Tadoba's tigers: Unfazed by tourists, masters of the jungle
Tiger-spotting is serious business at the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra. On any given evening, as the visitor is about sit down for dinner after a long day of dusk to dawn safaris, the tiger fanboys hold forth. “Raka’s back,” announces one tiger-spotter with a self-satisfied smile. “He’s a dude alright,” pronounces another; “got into a fight with Junior Mowgli and came off the winner.” There’s much appreciative nodding 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 which acts as the base of the tiger spotters. The house kitten snoozing under the table looks up hearing her name, perhaps gratified that she will share that name with a bigger cat 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 the big cats. “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 at the occupants. It is an amazing experience, locking eyes with a tiger.”
Tiger lore at the reserve includes stories about how Maya, the current queen of Tadoba, learned to deal with gawping tourists when she was a cub and prowled the jungle with mother Nira. Now she imparts that lesson insouciantly to her various litters. The male cubs from her latest litter are curious and come right up to the vehicles, says Kingsly. The female cubs don’t, acting hard to catch. While the Tadoba tigers are sanguine animals, more prone to strolling on the tarred roads and dusty tracks of the Tiger Reserve, the leopards around are disinclined to pose for cameras or taking languid walks; they streak across the jungle, throwing the rare suspicious glance over their shoulder.
The area, which covers 577.96 sq km of reserved forest and 32.51 sq km of protected forest, is home to around 150 tigers and 151 leopards in the core and buffer areas, at last count. The safaris are well organised, the number of vehicles trawling the forest 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 is their mission.
Here’s the thing: the Reserve positively teems with other animals, like the dhole, 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.
But the king or queen of Tadoba is Nature’s striped, golden miracle. The main highlight here is a sighting of the Royal Bengal Tiger. In the forests of the day, of course.