Another superb couple of days at Kanha, with 2 sightings of Jungle Cat (I prefer the much more expressive Hindi of ‘Jungli Billi’) and 3 Tigers, a six second encounter with a pregnant tigress this morning and longer views of two large cubs last night. This really is the best time to be here for Tiger sightings despite or rather because of the heat.Old ‘Blaster ‘Forsyth 1838-1871) as I’m going to call him for obvious reasons, has this to say on the subject

the hot season, the height of which is in April or May is the most favourable time for hunting the tiger.

He goes on to add a eulogy to the whole thing that save a change in the verb any tiger photographer or tiger watcher would recognise:

there is a stirring of the blood in attacking an animal
before whom every other beast of the forest quails, and unarmed
man is helpless as the mouse under the paw of a cat
a creature at the same time matchless in beauty of form and
colour, and in terrible power of offensive armature which
draws men to its continued pursuit after that of every other
animal has ceased to afford sufficient excitement to undergo
the toil of hunting in a tropical country.

I’m still thinking about that and whether the wildlife photographer is a worse dressed Big Game Hunter!

Oh and this poor birdwatcher who will never earn his twitcher badge has made it to 90 species here. I’m most pleased with the Indian Roller photos that I’ve been after. It’s a very common bird but has beautiful wings that flash when it flies. I’ve found it hard to photograph in anything other than sitting pose, like this one here.

I prefer this one which is the same bird but displaying.

It seems that the evolutionary history of the Tiger is as yet not fully understood. It is now classified as Felis Panthera Tigris. That is Genus, Family, Species.  The Panthera Family includes the Lion, Tiger, Leopard and Jaguar. The taxonomic status of the Snow Leopard remains problematic, with some recent DNA research suggesting that it is in fact closely related to the Tiger and slightly less closely related to the other members of the Panthera Family (or Roaring cats.) To complicate things further the Snow Leopard doesn’t roar.   The Tiger as we know evolved sometime in the Pleistocene (2 million years ago) in Asia. The earliest ancestor is a smaller cat from China but the earliest true tiger (also smaller) is from Java 1.7 million years ago. The evolution of the Tiger is closely related to the emergence and explosive radiation of the Cervid (deer) and Bovidae (cattle) families during the dramatic climatic shifts of the Pleistocene. Both Deer and Cattle did extraordinarily well during the Pleistocene. The ancestral or prototype deer was something like the familiar Muntjac or Barking Deer found throughout Asian forests (and on target to become, as a fertile and exotic introduction, the most populous deer in Britain ! ). The family rapidly expanded and diversified to exploit the emergence of forest-edge and grassland zones – exactly where you find find deer today. In Asia the range of deer body types and size runs from the diminutive muntjac (at around 50cm tall and weighing 10kg) right up to the Sambar at 165cm tall and weighing 450 kg). The Bovidae includes both the true cattle (Gaur, Bison, domestic cattle etc) and some curious oddities like the Nilgai or Bluebull and the Chousingha, which is a four-horned antelope. There is a huge variation in size from the Chousingha (60 cm and 20 kg ) to the Gaur (the largest wild cattle in the world standing 2 metres at the shoulder and weighing 1000 kg. The earliest ancestor of the Bovidae is thought to have been something like the Chousingha in size, shape and behaviour, which is regarded as the most primitive living form.  The Tiger evolved to prey on all of them and continues to do so. Their hunting technique is that of an ambush predator, consisting of a ‘concealment, stalk, a sudden rush and despatch of their prey’. The wide range of prey from 20 kg Muntjac to 1000kg Gaur means that a wide range of techniques are used, from frontal assault on smaller prey to attacking from the rear in the case of larger prey. The full sequence of a Tigers hunting is rarely seen but back when baiting of tigers was a regular technique for both hunting and viewing they were observed to approach the unfortunate tethered cow or domestic buffalo as silently and stealthily as possible and then attack from behind and try to bite through the back of the neck. I don’t know of any observations of Tigers hunting the larger prey such as Gaur but it seems likely that this is how they tackle prey that is more than capable of inflicting a serious injury. For a predator an injury can mean an inability to hunt so a degree of caution is prudent. Recent analysis of predator scat at Nagarhole in Karnataka, suggests the selection of prey items is a considered choice. Leopard scat shows very little wild boar remains and tiger scat shows very little langur. Why is this ? I asked various guides here and all of them suggested that the boar is too big and dangerous to be prey for leopard. Boar after all have been known to chase off tiger and there are a handful of cases of one killing a tiger by disembowelling it with their lethal tusks. As for the Tiger/Langur question, opinions were mixed, one suggestion being that ambush predators lash out in anger at the noisy forest sentinel.The most likely explanation is that Langur are too difficult to catch and don’t provide enough nutritional value to be worth it.  

