Aditya ‘Dicky’ Singh

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.

No Comments | Read full story »

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.

1 Comment | Read full story »

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.

2 Comments | Read full story »