started to move away from the river, breaking into an easy trot. We lost them as they moved into the tall grass and weeds beside the road. Our jeeps turned round in the road, dust rising from the gravel as we sped round to meet them on a road higher up the valley side. We arrived just in time to see them appear on the tarmac, emerging suddenly from the scrub. They travelled down that road for another half hour before taking to the jungle and disappearing.

Trotting down the road

That was not my last encounter with the dhole. On my fifth morning at Tadoba, we arrived at the gate at six o’clock in the morning. The light was dawn-grey and the Forest Guards were still busy washing and dressing after being asleep on the office roof or on machans (raised platforms) in the jungle. Across the dry paddy fields three slim shapes slipped over a bank and began to cut towards us.

“Dhole!” said a guide, pointing.

They were trotting in line, dust kicking up from their feet as they moved round behind us. Two more adults and three pups joined them and they all advanced towards the gate, passing close by and then stopping on the road.

Paperwork was being hurried up and got completed magically so that Guides could tumble into the jeeps as the gate swung wide and we drove up the road. We entered the Park with an honour guard of dhole trotting beside us. One of the pups was carrying a stick in his mouth, a small trophy that he was keen to show off but which all the others studiously ignored. Every few yards one of them would stop to scent mark a tree or leave a scat at the side of the road. They were a dawn patrol, travelling their territorial boundary, making sure that the neighbours knew to keep in their own space. Dhole are jealous of their jungle. They do not tolerate competition and goes for predators other than dhole. Tadoba’s tigress superstar Maya lost her first litter of cubs to dhole. They found and killed her two cubs. I waved to them as we turned to go into the middle of the Park and they carried on to probe the boundaries where the jungle meets the farmland.

Encounters with dhole are always on their terms. You can’t create an encounter, they just appear beside you. They let you get as close as they want and then move off when it suits them. You are not relevant to them. Their priorities are so utterly different to our own; there is nothing about us that would engage their interest.

Dhole are very beautiful: handsome in a way that many other canids are not.

On my ninth day at Tadoba, we were sitting in a small line of jeeps, listening for alarm calls. We were situated on a minor forest road just where it joined a larger road that skirted a large open area.

A good place to wait, watch and listen.

The high-pitched “POW!” alarm call of a chital from nearby in the dense bamboo scrub jolted everyone to full alertness as if a switch had been flicked on. More alarm calls sounded out as a small herd of the spotted deer walked past, scuffing through the crispy bamboo leaves that covered the ground. I heard something running towards us through the thicket, coming straight for us. I stood quickly, positioned the foot of my monopod securely on the side of the jeep and centered my weight so that I was balanced. Whatever it was, it was moving faster as it approached the edge of the thicket and I swung the lens to meet it. Chital burst out of the jungle, pouring like fluid from a tap they leapt across the track in front of us and bounded out across the grassland beyond it.

“Dhole”, grunted Lohoo my driver. “They run from the dhole.”

There was another star-burst of chital further up the track, some of them galloping down the track past our jeep, jinking and swerving, mouths gaping, eyes rolling: obviously terrified.

A pack of dhole were working this section of jungle. Spread out through the dense scrub, communicating with their quiet whistle, the pack was like a trawl that scours the sea bed catching everything in front of it. The deer were running, trying to get around the side of the pack before they were chased by one dog only to run in front of another. Two dogs came around the corner of the track, swinging along in a mile-eating trot, heads down, looking neither right nor left. I’ve seen fox hounds do the same thing. They are concentrating on what they can hear, rather than what they can see or smell, taking cues from their pack-mates who are in close contact with the quarry. Suddenly, their heads snapped up and they lunged off the track and dived into the scrub. Sambar honked in alarm and we could hear the sounds fade quickly, swallowed up by the jungle as the drama unfolded deep in the forest.

My last sighting of dhole was a single male. He was walking across the road, distended belly showing that his hunting had been good. His coat shone a deep red in the evening light. He paused to give us a long, slow appraisal. Then he turned aside, ears pricked to calls we could not hear. He walked into the jungle, answering a summons that was for him alone.

Belly distended with a large meal, this was my last view of dhole.