Whirling through the World

Sahas and I returned from Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve on a train from Jabalpur. As soon as we sat down on our birth in the second class AC coach we realized it would be a difficult journey. A family with two little children sat across from us, discussing how they had only two tickets for half of the distance to Mumbai. This had also happened on our first train trip to Nagpur and had led to cramped conditions in the compartment, with people sleeping on every surface available on the overnight journey.

As it happened, this family turned out to be even worse traveling companions. Their 5-year old daughter complained constantly and demanded to be fed dinner from the top birth of the train. At dinner time, while the rest of us waited, hungry, for venders to pass our compartment with meals, her mother pulled out a fully packed dinner of rice, rotis, vegetables and daal, and proceeded to dish out food to her family in our cramped quarters. Food passed between mouths and across births, and soon rice and rotis rained from the high tiers and coated the floor.

In the morning, Sahas woke me to a jarring discovery: our train had been stopped for 2 hours on the tracks and showed no signs of continuing any time soon. We weighed our options and jumped off the train onto the platform. Thirty minutes later a local Mumbai train picked us up and we headed towards the suburbs of the city. Two rickshaws and an hour later, we walked into Sahas’ home, happy to be home and off the road.

Sightseeing along the Queen's Necklace in Mumbai at sunset.

My whirlwind tour of the tiger reserves in central India has finished, leaving me with conversations of conflicts to deconstruct into a dissertation topic. As I slowly digest the relationships between tigers, prey and villagers, I’ve returned to the US to obtain a new visa and attend an orientation for the Critical Language Scholarship Hindi program. I’ll return to India on Friday via New Delhi and then settle in Jaipur, where I’ll study Hindi through the American Institute for Indian Studies until the end of August. My fieldwork has ended for the moment, although I do hope to visit Ranthambore and possibly Sariska Tiger Reserves while I’m in Rajasthan, since these protected areas are infamous for high human densities within and around the parks. From central India to Mumbai, London, New York, New Haven, Washington DC and now Jaipur – what a wild week this has been!

Oil, Water and Stripes

It lies in puddles at the bottom of bowls and clings to the sides of serving spoons. It seeps into aloo and coats paranthas, lingering on your plate long after you’ve finished your food. Worst of all, it absorbs into your skin, staining your nails yellow and leaving a warm salty smell that lasts for hours. In Madhya Pradesh, oil is inescapable.

Sure, you can rinse your hand. But the water runs warm and is tinged brown with iron. The dry air makes your throat perpetually itch yet water only exacerbates the thirst. Here in Kanha, people share water like they do tiger stories, continuously passing, craving, filling. When you enter a house, it’s the first offering – “Panni?” (water?); when you leave the reserve, the first question – “Tiger?”. Unfortunately, be it water or tiger sightings, neither satisfies the burning desire for more. Sahas and I listen as tourists exchange stories while they gulp down glasses, exchanging, competing, outdoing. This morning we watched as the tourist jeeps returned from safari an hour early – a tiger had been sitting in a waterhole near the entrance gate; one look and they returned, full of stories about the tiger and the tiger only.

 

The tiger we saw on a tiger show in Kanha.

Climate change predictions foreshadow hotter, dryer summers with more scattered monsoon rains (Kumar et al. 2006). I wonder to myself, if the waterholes dry and the tigers diminish, how then will people quench their thirst?

The Kanha Nature Trail: 7 Kilometers Too Scenic

We hit the trail at 5:30pm in the evening, an hour and a half before sunset. The Kanha Nature Trail began innocently enough, with a three-story watch tower and a path down to the nala (stream). Our boots scuffing against the red gravel, Sahas and I paced and paused, lifting our binoculars and calling out names of the shadows among the trees. As the trail wound its way among rocky patches and burned forest, we saw an Indian tree shrew cleaning itself with its long red tongue and spangled drongos weaving their way through branches.

At a fork in the trail, we turned left to follow an older trail into denser forest. More drongos and langurs, more boulders and burned forest. An hour later, the world grew dark through our binoculars and we quickened our pace. As the trail continued, so did our thirst. We had forgotten to bring water despite the evening heat. As dusk fell, I mentally inventoried our pocket contents – a few rupee notes, a mango candy, a mobile with no signal, and thankfully, a torch that Sahas had brought along had taken at the last minute.

