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