Inside Ranthambhore Fort
The Fort is a national historic monument but much more understanding of the importance of conserving our heritage as much as our environment needs to be communicated. While there are numerous different pressures on the park, awareness is important of the need for preserving the past for future generations.
One can almost hear the ghungroos of the dancers on their way to entertain the royal guests and courtiers in the many pillared palace of entertainments. Dusk would have fallen and the lamps lit, myriads of them, placed in their hundreds of niches in the walls surrounding the stage, shimmering and wavering to provide brilliance for the performers to shine.
There are many holy places inside this fort and villagers from the surrounding regions make pilgrimages from miles away to make obeisance at their favourite saint or chosen god’s temple.
This is the palace of Veer Hammir - the most famous of the local Rajput kings, and on the left it extends into the now derelict Queen’s palace. In front of this is the garden with royal blue peacocks making it their home.
This was where the kings of old would have their sacrifices [yagna] before beginning any martial activity such as war or invasion or defence.
The Ganesh temple inside the Ranthambhore Fort is one of the most famous in the region with pilgrims coming around for miles during the annual Mela. The grounds are full of the local “tame” langurs, considered holy and part of the temple thus not to be harmed. They are spoilt by tourists and visitors and can get quite aggressive about snatching flowers and snacks right out of your hands.
An old myth on the way to the temple has it that if you wish to build a house, you must build one here on the side of the path with the flat stones that are lying around. A number of such cairnlike houses line both sides of the pathway inside the Fort’s grounds.
On the way back to Ranthambhore Bagh - the setting desert sun hangs over the western sky as we return to the 21st century again.
Ranthambhore Fort
Continuing the posts on our trip to Ranthambhore Fort in the Ranthambhore Tiger Preserve, you can see one of the gates that the Rajputs used to hold fast against armies.
As you get closer to the main structure of the fort, after climbing up numerous stairs through three major gates, you finally begin to see the fortifications. This part of India was the first true barrier against the constantly invading hordes from the North and the East. Everyone from the Turks, the Persians, the Huns, the Mongols, even Timur the Lame and Alexander the Great attempted to knock on India’s doors in this region.
This is considered to be the oldest part of the fort, dating back to the 12th and 13th Centuries, AD. You can see the different methods of constructing the walls, they mark the development of construction over the centuries. Also the size of the stone blocks used increases as tools and development improved the people’s ability to measure and carry.
[View from the top of Ranthambhore Fort overlooking the Tiger Reserve, photo credit: David Tait]
Note the slates that are piled on top of each other to construct this portion of the fort.
The Road to Ranthambhore
As promised, I’m continuing the story of our visit to Ranthambhore as a guest blogger for Aditya Singh. On our first full day, after a leisurely brunch, we left for Ranthambhore Fort by Jeep accompanied by Bhupinder Singh Chauhan, acting as our guide and the young driver, who was a superb spotter with an eagle’s eyesight. The Killa or Fort lies in the heart of the Tiger Reserve and almost the first thing we saw - which, to be honest, I didn’t expect to see, was that hoary cliche of India. A couple of elephants being ridden as transport animals. Yes, Virginia, you really can see elephants on the roads of India. I can only imagine the traffic jams.
This is the Guptaganga, a perennial source of water that local myth claims has never run dry in historical memory. The actual stream of water has been channelled through a marble bull’s head, possibly Nandi himself, pouring lifegiving water from his mouth. You can see the Shivalinga just above the bull’s head. This site is considered very holy and is the official entrance to the Fort, whose walls can be seen high up above. We have already entered the Tiger Reserve and our spotter pointed out a variety of local fauna. A little further along, we heard a leopard scream and slowed down and stopped along road, waiting with bated breath for close to 20 minutes in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the great cat. But there was nary a sign and we continued on to the foothills of the Fort.
The parking area situated at the entrance steps to the Fort are swarming with gray langurs, whose eerie howls can be heard late at night, rustling their way through the trees of the forest. Closely associated with Hanuman, the monkey god whose army of monkeys helped Rama build a landbridge to Lanka, and helped defeat Ravana who had carried Sita away, these langurs are allowed to roam freely throughout the fort and the numerous temples there. This story is the basis of the epic Ramayana.