Some more details of yesterdays fantastic tiger sighting.

The mahouts had located a male tiger following his pug marks and the alarm calls of chital. This is the usual method of finding tigers. There is a forest early warning system and with practice it is possible to identify the specific warning calls of both Chital and Langur. The two live in a relationship that is sometimes described symbiotic as both provide effective alarm calls in the presence of two highly effective ambush predators (tiger and leopard here in Kanha, other species elsewhere). Is it actually symbiotic though ?  In addition the langur has untidy eating habits and as they feed in the canopy they drop a lot of potential foodstuffs that are otherwise unavailable to the deer. I’ve seen a paper that suggests that langur will drop around 4kg of foodstuffs daily that it is regularly foraged by chital. Associations are more common during the non-monsoon seasons (either hot or cold). Chital are much more vulnerable to predator attack than Langur as they are vulnerable to tiger, leopard and dhole (the three major predators here at Kanha), whereas Langur tend to retreat to the safety of the canopy, and are rarely predated by tiger (presumably because of size and their arboreal nature. It is clearly advantageous to Chital to associate with Langur, both for dietary reasons and for security but what is in it for the Langur ?

At the Park entrance at Mukki is a shrine to Durga under a Banyan tree. As it has tridents I’d assumed it was a shrine to Shiva but apparently it is Durga who is a Peaceful Form of Kali. Durga is commonly represented as riding on a Tiger, and every morning I’ve noticed the Guides bowing their heads and saying a prayer as we pass the shrine. I’ve got into the habit of doing the same, having a healthy respect for all gods, and particularly those whose worship goes back to the Paleolithic. This morning I had the best tiger sighting of my life; a beautiful adult male with a freshly killed chital in his mouth.

Photo here and thank you Durga !

This atmospheric quote is from the redoubtable Captain Forsyth again and The Highlands of Central India who in full Victorian flow dismisses the local name for Bos Gaurus  (Gaur) and insists on calling it the Indian Bison.  Forsyth’s tone is admiring of what he calls

This unconquerable antipathy of the Indian bison to the
propinquity of man (which) is slowly but surely contracting its range,
and probably diminishing its numbers. Gradually cultivation
is extending into the valleys that everywhere penetrate these
hills ; and the grazing of cattle, which extends far ahead of
the regularly settled tracts, is pushing the wild bull before it
into the remotest depths of the hills.

With a characteristic absence of irony he goes on to state at the end of this chapter (largely concerned with hunting) that ; On the whole I think
stalking the mountain bull among the splendid scenery of
these elevated regions, possesses more of the elements of true
sport than almost any other pursuit in this part of India.

Forsyth dismisses several accounts of the ferocity of the Bison as the work of ‘the class of writers who aim rather at sensationalist description rather than sober truth‘ and adds that he found the bison extremely timid. That’s easy enough to  believe when you watch them placidly grazing in the bamboo, but they are huge beasts. They are the largest wild cattle in the world as an adult male can weigh up to a tonne (1000kg). Bafati, my guide, here at Kanha, has had to retrieve the body of a local trampled by a male and has himself been charged whilst in his jeep by a male during the rut. Schaller describes them as noticeably shy and was ‘rarely able to watch them undisturbed’. He also observes that they are the only wild ungulate formidable enough to stand its ground against a tiger. Anecdotal evidence from the guides here suggest that tigers do predate Gaur but only via ambush, which is of course what the tiger evolved to do. In fact the tigers niche as an ambush predator explains why they are so difficult to see, and has been linked to its generally solitary lifestyle, although there has been some intriguing evidence to suggest that they are less solitary than had been assumed.

