Aditya ‘Dicky’ Singh

Here is an article that I wrote for the Sanctuary magazine:

A few weeks ago, I received a scathing response from a ‘tiger activist’ friend to an article I had posted online about the conservation value of tourism. After blasting my views, he finally stated that what tigers really need is “isolation from the forest department, researchers, scientists, locals, tribals, conservationists, hoteliers and tourists.” While it sounds like the perfect solution to all our problems, we do not live a perfect world. It would be ideal if our biodiversity would be protected for its intrinsic natural value rather than economic benefits but years of petitions and campaigns have still not translated into concrete results, and much of the public is still distanced from conservation. It is high time we consider a broader triple bottom line – market, environment and society. The reality is that tourism is here to stay, whether we like it or not. But the positive aspect of tourism is that it can be made into a winning formula, if we really want it to be, and use it for the advantage of wildlife.

Green bucks
There are few pristine wilderness habitats left in India and the majority of them are surrounded by human habitation. Ranthambhore – a prime tiger reserve – has been described as “an ecological island surrounded by overgrazed pastures and agricultural fields” in the Management Plan of the reserve. Nearly 100 villages surround Ranthambhore National Park and these villagers depend on the park’s resources for their livelihood – fodder for cattle, fuel-wood for their kitchens and minor forest produce for sale. The farmers who own land around the reserve use every possible means to keep wildlife off their fields, including hiring poachers to kill them. The only pro-biodiversity economic activity around Ranthambhore (and most of the Protected Areas in India) is tourism.
Traditionally, the forest department and most conservationists “have seen tourism as a necessary evil with zero conservation value.” Many forest officers and old school conservationists have accused me of the ultimate wildlife crime — of “making money from wildlife.” My answer always remains that I do not make money out of wildlife, — poachers do that. Yes, I make a living but my work supports and sustains the park, its wildlife conservancies, buffer zones and local communities.
Tourism is the only economic activity that values wildlife habitats as ‘economic zones’ and is the only ‘industry’ that pays for biodiverse, standing forests. Tourism is also a very effective anti-poaching unit in many Protected Areas in India, possibly the most effective given the poor track record of patrolling. Consider how few patrolling vehicles we have in most tiger reserves and compare this to the large number of tourist vehicles plying through the tourism zone. Little wonder the tourism zones seem to harbour the highest tiger densities. Dr. Raghu Chundawhat, an imminent tiger scientist, has stated on record that the Tala zone of the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh held a greater density of wild tigers (by far the highest in the world) than he had ever believed possible in such a small area. Of course, the Tala range also happens to support one of the highest tourist densities out of all our tiger reserves.

Tourism, to a large extent, was responsible for the revitalisation of African wildlife. In a developing country like South Africa, wilderness tourism generates US$12 per acre per annum, while agricultural land yields just US$3 per acre. Furthermore its national parks are virtually financed by tourism revenues. Mountain gorillas ‘earn’ $200,000 per annum in permit fees alone Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, and the indirect revenue is probably 30 times greater. Living Kenyan elephants will help bring in $1,000,000 in tourism revenue in their lifetimes, while a local poacher will earn less than $300 for the value of elephant ivory.
Let’s move to tigers. What is a tiger worth? The tourism zone of the Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve, which has around 20 tigers, contributes over Rs. one billion – directly and indirectly – to the Indian economy, every year. Of course we have a problem here. Over 40 per cent of this amount never reaches anyone in Ranthambhore and barely three per cent actually goes to the park.
A different kind of wildlife tourism
Sanctuary readers hardly need to be informed that “traditional” wildlife conservation practices in India have failed. This is primarily due to the ‘one size fits all’ approach” of wildlife tourism in our country. Travel Operators for Tigers (TOFT) – a campaign for responsible use of wild habitats in India sums this up well: “There is a growing recognition that tourism presently available within tiger reserves is often of poor quality in terms of facilities, interpretation and guidance, is ‘one species’ (read tiger) centric, often at loggerheads with park, community and tourism officials and offers little support for local communities.”
We – tourism professionals, including myself – are largely responsible for the mess in which wildlife tourism finds itself in India, but it hardly helps that government’s policies too run counter to what effective and sustainable wildlife tourism needs. Considerable blame must also be apportioned to the unfulfilled promises of major tourism ‘players’ including corporates, travel outfits and hotel chains. Most have adopted a “green” language because that is what travelers now want. But value tourism has not been internalised by them. Wildlife tourism must be built on the premise that it should empower locals, increase awareness and contribute to wildlife conservation.