The Fort at Ranthambhore has a long and checkered history of war, pillage and fierce Rajput resistance against the invading armies sweeping into Northwest India from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and the Russian Steppes. One of the most famous associated with the Killa is that of Veer Hammir, or Rana Hamir, a Chauhan king descended from Prithviraj himself who held his homeland against the vast armies of Ala-ud-din Khilji. From Ranthambhore’s history,
The Fort had its golden moments during the reign of Rao Hammir, the last ruler of the Chauhan dynasty (1282 - 1301 AD). During 1300 AD, Ala-ud-din Khilji, the ruler of Delhi sent his army to capture the Fort. After three unsuccessful attempts, his army finally conquered the Fort in 1301 and ended the reign of the Chauhans. In the next three centuries the Fort changed hands a number of times, till Akbar, the great Mughal emperor, finally took over the Fort and dissolved the State of Ranthambore in 1558. The fort stayed in the possession of the Mughal rulers till the mid 18th century.
And so, forts were built on inaccessible mountain tops with steeply rising slopes, numerous walls, fortifications and gates creating obstacles to invaders. You can see a sentry tower located at the first turn up the steep stairs that rise towards the three main gates of the Fort. Also scattered around the country side were sentry towers such as the one that can be seen below by the edges of the Talao, where signal fires were used to send alerts to the main garrison within minutes according to our guide. He’s the one in the green uniform of The Ranthanbhore Bagh on the left hand side of the photograph above. Carrying precious supplies up the stairs is a local villager.
Heaven on Earth - The Ranthambhore Bagh
Photo credit - Brian McMorrow
Greetings, my name is Niti Bhan and I’ve been invited to write about my recent experience as a guest at The Ranthambhore Bagh, by Aditya Singh, the owner of the lodge just outside the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve in Sawai Madhopur, Rajasthan, India. I guess this is what they mean by guest blogging!
Dicky, as Aditya is better known to me, hosted us from the 6th to the 8th of December 2006 after I’d arrived in New Delhi from San Francisco to attend the recent CII NID Design with India Summit along with my colleague David Tait, Creative Director of Readymade, a product design and innovation consultancy based in Pretoria, South Africa. Let me attempt to recreate in words - this journey - a world away from the world in which I normally reside; one that took me back in time, forward in space and more profoundly, deeper inside to a very peaceful place.
We took the night train, the Mewar Express from Nizamuddin Station, tickets were arranged for us by Vikram Singh, who runs Wild World India, an ecologically aware wildlife tour company based in New Delhi. I spent much of my time standing at the open doorway outside our first class airconditioned compartment, preferring to smell, see and feel the desert; it was almost the full moon and late at night as the train rushed us through Faridabad, Mathura and Bharatpur getting us into Sawai Madhopur station just five hours later. Other than a blurry drive, the first thing that I recall on my arrival was a warm, already heated and cozy tent with quaint details such as a mosquito net and a luxurious pukka shower and bathroom. I couldn’t believe it was just a tent, from the inside it had all the mod cons and amenities you could wish for, including a long hot shower to get rid of the filth of the train journey.
[Outside view of Ranthambhore Bagh's premium lodging, the tents, photo credit - David Tait]
You can see David’s tent here, mine is the one on the left just hidden by the bushes. They’ve all been laid out to ensure a little bit of privacy for any guest who may choose to sit out on their personal porch and relax with a beer or two. Or three, but we won’t go there , since we were Dicky’s guests and he was the one who’d taught me how to hold my drink back when I was a freshman.
That night we had dinner outside sitting around a portable fire pit that kept us warm enough in the chilly night air of almost winter in North India. Temperatures have been known to go down to 10 celsius or lower. Since it was late, we had missed the daily evening highlight - a Rajasthani family of musicians arrive to entertain Aditya’s guests with haunting local ballads of lost or unrequited love, popular songs from old hindi movies or classical melodies based on stories from India’s mythological epics - The Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
Their young daughter danced most gracefully for us, encouraging the guests to join her when an upbeat tune was played. You get to snack on tidbits, drink the best the bar has to offer, and Dicky’s bar has been and is, legendary. Just sit back - we happened to be there on the night of the full moon - and lose yourself in a state of emotional euphoria bordering on pure lethargy.
