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Missing tiger found
There are reports in the local and national newspaper that a male tiger – officially known as T 3 (pictures below – taken before he was radio collared) – has been reported missing from the Ranthambhore national park for over two months. This tiger (we call him Bahadur or Bunty) is the male cub of Machali (Ranthambhore’s best known tigress) from her previous litter. He is about 4 years old and use to be found in the heart of the park between the lakes and a place called Lakkarda (with in the bigger circle in the map below).
T 3 was one of the first tigers of Ranthambhore to be radio collared by the Wildlife Institute of India. However, there was some defect in the transmitter in his radio collar and it never really worked properly.
Somewhere in the second half of October he moved of this area and was not seen since then. The Forest guards did try for many days to track him down but had little success. Recently it came out in the newspapers that this tiger is missing. We have no idea why he decided to change his territory.
In the middle of November we had Daniel and Daniella Free (our regular guests from UK) staying with us. On the 17th of November 2008 they had gone for a safari on zone number 5 that goes right across the park. In the early afternoon they spotted a male tiger (without a radio collar) near the Thumka chowki (smaller circle in the map above). Their guide (Vijay Singh) told me that they had seen a young and confident male crossing the forest track and that the male had blood marks on his chest, probably from eating a kill. At that time we were sure that it was not T 3 that they saw because they had seen a tiger without a radio collar.
Daniella was generous enough to give me two pictures of this male (pictures above) and just yesterday I got down to match those two images with the other pictures that I have. And guess what it turned out to be T 3 without the collar. I immediately called up the forest authorities and informed them. The Deputy Field Director came over to the shack that we call our office and took a copy of the images. Even he took a long time to believe that this male had somehow managed to get rid of the ugly collar around his neck.
Three cheers for T 3 without the collar.
Update from Ranthambhore
It’s been a long time since I posted on the blog. I was on a long vacation and got back to Ranthambhore about 3 weeks ago and since then I have been busy trying to make a living. Yes some of us have to do that. Here are some updates from Ranthambhore:
1. The Park reopened to visitors on the 1st of October after being shut for three moths of monsoons. This year the monsoon rains were spectacular. The best that I have seen and all the waterholes in the park are overflowing. The park is lush green and there should be no major water shortages in the dry summer months.
2. The cubs of the Guda tigress that was found dead in September are still alive and kicking. They have been killing deer fawns and are apparently doing well. A true miracle. They are just about 10 months old – one male and one female – and have been taking care of each other. More about this in a later post.
3. In the Sultanpur area of the park (southern part of the national park) a tigress has given birth to two cubs. They were probably born somewhere in the late summers and have been seen by a number of visitors in the last three weeks.
4. The Forest Department has come out with a new policy to govern tourism, which is a total disaster. This policy is neither good for tourism nor for conservation and has ended up making Ranthambhore the “most visitor unfriendly park in India.” Basically it has made life extremely tough for people like me who make a living out of the visitors who come to see the park.
5. I learnt something really amazing yesterday. The Rajasthan Forest Department has started an “official inquiry” into my blog. A senior Forest Officer who is based in Jaipur is the enquiry officer. Apparently some people took some print out of this blog (mainly of some stuff that I had posted when tiger poaching was at its peak in Ranthambhore – 2004 or so) and sent them as a “complaint” to the Forest Department in Jaipur. The Forest Department, for obvious reason went ballistic and have now launched an enquiry on how I could post such stuff. . What really upset me is that they took three years to know about something that is so public. Just goes to show that no one really reads what I write. 
Indala Plateau
In my last post I had written about digging of wells and making waterholes in the Indala plateau. We just finished digging the third well and have got three water holes going already. The three wells were dug near non-perennial streams and in places where there were “small wells” (locally known as kui) on such streams. This was done to maximize the recharging of the wells after every rain. All the three kui that existed on these three different locations were in total ruins and the new wells were dug right next to the older ruined kui. We probably could have fixed these older kuis but we did not even give it thought because the cost of doing that would have been much more than the cost of digging newer wells.
The three wells are located in Dev ki kui, Gular ki kui and Pathar or Baba ki kui. They are about three to four kilometers apart from each other. Gular ki kui is about 4 kilometers away from Indala village (one of the four villages that exist inside the Ranthambhore national park). We got lucky with Dev ki kui and Baba ki kui. These wells struck good permanent underground water streams at 21 and 29 feet respectively. The well at Gular ki kui struck water at 40 feet but this water is just about enough to sustain one waterhole.
The total cost of digging 90 feet of well was Rupees 360,000. We have paid the contractor Dhanroop Maali a sum of Rupess 240,000 and the rest I am going to pay him in a day or two. I would like to thank three of my close friends who pitched in with the money. They are Jayanand Govindraj (from Chennai – Rupees 50,000), Neha and Hitesh (from Delhi – Rupees 25,000) and Nitin “Silky” Mistry (from Goa – Rupees 20,000). Cheers guys –this may be the only credit that you will get. No - I am just joking – you will get much more than that. And none of them paid in “dollars” (see the 8th comment in my last post to know what I mean).
Getting the first waterhole going near all the three wells was easy – all the three areas had “natural” rocky waterholes close by that are being filled by the water from the wells. The waterhole at Dev ki kui (see picture below) is pretty amazing. I saw about 20 Sambar der drinking there at one time, late in the evening. The Forest Department staff and the guys working at the wells have been reporting regular tiger sightings. And these were areas where tiger were almost never seen after December or so, when the last waterholes dried out.
There is some work to be done still. Like making a few very basic water recharging structures and a few more waterholes. This is time consuming but relatively inexpensive work.