Ranthambhore is an excellent example of what is wrong with wildlife tourism in India. Spread across nearly 300 sq. km. (50 per cent of which is a tourism zone, which supports most of the park’s tigers), Ranthambhore is encircled by almost 100 villages and three small towns. Yet only five villages and two towns have somehow cornered 90 per cent of all the tourism revenue from this destination. A small ‘cartel’ of hotels, local travel agents, suppliers, shop owners and transporters are earning money, the rest get nothing. Why should they support the park?
Yes, tourism provides some employment to locals, these are ridiculously low-paying jobs. There is more. Of the over 100 guides, 80 per cent have little wildlife knowledge or real training. The hotels are all located along on a short strip between Sawai Madhopur town and the sole entry point to the park, thus concentrating tourism benefits to a tiny fragment of the population.
Alternative tourist options such as hiking, birding and camping are discouraged even outside the park. The entry fees to the park are so low as to constitute a mere five per cent of the budget of most tourists. Meanwhile, the national park is woefully short of funds. To add insult to injury, as of now not a rupee from the entry fees goes towards conserving the park, though technically 75 per cent of these fees are labeled ‘eco development surcharge’.
The list of contradictions and problems is endless and could possibly be applied to almost any Protected Areas (PAs) in India. This is why “a dead tiger is worth more to the local villager than a live one.”
The way forward
Julian Mathews founder of the TOFT campaign, suggests that wildlife tourism in India needs to “provide a much more rewarding holiday experience for visitors, raise the quality of life of local communities, and protect the natural environment.”
So how do we achieve this? To make wildlife tourism an effective conservation tool in India we – conservationists, the government and tourism professionals – must change our own archaic thought processes regarding both tourism and conservation. There are no magical solutions but there are a few things that we can do. Almost all PAs have core zones, which are out of bound for tourists and a buffer area where tourism is permitted. The density of wildlife is much higher in the tourism zone and the core area is rarely monitored. Predictably, most wildlife offences including poaching, cattle grazing and woodcutting take place in the core zone, where offenders have a free run. In Ranthambhore, the poaching incidents that took place between 2003 and 2005 only came to light because poachers started targeting tigers in the tourism zone, after they had wiped out tigers from the inaccessible core. Field biologists and forest officers need to work together to come up with a plan that suggests how tourism in core areas can be turned into a monitoring exercise for a few days each month. The revenue generated could pay for 24×7 patrolling, 365 days a year. This does not mean that the core zone be turned into a ‘free for all’ because wild animals do need the solitude that is often denied when noisy vehicles and tourists enter. But surely it is time now for us to work out sensible ‘tourist carrying capacities’ for park? And no, the current carrying capacity analysis is not going to cut it. Often this constitutes a simplistic formula park managers come up with to arrive at figures stipulated by ‘higher ups’. So we accept 90 vehicles a day as the suggested carrying capacity of the Tala range in Bandhavgarh, while this actually exceeds the carrying capacity of the entire Ranthambhore tourism zone, which is three times the size of the Tala range.
We need to get real about wildlife tourism. Visitors are able and willing to pay much more. In some parks, the fee is even lower than the price of bottled water in a mid-range hotel. And there is nothing wrong with charging special-interest tourists including photographers and birdwatchers more for the privilege of longer, (carefully) supervised excursions and permissions to use hides, or guard outposts.
We should explore the idea of developing a tourism buffer within the forest buffer area. In most parks, for instance, agricultural fields begin right where the forest ends, leading to human-wildlife conflict. If hotels in wildlife areas were only permitted to set up facilities in harmony with the land on just two per cent of their land holdings, they could be persuaded to manage the rest of their land holding with the same strict rules that are implemented within the national park. If this were done, within a few short years, we would have a high biodiversity tourism buffer on the periphery of most parks. This would not only add to the forest area but reduce the tourist pressures at today’s over-crowded entry points. And, of course, ‘tourist cash’ would automatically reach locals.
So will we see a situation where degraded wildlife habitats next to PAs are leased out to tourism facilities, rather than to paper mills around Tadoba? Or land ‘developers’ and industrialists around Kanha, Bandhavgarh, Periyar, Bandipur and Keoladeo? I hope so, because if this is not done, I believe the noose around the PA network can only tighten, till it throttles the biodiversity that brings in the tourists.
The forest department controls over one-fifth of India’s total land area and the vast majority of these lands are going from bad to worse. The department lacks the resources to revive and nurture them. Leasing them out on very strict terms for wildlife tourism might just be the most effective, least risky way to revive these degraded forests. In the process, according to Sanctuary, local communities and the forest department itself could legitimately earn a sizeable amount from the carbon trading regimes that are currently not able to do much to actually help counter climate change.
The bottom line? Forest and Tourism Departments, the tourism industry itself and local communities need to recognise the benefits of working together on systems and solutions that restore health to our wildernesses. The economic and the ecological health of our nation will improve, poaching will come down and the more popular parks, which are hotbeds of local conflict, could see a wonderful transformation with locals community leaders and tourism professionals taking on the role of ‘wildlife activists’ in India.