After my long flight from California to India, the hectic rush of the conference, this timeless place after 9 months without a break from work, was nothing less than pure bliss. Or as I read recently, heaven on earth, for heaven is the place where you get all your needs fulfilled. Enough, I have to shake my head to return from those moments but that was when I knew I would return, for all the stress, the pressure, the tension, just seemed to melt away and I was left a boneless puddle.
The next day, we set out after a leisurely brunch to see Ranthambhore Fort or Killa as its known in the local language. Built in 944 AD by the descendants of one of India’s best known Rajput kings, Prithviraj Chauhan, whose story is worthy of any swashbuckling romance from the days of yore and chivalry. I’ll continue with a post on the Fort tomorrow with more photos and stories of the legendary bravery of Veer Hammir and the Rajputs of Ranthambhore.
Sundarbans III
The rest of the National geographic crew – Sue (the big boss), Becky and Andy (the cameraman) landed in Calcutta by midnight. On the 1st of April we went to get shots of a male tiger in the Calcutta zoo. This tiger had killed a girl in a village that was just on the outskirts of the forest. A few days after killing the girl he again landed in the village. But that time the Forest Department officials were prepared. They had set up a trap in the village and they did manage to trap the tiger. After they trapped the tiger, they realized that a few months ago this same tiger had been trapped, after he had killed a person, in a nearby village. They had at that time released him deep in the heart of Sundarbans. They decided not to do so again and sent him to the zoo, where he was lodged in a cage that was out of bounds for the general public. When we went to film him in the cage, he was extremely agitated and tried to charge at us a number of times. We would have been in serious trouble if there were no bars between us. Andy did get some great shots.
The rest of the day we drove around the streets of Calcutta taking random shots of the city. My old friend Sanjoy Ghosh (or “Chotu Bong” – a slang for Short Bengali) drove us around in his car. He was a big hit wit the entire team. In the evening when we were sitting in the hotel, we realized that there were not enough Bengali speakers in the team – in fact there was just one – and since most people in Sundarbans understand only Bengali language, we would have to take along some more people who cold speak Bengali. As a result, another friend of mine – Joydeep Kundu – got in the boat the next day. We also had a Doctor on board who was carrying every possible kind of anti-venom.
We left for Sundarbans the next morning and had a blast for the next 10 days. We were booked in a lodge in Sajnekhalli, where we would spend the nights. The film was essentially recreations of there different “tiger attacks” – one on a girl in a village, the other on a man who was part of a group of “honey collectors” and the third was a fisherman (the only one to survive the attack). Most of the filming happened very close to where we were staying but for some shots we had to go a fair distance on the boats. We had two boats – a “launch” and a smaller boat that is locally known as a “bhotbhoti” because the engine makes a racket that sounds like bhot ..bhot ..bhot. The bhotbhoti is a smaller boat and it can go in some pretty narrow creeks, where the launch cannot make it.
The weather in Sundarbans is very hot and extremely humid in April and so we used to shoot from just before sunrise to about 8 in the morning and then from about 3 in the afternoon till sunset. Joydeep and I used the time in between to do a lot of birding – a great way to spend time in Sundarbans. We saw very little terrestrial wildlife – some Spotted Deer and a few Wild Boars – but we did see a lot of marine wildlife, including Dolphins, Sharks, Sea Turtles, and a large variety of Crabs. The bird life was really amazing. Wherever we went shooting we had a large group of curious onlookers following us, like these kids on a cycle rickshaw (the dominant mode of transport in Sundarbans).
Sundarbans II
Sundarbans – the largest Project Tiger Reserve in India – is a tidal estuary where the only modes of travel are small to medium sized slow boats. It is truly a boat country. On the 25th of March, we went to the office of the Field Director of Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, which is in a small port town called Port Canning; about three hours drive from the outskirts of Calcutta. That was my first interaction ever with any Forest Department Officer of West Bengal cadre.