 On the way out of the park today we came across a huge traffic jam at a nala (stream) where a tiger was dozing in the shade. This was the scene as all of the gypsies tried to get a view of stripes.

This is what they saw, a relatively poor view through thick cover, but a definite tiger sighting

Home to wrestle with the complex taxonomy of the woodpeckers of which more later as I still have the aching head.

The guides say that here at Kanha you see one leopard for every ten tigers that you see and for every ten leopards you see a sloth bear. I had a very good sighting of ‘Adam Zad’ (see my previous post) this morning just after entering the park. The bear was hurrying across the track after we disturbed it tearing open a termite mound. It sped off (nothing slothful about it) into the bamboo thicket before peering at us through the foilage. I’d been chatting about bear to two sisters from Scotland (Heather & Diane) in the jeep behind me as we waited for the Park to open. My guide, driver and expert Bafati has had two sightings in the last six months, both of them with me. It was a good sighting but a poor one for photography (or alternatively a poor photographer !) as the bear didn’t hang around long enough to tweak the autofocus past the bamboo that obscured it.It was a privilege to see it, but as Heather and Diane had said that they would rather see a bear than a tiger I rather feel that it was their sighting that I poached ! I’ve posted the poor image above (which I’ve run through a filter that you’ll have to email me for details of ) just to show that you can have the right kit but getting a good image is often about luck and speed. I was standing up in the gypsy, when Bafati saw the bear slammed the anchors on, my big lens which was on the back seat hit the back of my legs and rolled onto the floor (it’s designed to put up with that sort of abuse). I grabbed it, and started shooting and the bear was off into the dense bamboo thicket before I could get critical focus on the eyes. It was all over in under twenty seconds.

I’m not sure about the reason for the Sloth part of the name – as I say they isn’t really anything slothful about them; shambling, slightly scruffy, suspicious and perhaps a little curmudgeonly (if I may be permitted a little anthropomorphisation !). I’m assuming that the Sloth part is because the great curved claws that they use to tear apart Termite mounds are similar to those of Sloths.

This is Forsyth writing in 1872 about the bear;

‘The common black sloth-bear of the plains of India is
very plentiful in the hills on either side of the Narbadd,
between Jubbulpur and Mandla Indeed, there are few parts
of these highlands where a bear may not at any time be
met with. They are generally very harmless until attacked,
living on roots, honey, and insects, chiefly white ants, which
they dig out of their earthen hillocks. The natives call them
adam-zad, or “sons of men/’ and, considering them half
human, will not as a rule molest them. Eeally, their absurd
antics almost justify the idea. Sometimes, however, a bear
will attack very savagely without provocation generally,
when they are come upon suddenly, and their road of
escape is cut off. As a rule, in frequented parts, they do
not come out of their midday retreats, in caves and dense
thickets, until nightfall ; but, in remoter tracts, they may be
met with in the middle of the day.’

Note the fading traces of a bear cult in the name – skinned bears resemble naked human beings – I hasten to add that I’ve no personal knowledge of this but can remember seeing the dancing bears outside the Red Fort at Delhi not too many years ago. Thankfully this horrible practice has been successfully banned.Forsyth’s book is called The highlands of central India : notes on their forests and wild tribes, natural history, and sports (1872) and is available online here – http://archive.org/details/highlandsofcentr00forsrich. It is a wonderful and fascinating account of central India and its natural history, topography and anthropology, if you can get past the obsession with shooting everything that moved. Given the contemporary scarcity of many of the species that Forsyth cheerily blasts away at it does need to be read in its historical and cultural context but they were very different times and no doubt any of us would have thought and acted the same had we been living in that foreign country that is the past.

A more recent account from 1965 is George Schaller’s The Deer and the Tiger which is based on two years that he spent in Kanha. he writes ‘ Sloth bear is uncommon in the park and I encountered solitary individuals on only seven occasions. they were almost wholly nocturnal’. Having seen two in 5 days here I’m feeling very lucky indeed.

Apart from a prolonged period of near constant alarm calls from Chital and Langur – a pretty reliable sign that a Tiger was close, that was it for predators today. There were some good birds however – a beautiful Black-headed Oriole and a couple of pairs of Indian Grey Hornbill. Hornbills are hard to photograph – even the relatively common ones like the Indian Grey and I’ve had various entertaining sessions chasing them round forests trying to get reasonable shots. Ideally you need to be up in the canopy at eye level as otherwise you are shooting up into the trees with all of the attendant delights of juggling a big lens !