The gentleman who is busy photographing the tiger from the ground (which is strictly forbidden in Indian Tiger Reserves), in the above picture, was the Deputy Director of the Kanha Tiger Reserve in Central India. So much for responsible behaviour.

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If you had visited Ranthambhore in 2006 for a few days you, chances are you would have seen the Guda tigress with her two male cubs. This highly visible family had delighted a large number of tourists with their easy sightings. One of these two males, now fully grown, called Yuvraj, was killed by poachers a month or so ago. He was killed near a place called Lakheri, which is about 30 kilometers from the edge of the Ranthambhore National park, by a group of 7 “mogiya” tribal poachers. The Forest Department arrested one of these 7 poachers about 10 days ago and they made this news public yesterday. This man –goes by two names (as many Mogiyas do) - Ramswaroop Mogiya or Sanwarmal Mogiya. He is a resident of a small village near Lakheri, where many Mogiyas stay. And believe me, the Mogiyas of Lakeri area are no friends of wildlife.

Yuvraj’s brother, who is known in Ranthambhore as the “Collared male” because of the radio collar that has been fitted on his neck by the Forest Department. He was the only tiger in Ranthambhore to be radio-collared till a few days ago, when two more were radio collared.

These two male cubs were born during the monsoon months of 2004, in an area called Guda at the southern edge of Ranthambhore national park. Guda lies at the heart of the territory of their mother, who is known as the Guda tigress. When these cubs were small they were very shy, as most cubs are. We only got to see them during the onset of summers of 2005. Before that there sightings were rare. When they were about a year old they got used to vehicles and their sightings became very frequent. In fact between summers of 2005 to the end of winters in 2006 (when the two cubs finally separated from their mother), we started calling Guda a zoo because it was so easy to find this family.

There was a TV crew staying with us in June 2005. They had come to shoot tigers for NBS, which is one of Japan’s largest TV channels. Salim (Ranthambhore’s best guide) and I were assisting this crew. All through June we had some great times with this family. We saw them interacting as a family, playing in water, play fighting with each other and even making a kill.

At that time there was a male tiger called “Jhumroo” (see picture above) who took over as the dominant male of an area called Lahpur, that lies close to Guda. Jhumroo was not the father of these cubs and so posed a serious threat to the two cubs. However, their mother was older than Jhumroo and always managed to keep Jhumroo from encroaching into her territory. We once found the Guda tigress and her two cubs sitting in a waterhole at a place called Nagdi. After a few minutes the two cubs just got up without a warning and ran away from us, while the mother started snarling at us. Soon she got up from the water and charged in our direction (see picture below).

She went right past our jeep and straight into the bushes behind our jeep. We heard another tiger in these bushes and almost immediately there was fight (that we could hear but not see). A few minutes later the mother came out of the bushes and walked rapidly to where the cubs were hiding. And just a few minutes after that we saw Jhumroo coming out and walking back towards Guda, with a slight limp and a big dent to his ego (see picture below).

By the end of winter of 2006 the two cubs had separated from their mother. Initially they stayed together in an area called Phoota Kot for a few weeks. I once saw Yuvraj and his brother (see picture below) trying to hunt Sambar deer together, without much success. This was a difficult time for the two brothers because they had not mature as hunters and the other dominant males of the area, mainly Jhumroo and a male that we call the X male, would not let them establish their territories easily. Soon Yuvraj drifted out of the national park to the Man Singh Sanctuary, while his brother established his territory in the Soleshewar – Dumduma – Sultanpur area, where he is still seen often. To be fair to the officers of Ranthambhore national park, they did keep excellent track of Yuvraj. In fact they had a team of trackers constantly following his trail. After spending a few months in Man Singh Sanctuary, where he was reasonably well protected, he once strayed right out to Ramgarh Sanctuary in Bundi district. He was in dangerous territory now because there is very little protection in Bundi and the place is full of poachers. On that occasion the Forest officials of Ranthambhore managed to somehow get him back to Man Singh Sanctuary. Don’t ask me how they did this but they did manage it after a lot of effort.