We met quiet a few forest officers who were in charge of Sundarbans and the feeling I got was that most of them were clueless and were living in a make believe world. For instance, one very senior officer gave us a long lecture on the “fact” that writers and filmmakers were defaming the tigers of Sundarbans by spreading “rumors” that a lot of them were potential man-eaters. When I asked him if this was not true then why do forest guards take such elaborate protection measures whenever they have to get off their boats to go to the shores, inside the park? When ever the guards have to do that they load their guns (with the safety catches off), wear “tiger proof” armored jackets and helmets, put a tall nylon safety net around the entire area that they have to work in etc etc. This officer informed us that these were “routine” safety measures that are adopted in every tiger reserve in India. That was not true. In all the tiger reserves in India, the forest guards almost never carry guns; forget the rest of the paraphernalia. He later showed us a lot of statistics to “prove” that very few people had been attacked by tiger in Sundarbans during the last 10 years. Apparently the forest department had stopped recording tiger attacks on humans for the last 10 years and so “there were hardly any attacks on humans,” officially for the last 10 years. With such officers around, the future of Sundarbans did not appear to be very bright.
On 26th March, we left for a familiarization trip into Sundarbans and during the next three days we met a number of people whose friends or family members had been mauled or killed by tigers. There are a number of villages in the periphery of Sundarbans that are called “Tiger Widow” villages, where tigers had killed a large proportion of the adult male population. Most of them were killed when they had illegally gone into the reserve area, for cutting wood or collecting other minor forest produce. Since what they were doing was illegal, their cronies never filed a complaint and so their deaths went unrecorded. By the time we got back from the trip, on the morning of 31st March, we had learnt a few things about Sundarbans:
1. There is no way that Sundarbans Tiger Reserve could boast a population of nearly 400 tigers (that they officially do). The figure should be closer to 125 or so. This is true for almost all the Tiger Reserves in India – where officially there are two and half times more tigers than the real number. Forest Officers love to exaggerate the numbers for a variety of reasons.
2. Sundarbans has loads of problems (again lie most other tiger reserves in India), that include wood cutting, population pressure, over fishing, “economic development” etc. The reserve is totally porous and it is almost impossible to patrol its periphery.
3. Tigers will survive in Sundarbans for a long time, just because a large part of it is extremely inhospitable to man.
We got back to our Hotel (Sonar Bangla – a fine place) on 31st and the air conditioning was a welcome relief after the hot and humid weather of Sundarbans.
Sundarbans I – The Hunter and the Hunted
When I was in Bharatpur, I got a call from a guy from Bangalore called Lesley, who wanted to know if I would be interested in working on a two week project on Tigers of Sundarbans, , with the National geographic Film and Television department. He was the India co-coordinator for this project and told me that if I was interested he would put me on the Producer in Washington. If I was interested??? This guy must have been crazy – Of course I was interested. It is not everyday that national geographic takes us out on an all expense paid trip to an exotic tiger habitat and pays us at the end of the day for our time (which most people like us have in plenty). So I told the guy that I “maybe interested.”
When I got back from Bharatpur I got a call from James Byrne from National Geographic, Washington. We discussed a lot of general things and he told me that the shoot starts from the 1st of March and would be over in two weeks. He also told me that he would be in Calcutta (the closest airport from Sundarbans on the 25th of March) and would then head to Sundarbans for a familiarization trip and would be glad if I could join him for the same. I reached Calcutta on the 24th night (a day before James was to reach) and met up with Lesley.
Over dinner, Lesley explained to me what the film was going to be all about. I knew a bit about it but not enough. The film was about man eating tigers of Sundarbans and was to cover three different stories – one about an attack on a girl child inside a village, another about an attack on a fisherman who was on his boat and the third about an attack inside the forest on a man who was part of a group of honey collectors. In all the three cases the tiger (different ones in each cases) had killed the people they had attacked but could not eat them, mainly because the other people around had managed to scare the tiger away.
Sundarbans – the world’s largest estuarine mangrove forest - is the largest habitat of Bengal tigers in the entire world. It gets its name from the “Sundari” mangrove tree, which is now a rarity in most parts of Sundarbans. It is situated in the southern tip of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Sundarbans is the delta of two of India’s mightiest rivers – the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. The entire place consists of a number of tiny islands and is cris-crossed by tributaries, distributaries, creeks and backwaters. The face of Sundarbans changes dramatically with the diurnal tides. Durinf the high tide about half the land is submerged and one can see floating forests” all around. While at low tide, large expanses of mud are visible all over. Sundarbans is home to large number of aquatic and terrestrial animals. As one goes closer to the sea, the salinity of the water increases and this has an important role to ply in the mix of the aquatic animals and plants that are to be seen.
