Travel: The tigers of Tadoba
Tadoba`s family tigers
Tiger-spotting is serious business at the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve. On any given evening, as the visitor is about to dig into dinner after a long day of morning and evening safaris, eavesdropping becomes a fun sport.
“Raka`s back,” announces one tiger-spotter, a satisfied smile hovering about his mouth. “He`s a dude alright,” pronounces another; “got into a fight with Junior Mowgli and came off the winner.” There`s much appreciative nodding over Raka`s resilience and recall of Matkasur`s scraps with the fierce Gabbar in earlier times. Then the talk veers off to Unnamed Female with cubs, a new entrant. “I`m of a mind to name her Min Min,” jokes Ali Huzaifa, a naturalist at Red Earth Resort, Tadoba, a resort hugely in demand for its good food and good spa facilities. The house kitten snoozing under the table looks up recognizing her name, quite gratified that she will share that name with a much bigger counterpart.
Apparently Unnamed Female`s cubs have learned the way of the Tadoba Tiger: to be completely impervious to the safari vehicles crawling alongside, as also to the whirr of several cameras going off at once, some equipped with lenses the size of small bazookas. These are indeed, family tigers.
Red Earth Tadoba`s manager, Jeswin Kingsly, is a senior naturalist who has much to say on Tadoba`s tigers. “These are totally tourism zone animals,” he says. “They walk alongside safari vehicles, completely unconcerned. In fact, when the vehicle stops for a closer look, they come to a standstill and direct a puzzled look up at the occupants, literally asking why they have stopped. And I tell you, it is an amazing experience, locking eyes with a tiger.”
Tiger lore at Tadoba includes info on how Maya, the current queen of Tadoba, learned how to deal with gawping tourists as a cub when she walked abroad with her mother Nira, and now regularly imparted that lesson in insouciance to her various litters. Of her latest litter, the male cubs are curious and come right up to the vehicles, says Jeswin. The female cubs shrink away. Clearly, gender behaviour has been assigned to felines in the jungle, too.
If the Tadoba tigers are sanguine cats, more prone to strolling on the tarred roads and dusty tracks of the jungle, the leopards in the Reserve are not too inclined to pose or take languid walks; they streak across, pausing for the rare suspicious glance thrown over their shoulder.
The Tadoba Andhari Reserve which covers 577.96 square kilometres of reserved forest and 32.51 square kilometres of protected forest, has around 150 tigers and 151 leopards in the core and buffer areas, at last count. The safaris are well organized, the number of vehicles trawling the jungle controlled, the drivers tireless in their quest to bring the tourist to a tiger, taking different routes, stopping to point out the pugmarks of several large cats, setting up stakeouts besides watering holes on the Reserve.
Now here`s the thing: the Tadoba-Andhari Reserve teems with other animals too, like the dhole, the gaur, sambar, chital, chinkara, barking deer, langur, flying squirrels, nilgai, sloth bear, wild boar, mongoose, civets, jungle cats, honey badgers, and a host of woodland birds native to central India like eagles, lapwings, paradise flycatchers, racket- tailed drongo, lesser whistling ducks, sandpipers, ibis, darters, and some raptors, too.
But, and there`s no getting away from this, the main event at the Reserve is tiger-spotting, a sighting of the Royal Bengal Tiger. Just one successful sighting and the visitor soon knows why.
This ran in the Sunday Express Magazine of 19 May 2024.
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