No cats or predators in Kanha today but a very nice pair of Oriental Honey Buzzards which aren’t actually Buzzards at all but relatives of the kites. Both the Oriental and its European relative (which is a very rare bird indeed in the UK being just at the westernmost edge of their range),look like more aggressive and heavily armoured birds (Hawk Eagles in Asia and the Common Buzzard in Europe) and there is a reason for that; protective camouflage. They both have plumage that is designed to fool raptors such as the Goshawk that will think twice about attacking the larger more aggressive birds. One of my favourite books as a child was T.H.White’s The Once and Future King which is a strange and wonderful tome whose magical depths are barely hinted at in the Disney cartoon (surprise), but White was also a brilliant nature writer and his book The Goshawk, is a haunting account of his own obsession with hawking in a cottage on the Stowe school estate in the 1930′s. White was a romantic manque born out of his time who despaired of humanity- it’s easy to imagine him as a colonial administrator (like his father) in some remote part of the empire finding a sort of peace in the natural world around him. His attempt to train a goshawk in rural Buckinghamshire amounts to an extraordinary heroic rejection of the modern world and one that prefigures his return to the ‘matter of Britain’ in The Once and Future King which he began the following year. The best of White’s work and there is a great deal of it in the four volumes of the Once and Future King, is charged with a wonder for wild nature that ‘sings a pagan creed outworn’, as Wordsworth put it. Indeed for White the world (by which we must read the human world) was always too much with him. This was not a fashionable view at the time, one can only think of his contemporary, the American poet Robinson Jeffers whose lines about a wounded raptor in Hurt Hawks (‘I’d sooner except the penalties kill a man than a hawk’, express a reverence for wild creatures that is easily misread as misanthropic. White is often cited as an inspiration for Harry Potter, which does him a great disservice as I find the latter sentimental,  snobbish and shoddily written in the extreme. I’d agree with Anthony Holden’s inspired put down of the Potter novels as ‘Billy Bunter with broomsticks’  ( his review is here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/jun/25/booksforchildrenandteenagers.guardianchildrensfictionprize2000)  and add my own less-inspired ‘cosy supernatural’ before directing you or the sensitive imaginative child that you are, were, or aspire to be to the The Sword in the Stone.

One of three males I saw this morning. So much for previously posted nonchalance! We watched this young male on the road briefly before following him as he headed down a drying up nala towards  water. A Langur family group was drinking at the pool as my driver Bafati adroitly positioned us at the ideal viewpoint. The Langur scattered and shot up the trees hurling the characteristic and abusive sounding alarm calls as the tiger padded down to the pool. Looking closely he has a wound on his left fore leg ; which looks like claw marks, presumably from a fight with another tiger. Young males have a hard life, having to disperse from the maternal territory and carve out a new territory. Dominant males will not usually tolerate another male in their territory, which inevitably means conflict either between tigers or with human beings when the young males disperse.

I’ve seen official figures in the park literature of between 73-106 tigers (excluding cubs) in the whole park area (around 2000 sq km, if buffer areas are included) , but that figure is almost certainly wrong. It is based on the 2006 census that used the now discredited pug mark method. Here’s what Ullas Karanath who is probably the world’s leading expert on tigers has to say about that method; ‘ The pugmark census’ was invented in 1966 by Indian forester S.R.Choudhury…it fails to attain its unrealistic goal of measuring the absolute abundance of tigers, on a contry wide basis and because of this three decades of tiger monitoring has basically failed in India, despite being backed by massive investments and the best of intentions’ . (my emphasis). This is from a terrific article (Science deficiency in Conservation Practice , in an even better book by Karanath – The Science of Saving Tigers. I’m grateful to Aditya ‘Dicky’ Singh for directing me to Karanath’s work. Dicky’s excellent blog is at http://www.dickysingh.com/ .