In the end of October 2007 he once again drifted back from Man Singh anctuary and never returned. We heard that he had killed a cow near Lakheri. Some trackers from the Forest Department were rushed to the place where he had killed the cow but they could not locate him. After that there was no news of Yuvraj, despite the fact that a whole load of forest guards, volunteers etc were looking for him. About 10 days ago a Mogiya was caught by the Forest Department acting on a tip off and he confessed that he was part of the 8 persons who killed Yuvraj.

What hurts me the most is that the Guda tigress managed to save her cubs from the poachers when tiger poaching in Ranthambhore was at its peak. This male survived the worst time that Ranthambhore had seen in the last decade or so but was poached when tiger poaching in Ranthambhore is under control.

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In the end of September 2007 Doctor Dharmendra Khandal - the Field Biologist of Tiger Watch - went on a tour of the Thar desert in Rajasthan with a few of his friends. I could not join them because that is the time we have to start getting out Lodge in Ranthambore - The Ranthambhore Bagh- ready for the tourist season, that starts on the 1st of October.

The most interesting find was this little Persian or Sindh Dwarf Sand Gecko that they found in the Barmer district of Western Rajasthan. This is the first time that this gecko has been reported from anywhere in India. Keep it up Dharmendra.

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On the 1st of October 2007 the Ranthambhore national park re opened after three months. All the Project Tiger Reserves are shut during the monsoons and likewise Ranthambhore closes on the 1st of July every year. These three monsoons months are “tough” ones for the managers of the park because this is when illegal cattle grazers storm the park with their cattle and literally camp inside the park. This year, however, like the last year, the Park management managed to keep the grazers out of the national park. There were some instances of grazing but compared to what used to go on a few years ago, such instances were insignificant. Hats off to Mr. R. S. Shekhawat and his team.

I was busy trying to set up our Lodge for the new season and did not get a chance to go to the park till the 7th of October. Between the 7th and the 12th of October, I managed to go for every safari (and there are two in a day) and boy did I have a good time.

Water availability: Ranthambhore had some great rains in the last few months and all the water holes inside the park are full to the brim. I have not seen the water in the lakes rise to this level since 2001. The park is lush green and the undergrowth nice and thick. The ungulates have had a good time for the last few months and it shows very obviously.

Tiger sightings: Till a few days before the park reopened we believed that October would not have many great tiger sightings. Mainly because we thought that since there is water everywhere in the park, the ungulates would be spread out all over the park and so would the predators. We also believed that the thick undergrowth would make tiger sightings even tougher. But this was not to be. I personally saw 10 different tigers – two families of a 4 tigers each (one in Kachida and the other in the area of the lakes) and two males.

Cubs: the forest officials have told us that at least two tigresses have small cubs (below three months of age) – one in Guda and the other in Berda. Ranthambhore is rocking again – after a span of 5 years. I just hope that the good times are here to stay for some time.

All these pictures have been taken between the 7th and 12th of October 2007.

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What’s the toughest question to answer in Ranthambhore? You guessed it right. It is - How many tigers are there in Ranthambhore?

Tigers by their very nature are elusive and are not the easiest animals to find. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to get their exact numbers in any wild area, specially in large and dense forested areas. Ranthambore is neither large nor dense. The Ranthambhore tiger reserve is nearly 1400 square kilometers in area but of these 1400 square kilometers, only a small part (of slightly under 300 square kilometers - the part known as Ranthambore national park) has tigers. The rest of the Ranthambhore tiger reserve is not a good enough habitat for tigers, where the odd tiger may stray in occasionally for a short duration of time. This part has too much of human disturbance (mainly cultivators and cattle herders – the number one enemies of wildlife in India) and not enough prey base.

So how tough is it to estimate the number of tigers in a place like Ranthambhore? I would say that it is not easy but at the same time Ranthambhore (because it is a dry deciduous forest) is the easiest place, amongst all the Indian tiger reserves, in which to conduct a tiger census. A tiger census is always an estimation with some margin of error. If you get together a small group of people who know the terrain of Ranthambhore and are willing to work hard (and none of them have to be tiger experts) to conduct a tiger census in Ranthambhore, the margin of error should be between 5 to 10 percent.