The Indian part of the Sundarbans has been declared as National Park and is a Project Tiger Reserve. UNESCO has also declared the region as a “Biosphere Reserve.” The region is home to some of the poorest people in the world, who make their living out of farming, fishing, aquaculture and through the collection of minor forest produce (such as honey). It is one of the few regions in the world where there are no social tensions between the mix of Hindu and Muslim population that inhabit the area. In fact the muslim and hindu population share a large number of social, cultural and even religious traditions.
Bharatpur Birding
Bharatpur is small town (by Indian standards – which means a population of about 200,000 people) that is half way on the train route from Ranthambhore to Delhi. Bharatpur is home to one of the best bird sanctuaries in India – namely the Keola Deo Ghana National Park. I left for Bharatpur for a week in the first week of February.
Bharatpur has a number of small and big lodges but the only one that I stay in is The Birder’s Inn. The owner of The Birder’s Inn – Teerath Singh is a great friend of mine. Besides owning and running this lodge he also leads wildlife tours on a freelance basis. My guides (or Gurus – to be more precise) in Bharatpur are Laxmi Mudgal (who is by far the best birder in Bharatpur) and Rajeev (who owns and runs a drug store – that is when he not busy taking pictures in the bird sanctuary). If I go to Bharatpur and do not stay with Teerath, he would probably kill me. Birder’s Inn is a small 12-room lodge but a great place – good food, clean room and great company – and they sure know how to get you drunk on dark rum.
Situated at the confluence of the Gambhir and Banganga rivers in the Bharatpur district of Rajasthan, the sanctuary was originally a natural depression prone to seasonal flooding. Over a period of time it developed into a lush, thriving system of freshwater marshes that attracted a large and diverse population of migratory birds. The Maharajas of Bharatpur added some bunds (dykes) and developed it as a duck shooting reserve. You can see the list of their exploits inside the park. Later, when hunting was stopped, it was deemed a Bird Sanctuary and later a National Park.
The park is generically called Bharatpur, after the town but its official name is Keoladeo Ghana. “Ghana” means dense while Keoladeo is derived from the Shiva temple situated at the heart of the park. Shiva, in his form of Pashupati or Lord of the Animals is the protector of the park’s various species. The fascinating mix of wetlands, woodlands, woodland swamps and dry grasslands has blessed the park with a rich biologically diverse birdlife. Keoladeo and its surrounding area host over 400 bird species and a single day trip may yield 140 species.
Bharatpur is paradise for outdoor photographers, particularly when there is no water shortage in the Park. Most of the water for the Park in Bharatpur comes from the Pachana dam on the non-perennial river Gambhir. However, for the last few years some local politicians have been ensuring that this water is diverted for a small group of rich farmers, who grow mustard in their field around the dam. Diverting this water makes a small group of rich farmers (who are politically very vocal) richer. However, there are many small and marginal farmers (who are not so politically influential) who make a living growing vegetables on the river bed of Gambhir, whose economy take a big hit when the water from Pachana dam is not released for Bharatpur. The once thriving tourism industry of Bharatpur (that employs over 20,000 people – directly and indirectly) also takes a huge hit, whenever the water from Pachana dam is not released for Bharatpur.
Pratapgarh III
Both Dharmendra and Amit have done their Ph.D. in Botany from Jaipur University, so they were very interested in the flora of southern Rajasthan (that’s where Pratapgarh is). I am not very good with my flora, at least compared to the two of them, so it was a great learning experience for me. I do know most of the common species of Central Aravalis (where Ranthambore national park lies) but Pratapgarh was a slightly different ball game. We saw a lot of interesting plants and my best one was the Caparice zylenica, whose flowers turn from white in the mornings to crimson by the evenings. We also came across four different species of snakes – a Rock Python, a Banded Racer (reported for the first time from that area), a Bronze back tree snake and a Saw Scaled viper (one of Rajasthan’ s most poisonous and common snake). We also came across an old road kill (on the way to the Pratapgarh town, where we had to go to get supplies) of a green coloured Keelback snake. We did not come across many large animals, except a few jackals, wild boars, langur monkeys, Nilgai or the Indian Antelope and quite a few Striped hyenas (that were often mis reported by the villagers as a leopard). The hyenas were totally nocturnal and it was easy to mistake them for a leopard in the nights. Did not see many interesting birds, except for a few nesting Sarus cranes (India’s largest birds) on the drive from Bundi to Chittor (no where near Pratapgarh).