The guides and locals that I’ve spoken to suggest 50 as a more realistic figure. The official park figures for prey animals at Kanha don’t quite add up to the numbers required to sustain the larger end of the estimate (106). The Museum suggests the following figures for 2010;

1. Chital -26615
2. Sambar – 3511
3. Barasingha – 475
4. Muntjac – 1174
5. Nilgai – 102
6. Chousingha – 146
7. Gaur – 1690
8. Wild Boar – 8157

Total = 41,870.

Given that the basic biology of an adult tiger means that it needs to kill and eat 50-60 cow or deer sized animals a year to survive, this in turn means that it needs a prey base of 500 animals. Again I’m relying on Ullas Karanath again here for these figures (this time Reconciling conservation with emancipatory politics, in The Science of saving Tigers). In theory that prey base assuming it is accurate and nothing goes wrong could support 83 tigers. The shortfall is presumably made up in domestic animals who are relatively easy prey. I’ve heard figures suggesting that tigers are successful on 2-4 out of 10 hunting attacks which statistic doesn’t include domestic prey. The hunting of domestic prey is a major source of community and tiger conflict. This is an age-old battle that goes back at least to the emergence of agriculture in the Near East although it is fascinating to speculate about the relationship between large carnivores and early hominds. Last time I checked Man the Hunter had been replaced by Man the Scavenger – a slightly less noble phrase. Biblical and Classical references to Lions (all those wonderful extended lion similes in the Illiad but that is a subject for another post ! )  were made by a people who had direct empirical knowledge of the cat and one theory about the near extermination of the Asiatic Lion is that its preferred habitat and hunting strategy was in direct competition with pastoralists. The Tiger, of course is an ambush predator particularly of deer although it will eat most animal prey, and is associated with forests, specifically forest edges. In evolutionary terms it emerged to prey on the deer as they spread out across Asia, from an ancestral homeland somewhere in Asia, in modern day China.Studies of the heartbreakingly recently extinct subspecies of tiger such as the Caspian (1972?) and Javan (1976) suggest that it was the reduction of prey animals that finished them off. There is something unbelievably poignant in the fact that they didn’t quite make it to the 21st century, particularly given that the science now is good enough now to understand why.

And before I sign off with a haunting image of the last of these magnificent cats dying of hunger somewhere in an empty thicket on the Turkmen-Uzbek-Afghan border or deer forest in Java, here is another image from today.

Note the distinctive markings – everyone unique to the individual tiger, which is why camera traps or photos are the only way to count tigers. I have been told in the past, in defence of the pugmark census method that every tiger pug is unique like human fingerprints, but the slight hitch there is that human beings are a bit more cooperative than tigers.

In my previous post I included this quotation without giving a source. It is of course from the final Mowgli story, The Spring Running’ from Kipling’s The Second Jungle Book. I’ve been pondering over those lines, with their elegiac note as the now -adult Mowgli leaves the forest. As the old half-blind bear Baloo ( which is of course the Hindi word for the sloth bear) puts it ‘who shall question Man in his ways?’. I saw a Sloth Bear yesterday in the Park, just long enough to register the thought that the black object shuffling through the bushes looked like an old man in a badly fitting scruffy fur coat. It’s an easy mistake to make as the wealth of names thrown up by bear cults around the world suggest. Many years ago while a research student I came across a lovely book on the Circumpolar Bear Cult in the Northern Hemisphere by an anthropologist in the 1920′s. I wish I had it now to dip into as it is a treasure trove of curious myth and fable about what traditional cultures call the Big Fellow. Kipling of course has a chilling poem about Adam Zad (Son of Adam) the traditional name for the bear amongst the Kashmiris, which is a barely-veiled warning against Russian Imperialism in Asia. He so disliked Russia that his last will insisted that there should be no investment in Russian stocks by his executors.

I’ve reproduced the first two stanzas below, but should say that I was once charged by a sloth bear protecting her cub in Chitwan in Nepal. Luckily I was in a group and she backed off after a threat display but the speed of the angry mother was terrifying.

YEARLY, with tent and rifle, our careless white men go
By the Pass called Muttianee, to shoot in the vale below.
Yearly by Muttianee he follows our white men in -
Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin.

Eyeless, noseless, and lipless – toothless, broken of speech,
Seeking a dole at the doorway he mumbles his tale to each;
Over and over the story, ending as he began:
“Make ye no truce with Adam-zad – the Bear that walks like a Man!