Since the time Project tiger was launched in 1973 the different tiger reserves in India used the

Recently the Project Tiger funded an extensive census of tigers in all the tiger reserves in India and the results were scary – between 1200 and 1500 tigers in all of Indian wilderness. It was carried out by Wildlife Institute of India using lots of camera traps – the only proper way to do a tiger census.

What do they have to say about how many tigers are there in Ranthambhore? 31 including all the cubs. Before I read this data I thought there were 32 including cubs. I could be wrong.

This nationwide census finally put to end the big stupid debate that was going on about tiger numbers in India with people like us claiming no more than 1000 to 200o and the government claiming 3000 to 4000. And it woke the nation up. The Prime Minister is now acting tough and we have a lot of hopes from him. he is a great man who can really act when required.

I am posting some interesting pictures that came out from the camera traps used in this census in Ranthambhore none of which are mine and don’t ask me how I got them. Some people may get sacked if I answered that. These pictures have been taken with Indian tax payers money and since I am one of those I have a right to post them.

Male for sure.

There are a series of pictures of this guy and he is not supposed to be here. After a few pictures he started waving to the camera.

They are not supposed to be there either

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“Machali” in Hindi means fish but for regular visitors to Ranthambhore Machali is the resident tigress of the area around the Ranthambhore fort. This area is one of the most scenic parts of Ranthambhore, where three of the six lakes of Ranthambhore are located. Machali is by far the most famous tigress of Ranthambhore and one of the most photographed tiger in the entire world. She has starred in a number of documentaries – the best known of which is “Danger in tiger’s paradise” by the BBC Wildlife Division. I had the good fortune of being part of the crew that made this documentary.

Machali was actually the name of her mother, who died about four years ago, but in the BBC documentary, she was mistakenly called Machali and the name stuck on. Her mother was known as Machali because she had a mark on her right cheek that looked like the outline of a fish. The most famous mark that our Machali has is a fork like mark on her left cheek.

Machali territory lies at the very heart of Ranthambhore around the Ranthambhore fort. This area has a mix of different kinds of habitats, ranging from wetlands to valleys to plateaus and also has the highest concentration of prey species. Machali’s territory also has some of the highest human pressure, not just of tourists who come to see the wildlife but also of the large number of pilgrims who walk up to the fort to visit the Ganesh temple. Once in a year, for a period of three days over 500,000 people visit this temple. As a result Machali is very tolerant of humans. I have personally seen her sitting on a rock face for over an hour, watching a stream of pilgrims walking past her, barely 50 meters away.

She was born during the monsoon months of 1997 (between July and September) and was the dominant cub in the litter of three females. I had first seen her in February of 1998 and have been keeping a track of her ever since. By the beginning of 1999 she had started hunting on her own, the first sign that she was about to separate from her mother. Around then her mother ceded a par of her territory for Machali and that is where she has stayed since.

Below: Jhumru and Machali.

During the summer month of 2000 (somewhere in April) she mated with a large male tiger called “Bamboo Ram” and three and a half months later she gave birth to her first litter of two male cubs called Broken tail (because his tail was broken) and Slant ear (named so for no apparent reason). By the end of December 2001 both these cubs separated from Machali and we never saw Slant ear again. For about a year and a half Broken tail lived in a small territory at the edge of Ranthambhore national park, not really great neighborhood for tigers. Somewhere in the summers of 2003 Broken tail decided to leave Ranthambhore and in August 2003 a passenger train ran him down, in Darra sanctuary, about a 100 miles away from Ranthambhore.

Above: Broken tail just after he was run down by a train

Soon after Broken tail and Slant ear separated from Machali, she mated again with another male tiger called Nick ear. Bamboo Ram had died of old age when Broken tail and Slant ear were still with Machli and Nick ear had taken over his territory. By April 2002, Machali had given birth to her second litter. When I first saw these cubs, on 30th of June (the day before Ranthambhore closed for the monsoons) in the Nalghati valley, there were three cubs. She was carrying one in her mouth and the other two were following her. However, one of these cubs did not survive and when the Ranthambhore reopened for visitors in October there were only two cubs – a male called Jhumru and a female called Jhumri. By the end of 2004 Machali started mating again, this time with another large male tiger known as X male (so called because we do not know much about him). Around this time Ranthambore was under siege by tiger poachers and Nick ear had disappeared. Soon after her mating with X male she almost threw out Jhumru and Jhumree from her area. Jhumru set up his territory in an area called Lahpur. He could do this because the dominant male tigers of Lahpur (there were two of them) had been killed by poachers and the area was devoid of male tigers. We did not see Jhumree after she separated from Machali and we still do not know of her whereabouts.

