CHENNAI: Sporting a gleaming black coat, when Saya made a majest ic appearance on our social media timelines two weeks ago, jaws dropped, and ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ prevailed. The piercing gaze of his green eyes even convinced some netizens that he was indeed Bagheera from The Jungle Book. Spotting Saya in the thick woods and capturing his movements seemed ambitious.
But when the moment arrived, the stunning photos — of him peeking from behind a tree, sitting royally on the bark, and walking through the mist-engulfed Nagarhole forest — left a balming effect in the hearts of more than a million people trapped in a locked-down planet. While Saya remains oblivious to this fame, a part of the spotlight also fell on the painstaking efforts of wildlife photographer Shaaz Jung. “Tracking Saya was my greatest challenge and reward,” said Shaaz about his latest photography series. He was in conversation with Karan Virwani, CEO of WeWork India, earlier this week, narrating his experiences with wild cats.
Tracing the tracks
When the forest department officials alerted Shaaz that Saya had walked into the Nagarhole and Kabini jungles in 2015, a hopeful Shaaz set out to capture the moment he had been waiting for. But it was only in 2016 that he could catch a glimpse of this mighty creature. “Saya was establishing territory at the time, and it was difficult to track him. When I saw him I realised that it was a oncein- a-lifetime opportunity for me to finally understand an animal that had never been documented intimately before. Black panthers have always existed in India, however, in inaccessible jungles,” he shared.
For Shaaz, this was a golden opportunity — to follow Saya and tell a story that the world didn’t know it needed to hear. “I decided to write a script and went to National Geographic. They came onboard and that allowed me to acquire research and filming permits, which gave me three years in the park where I could track him and make a film on him every day,” he said, adding that Saya belonged to a lost species. “It is a leopard, but with a mutation. One doesn’t come across a mutation like this often,” he pointed out. Looking for Saya was like looking for a needle in the haystack.
“I spent days looking for him and it was absolutely worth it when we saw him for those 15 seconds, crossing a road or getting down a tree,” he said. The longest he went without a sighting was 81 days. “The deadlines given to us by Nat Geo were inching closer. On the 82nd day, we saw Saya emerge from a thicket with a deer in his mouth. We froze in awe of the scene that was unravelling in front of us. It took me 15 seconds to recover and snap back to reality and capture the beast with my camera,” he recalled.
Born to explore
With parents who loved exploring the wildlife, Shaaz spent his childhood wandering the jungles of south and central India. Soon, he found his heart beating for the big cats — leopards and panthers. Shaaz’s first interaction with a leopard — called Scarface — was 11 years back in the woods of Nagarhole. “I found a reflection of myself in Scarface. When I first saw him, he had just taken over the territory from his father, who was also the one to give him the scar. The wound was fresh and he sat on a log like it was his throne, looking around triumphantly.
It was a moment of immense self-discovery for me,” he recounted. With over ten years of experience, walking and working in the wild, Shaaz calls his style of photography ‘environmental surrealism’ as he wants to “bring an artistic touch to my pictures.” He has documented 48 leopards in the jungles of Kabini. “Eighteen of them are local to the jungle, the rest were passing by or migrating,” he shared. A frequent visitor to Kabini and Nagarhole forests, Shaaz also works towards conserving forest resources by focusing on creating a dialogue with the locals in and around the forests, sharing the importance of saving the jungles that surround them and preserving the present for the future generations.
As the webinar inched towards conclusion, a participant asked Shaaz to share three lessons that he learned from the wildlife. “Patience, our insignificance when compared to the vastness of our surroundings, and the fact that life and death are always in motion, so one mustn’t fear death. Wild animals are oblivious to the passing of time. They don’t care for it and live by the day. I try to do the same too,” he said. Shaaz will soon release two books — one on the melanistic leopard, and an anthology of short stories about his encounters with cats in the wild.
WHAT’S A MELANISTIC LEOPARD ?
Leopards are a sub-species of jaguars. The signature black rings on the yellow fur are caused by the combination of two dominant Agouti Signaling Protein (ASIP) genes in the DNA of the animal. In some cases, a mutation in the ASIP gene causes the recessive characters of the gene to manifest in its DNA. In the case of leopards, the offspring are born with a complete black coat of fur. These mutations are rare and give birth to what we call black panthers or melanistic leopards.