On one of our walk in a kho in Pratapgarh - Dharmendra (yellow head band), Amit (white jacket) and the Assistant Conservator of Forests.
A typical day used to start with getting up at sunrise and heading soon after to the dang in the jeep that Mr Fateh Singh Rathore had kindly leant to us. We would do a quick run over all the tracks to see if we found any pugmarks. After a few hours we would try to find some forest guards to get news about the “cage traps”. All we heard that no leopard had been trapped. The Forest Officers had promised us that we would be informed immediately if they did manage to trap a leopard, so if we did not hear from them by late mornings, we knew that no leopard had been trapped. They did trap a man once – a drunk guy who decided to steal the goat that was used as a bait. He got trapped and had to spend the night in the trap. By 11 in the morning we would get back to our small camp for a meal, that Ram Singh would cook. By noon we would again be on top of the dang, exploring some area that we had not previously explored. We would take the jeep as close to the place ass possible and then start off on foot. By the evening we would be back for dinner. We would again head out in the jeep around 9 in the night, with a powerful night light. We spotted a fair amount of hyenas on such drives but never a leopard.
Sometimes we would have the forests tranquilizing expert with us, though most of the time we were on our own. The tranquilizing expert was a nice Sardarji (Sikh person) from the Udaipur zoo. He told us that he stood no chance of getting any leopard with his dart gun, because the range of the gun was very poor. Besides, even if he did manage to hit the leopard with the dart, the drug would take about 10 minutes to take effect and by then the leopard would be away and hiding. The drug lasts for about 10-15 minutes and after that the leopard would be conscious once again. The point that he made to us (loud and clear) was that if did manage to dart the leopard and even if we knew that the leopard had taken off and hidden in a kho, who would go after him to check if he was conscious or not. He sat on a tree in Pratapgarh all night with a bait tied close by, hoping that the leopard would take the bait. But that never happened. Every third day we went to the Pratapgarh town to get petrol for the jeep and to replenish our supplies. That was time for me to get a few beers. Amit and Dharmendra do not drink any alcohol at all. We spent about 10 days like this. On the 11th day the leopard struck again.
The Bronze backed tree snake. It does not look so big in the picture below.
One evening we reached the Forest camp and a few guards came running towards us. They told us that they had just got a message (about half an hour ago) that a girl had been killed on the other side of the dang. The forest officials and the police department had already left for the area. We drove like mad men but it still took us about half an hour to get to the spot. By then it was getting dark. By the time we reached the spot there were more than a hundred people there looking for the leopard. We learnt that the girl had gone collecting gum with her mother. Around 5 in the evening her mother heard a scream a few meters away and she saw that a leopard had got her daughter by the throat. She ran after the leopard who initially tried to run with the dead girl but later on abandoned her and disappeared. By that time a few more people from the closest village (the dead girls village) ran to the spot. The girl was dead and the villagers took her body to her village and then informed the police and the forest department.
When we reached there we found that there were a few search parties that were spread out all over the area looking for the leopards. The first thing we did was got in touch with the District Forest Officer on the wireless (he was part of one search team) and asked him to call back all the search teams. We reasoned that the leopard would normally come back to the kill spot after all the human disturbance was over. We then asked the Forest officers to get a cage-trap and set it up close to the kill spot. That was easier said than done. The cages were very heavy and the terrain was not helping much. The guards managed to get the cage close to the spot. We got a goat and killed it at the kill spot and then dragged the dead goat to an opening near the cage. We got the girls clothes and put them on top of the dead goat. We then asked a police shooter to sit inside the cage, locked the cage and hoped that the shooter would be able to kill the leopard if it showed up. The leopard had been declared a man eater and there were orders out to kill it “after ensuring that it was the man eater.” After “setting up” the kill we left the area and waited about 2 kilometers away from there. Te shooter was told to wait for about 4-5 hours and if nothing showed up till then, he should send us a message on the wireless. At midnight we heard from the shooter that he wanted to come back. Some guards went and got him out of the cage. We then took the dead goat and put it inside the cage and covered it with the girls clothes and set the trap door up.