Above: Jhumru and loads of tiger watchers

Since Machali’s area included three of the six lakes of Ranthambhore, she had a lot of interactions with crocodiles. Interactions in which crocodiles almost always ended up dead. She passed on this skill to Jhumru and we know of at least one instance when he killed and even ate a crocodile. We have never come across any evidence to suggest that Jhumree also killed crocodiles. However, all these scraps with crocodiles did take their toll on Machali and by the summers of 2005 she had lost two of her canines (the upper and lower canines on the left side).

Above: Bahadur

Around March 2005 Machali gave birth to her third litter of two cubs - a male called Bahadur (which means Brave in Hindi) and a female called Sharmelee (which means Shy in Hindi). These two cubs stayed with her till October 2006. When these cubs were young, all of us were scared that she may not be able to successfully rear them because she had lost two of her four canines. At that time we were pretty sure that this would be Machali’s last litter. She, however, surprised us all by giving birth to a fourth litter during the monsoon months of 2006. Unlike the previous three litters this time she has three cubs. These cubs are barely five months old right now and judging by the way they have been growing, they obviously have a great mother to take care of them. Machali, after all, is no ordinary tiger.

Above and Below: Machalis latest litter. Picture taken on 17th January 2007

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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.

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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.

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In the first week of December we left for Pratapgarh, in the Chittor district of Southern Rajasthan. This area has some highly degraded teak forests – most of which have been cut down by the local villagers. These forests hardly have any wildlife left but a few leopards do live in the area. We went there for these leopards. Pratapgarh witnessed a number of attacks by leopards in the year 2004. By December 2004 leopards had killed 7 people – most of them children below the age of 12 years or so. The local officials tried to trap these leopards but were not successful. After the fourth person was killed it became a local political issue and a lot of people in Pratapgarh were demanding that the “man-eating” leopards be shot dead. The Chief Wildlife warden of the Rajasthan state (who is the officer in-charge of all the wildlife in the state) issued orders that the “man eating leopard be shot dead but this should be done only after ensuring that the leopard that is targeted is the man-eater.” This was easier said then done.

The Rajasthan Forest Department invited Tiger Watch to Pratapgarh to help track the man-eating leopard. Four of us – Dr. Dharmendra Khandal (the Field Biologist of Tiger watch), Dr. Amit Kotia (a botanist from Jaipur), Ram Singh (Dharmendra’s field assistant) and I - left for Pratapgarh, as team from Tiger Watch. Though none of us had any experience with man-eaters but all of us had spent a fair amount of time in leopard and tiger country. The forest officers were under a lot of political pressure to put an end to this menace. This was a big issue in Pratapgarh and every time someone was killed the law and order situation used to turn nasty.

In Pratapgarh, about 30 Forest Department officials were camping in a school building near the area where most of the killings had taken place. Since we reached Pratapgarh in the night we camped in the same school building for the first night. The next day we realized that this building was actually an hours drive from the place where the last incident had taken place. We thought that this was too far so we shifted to an abandoned hut about a hundred meters from the place where the last kid was killed. We collected all the information that we could get from the forest officials who were working on this project (it was called Operation Leopard) for over 6 months. We realized that except for three people (the first three to die) all the others were killed within a radius of 4 kilometers from a central hillock. The first three who were killed died in an area that was about 20 kilometers away. Most of the kids who were killed were killed when they had entered the forested area to collect the sap (gum) from a tree known as Anogeissus latifolia (locally known as Sadar) and that all these attacks happened when the kids were sitting below the tree and taking the gum out. Most of these kills happened between 1600 and 1800 hours when the kids are finishing for the day. We also realized that there was very little wild prey for the leopards in the area and they mostly must be hunting domestic cattle, goats and stray dogs.

