Tiger! Tiger!

Watchtower Vigil

There is something really special about seeing a wild tiger in broad daylight, that too in south India, where they tend to be very secretive. On 16th January, renowned tiger biologist Dr.Ullas Karanth, G.Ananthakrishnan from The Hindu and I decided to spend the afternoon in a watchtower in Karnataka’s Nagarahole National Park. It was 3.00 in the afternoon and, as we took our places, there was a small herd of chital at a salt lick nearby. After about half an hour of licking the soil, they started drifting away and a couple of gray langurs arrived with two small playful babies. It was entertaining to watch the young ones rolling around on the soft earth and pouncing on one another.

A few minutes past 4.00 there was an urgent whisper from Ullas, Tiger! Tiger! Looking in the direction he indicated we saw an adult male tiger ambling towards us on a game trail in the middle of a wide ‘view line’. On catching some scent on the ground, the tiger sniffed at it for a moment or two and made the facial gesture known as ‘flehmen’, which is basically a curling of the upper lip in response to a particular scent (such as traces of the urine of another tiger). The tiger then continued his walk towards the tower, on his massive, padded feet. The evening sun glinted off his orange coat as we watched in spellbound admiration. While I decided to just enjoy watching the tiger through my binoculars, I could hear Anant’s Nikon clicking away behind me. The tiger was getting closer by the second and I was quite sure that, with a 80-400 Nikkor lens on his digital SLR, Anant was getting great pictures.

It wasn’t until the tiger was about 50 m away that the langurs on a nearby tree spotted him. Suddenly, the air was rent with their harsh alarm calls. The tiger looked towards the tree once and then ambled forward. A few metres more, and he stopped and looked at our shapes in the watchtower. Perhaps he had caught a small movement from one of us, or perhaps he was naturally wary of the tower, having seen people in it before. He stood stock-still and stared at us for a few seconds and then, without haste or panic, he turned and disappeared into the vegetation by the side of the view line. A few minutes later, alarm calls of chital (spotted deer) indicated the way he was moving. The alarms were taken up by other chital, and through their sounds we could ‘follow’ the tiger's movements for another 10 minutes.

Altogether, the sighting lasted no more than 3 minutes, but it’s been playing in my mind ever since. It’s not an image you can easily forget, but then, why would you want to?!