When we came back the next day we found a lot of leopard hair just under the trap door, that had fallen shut. The leopard did come back and even tried to enter the cage but the trap had fallen prematurely. After that the leopard had tried to eat as much of the goat as he could through the bars. So close and the trap did not work. The gate must have fallen on the leopard who managed to sneak out from under the trap door.
Rebari - goat herders of Rajasthan - in Pratapgarh
I had to leave the next day (back for Ranthambore) because I run a tourist lodge for a living and it was our most busy season then. End of our leopard hunt– at least mine as I had to get back to making a living. A few days later, Dharmendra called me up and told me that their first leopard – the old limping male was trapped. The forest officials with some input from Dharmendra decided to use a dead goat as a bait instead of a live one. And on the first day they tried it and they trapped the leopard (and took it to the Udaipur zoo). A few days later another leopard was trapped, a few kilometers off, in the neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh. This was the work of the Madhya Pradesh forest department. That was the end of the man eating leopards of Pratapgarh. We still do not know which one was the killer – maybe both of them were.
Pratapgarh Part II
The abandoned hut that we were living in was at the base of the Central Hillock, around which most of the kill had taken place. It was not really a hillock, it was more of a low plateau (called dang in Rajasthan). These dangs rise abruptly from flat ground and have sandstone ridges running almost continuously along their edges. At places, small and short-lived streams have eroded deep, long and narrow gorges that are locally known as Khoh. Such a terrain is very typical of the Aravalis hill ranges. This dang was a fantastic place. There was one barely motorable track, with very few side tracks, running across its and the two ends of this track was the only way one could take a 4 wheel drive up the dang. There was a small and old temple of Lord Shiva (picture below), that attracted a few visitors every day and this temple was one of the few places that had water on top.
Our first task was to drive along the main track and all its sidetracks with a GPS. That gave us a great orientation to the whole place. The forest department had planted two “cage traps” on top of the dang near the beginning of two different khos. The “cage traps” are 8 feet by 3 feet (or so) cages made of steel bars (see the picture below). One of the two entry gates (at either end of the cage) would slide up and be help in place by a small trigger, so that the cage would be open. The base of the cage was a steel plate that was spring loaded so that if any medium weight animal went inside the cage the base plate would release the trigger holding the gate up and the gate would slide down, trapping the animal. A bait, usually a goat, would be tied inside the cage. These traps were heavy contraptions that took a lot of effort to set up.
The forest guards and officers told us that leopard used to walk right along the traps but would not enter even though they knew that there was a goat inside the trap. We soon saw pugmarks of a leopard, we believed it was a male, all around one of the traps. He had climbed up from the kho and walked right along the gate of the trap towards the temple. We took plaster casts of his pugmarks for record. All the forest officials in India believe that different individual leopards (and tigers) can be identified by their pugmarks. Sounds good but it does not work at all, unless the cat has an obvious deformity. Well this cat did have one. The pugmarks were large and we thought that it was a male. On the ground there were slight signs of the right rear foot being dragged. It was very minor but it was there. Later on the District Forest Officer and his assistant told us that even they had noticed this slight drag on two different occasions. We were convinced that this was a large and old male leopard, who had a slight injury in one of his foot and was limping a bit. We also came across at least two different set of pugmarks that were much smaller than the pugmarks of this limping male leopard. Some local people told us that two years ago they had often seen a female leopard with two nearly full-grown cubs. We were sure that there were at least three different leopards, if not four.
Taking plaster cast of the pugmarks of a leopard. Dharmendra is in the centre, Amit on the left and Ram Singh on the right.
For the first few days we did come across pugmarks regularly but that was it. We kept ourselves very busy – exploring the local flora and whatever wildlife we came across (most of it was micro fauna).
Pugmarks of the old limping male leopard.