The Sadar tree is a short, bushy tree and the gum that is secreted is done at the lowest 2 feet of the main trunk. To collect the gum one has to crouch down (to get below the low branches) and get to the main trunk of the tree. That’s why kids with their small built frames are best suited for collecting the gum. However, when they crouch down to collect the gum they look like prey to the leopard and this is when all the attacks happened. The gum sells for nearly Rupees 200 a kilogram (about 4-5 US dollars), which is a princely sum in rural Pratapgarh. The forest officials were trying their best to discourage the kids from going inside the forest area but the lure of money was too strong for the locals.

In their quest to trap or kill the man-eater the forest department was facing a large number of problems. The terrain was very tough and there were few motor able tracks with in the forested area. The ground was rocky and as a result it was very difficult to follow the pugmarks (foot prints) of the leopards. The area was pretty remote and communication facilities were very basic. Whenever someone died the information used to reach the forest control room after a few hours and by the time they would reach the area all the tracks were obliterated by the local crowd that invariably gathered there. They hardly had any resources or budget to handle such an operation. The staff that was involved with the project was just not trained to handle wildlife related problems. They had served all their lives in plantations and had no experience with wildlife. What they did have were good and hard working officers – the Divisional Forest Officer and the Assistant Conservator of Forest - who were in charge. But that is not enough.

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Ranthambhore National Park, like all project Tiger Reserves in India, shuts down for visitors during the monsoons. Since Ranthambhore lies in Rajasthan – the driest Indian state – it only shuts down for three months of monsoons, from July to September. This is the most dangerous time for the big predators.

Due to the monsoon rains the undergrowth and grasses inside the park are lush green and this makes for excellent fodder for ungulates and cattle. The villagers enter the park with their cattle and often get into violent fights with the forest department staff. As a result many of the more isolated forest guard-houses (or chowkies) inside the park are abandoned. Many of the smaller guard-houses have 2-3 forest guards and these few guards neither have the will nor the resources to take on the more numerous and organized groups of villagers. During the monsoons the park is an “open house” for all – the illegal grazers, wood-cutters and poachers.

It is widely believed that most of the poaching incidents occur during the monsoons but this is not true. Most of the big cat poaching occurs during the summer months of May and June, when it is easy to find the big cats. During the peak of summers – in May and June – most of the smaller waterholes dry out and water is available in very few places in the park. Since the big cats during summers, particularly tigers, tend to spend most of their time in or near water, it is very easy to find them. During the monsoons there is water and fodder for the prey species all over the park and as a result the ungulates are spread out all over the park. Since there is prey and water all over, the tigers also tend to spread out all over. As a result it is more difficult to find them. So even though there is hardly any protection in the park during the monsoon months of July, August and September, tigers are generally more secure in the park during monsoons then they are in summers.

However during the monsoons there are a lot of cattle and cattle herders inside the park. Tigers often kill the cattle because they are easy prey. During such times the tigers are at great risk. It would take a tiger 3-4 days to finish eating a cattle kill. During these 3-4 days they tend to stay near the kill, leaving it only for short periods of time. Since cattle is a very valuable resource for the local villagers, even one kill can be a bad set back for them. To take revenge they would sometimes “get back” a the tiger. They do this by either poisoning the carcass when the tiger is away or by tipping off a mogiya about the kill. The mogiya then stakes out the kill and shoots the tiger when it returns to the kill. Either ways it means a dead tiger.

At least one such incident happened during the monsoons of 2004. There may have been more but we definitely know of one. In July 2004, just after the first showers, the local villagers entered the park with their cattle. For the last 3-4 years the forest department was under a lot of pressure to stop grazing in the park during the monsoons. Since this was not possible for them to do, they declared that there was “zero grazing’ in 2004 monsoons. This pleased everybody. The local forest officers did not have to face any flak, the senior forest officers in Jaipur were happy and the conservationists were happy. Only the wildlife was not happy because the park was full of cattle.

Somewhere in August a male tiger killed a bull in “Peeli ghati” near the village of Uliyana. The villagers tipped of Devi Singh Mogiya – an extremely dangerous poacher who is now behind bars. Devi Singh set up a hide (or machaan) near the carcass and when the tiger returned to the kill he shot him dead. The next month Devi Singh killed another tiger in Kachida kid eh. This is a permanent waterhole about a 100 meters away from the Kachida chowki (or guard house). The guards of this chowki regularly use this waterhole for taking a bath and doing their laundry. Surprisingly, on the day that Devi Singh killed this tiger, the guards neither heard the gun shot nor did they go near the water hole for the next few days, which was more than enough time for Devi Singh to skin the tiger and take the bones out of the carcass.

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