We walked faster, Sahas leading and me running to keep up from behind. The trail continued. As the stars emerged above, the boulders around me shifted to panthers, the crackling leaves beneath me growling with each step. And then in the distance, a horn and a light, and suddenly the sal forest revealed a road and a resort, with lights to guide us ahead. Sahas had joked earlier that we were hiking to the other side of the park but as the resort sign swung in the night breeze, we realized that our 20 minute nature trail had turned into 7 kilometers. We asked the resort night guard and he gestured ahead, “Sida jao…long distance”. Sahas withdrew his cell phone and there they were – three glorious bars of signal. He called a friend and 15 minutes later we were cruising down the road to our forest rest house, parched, exhausted and exhilarated from our walk among tigers.

The Power of Protection: Pench Tiger Reserve

Over the past two weeks we visited Pench and Kanha Tiger Reserves. In Pench we stayed at Karmajhiri Gate and met up with Aniruddha, a PhD from the Wildlife Institute of India. He’s been studying tiger ecology and dispersal for the past four years at Pench, using camera traps and scat analysis to estimate the population and evaluate movement around the park.

 

A sambar deer grazes in the forest.

 

Wild dogs play along the roadside by our jeep.

Pench is starkly different from Tadoba. Unlike Tadoba, where bamboo stands thick and evenly dispersed through the forest and the undergrowth is otherwise clear of vegetation, Pench has few bamboo clumps and thick lantana for tigers, deer and antelope to hide in. Space in the reserve is highly seasonal, with much of the land submerged by a dammed reservoir during the monsoon and winter months. During our visit the mating season was in full swing. The forest resounded with the echoing calls of meowing male peacocks, their tales rising and turning amongst the dry grasses, and asthmatic bellows of chital (spotted deer) parading around their sprawling racks.

 

Interviewing people in a large village near Pench Tiger Reserve.

While the drought of 2009 in Tadoba prevented interior villages from planting their one crop (rice, which requires standing water), Pench received enough scattered rain that the villagers could harvest one (maize) of their two crops (the second is wheat). We saw the difference in moisture most prominently in the animals. Tadoba gaur (bison) grazed near dried waterholes, their rear back bones concave and their ribs tight against their dark coats, while their equivalents in Pench roamed in shaded forest and drank from permanent natural pools in the Pench River. 

Stories from local villagers reinforced these differences and presented surprising new ones: Pench is remarkably conflict-free. Since the core of Pench is vacant of villages, we spoke with several villages in the buffer of the park, bordering on territorial (non-park) forest. No matter who we talked with – forest officials, researchers, local politicians, farmers – everyone shook their head at my inquiry into livestock depredation. Few to no livestock are killed by tigers and leopards in the 99 villages surrounding Pench, and no one can remember a case of the big cats injuring or killing a person. As expected, crop raiding and wolf attacks on goats and children were their main complaints, but I was stunned to learn that conflict with the top carnivores of the park is virtually nonexistent. Pench may well serve as a “control” site for comparison against parks with higher levels of conflict, such as Tadoba or even Kanha.

 

Although villagers outside Pench keep their cows beneath bamboo-thatched stalls at night, attacks on livestock by tigers are surprisingly rare.

Shades of Meaning (Tadoba Tiger Reserve)

In India, no means yes and sometimes yes means no. The infamous head bobble has confused me countless times and caused me to receive some unexpected dinner orders. And the same ambiguity that the head bobble represents struck again as I questioned local guides and villagers in Tadoba Tiger Reserve about their experiences with tigers. For every answer, I found a counter-answer; for every no, there was a yes.

Over the last few years, Tadoba has been labeled by the Indian media as a place of “bloody trails”, where 50 villagers have been killed by tigers since 2006. I visited Tadoba to hear first-hand about the attacks and try to find commonalities that might indicate correlative factors to explore with my dissertation research. With Sahas translating my questions into Marathi, I held interviews with forest department safari guides as we bumped along dirt roads or sat over steaming cups of chai. We also spoke with people in villages inside and on the border of the reserve, conversations which grew into village-wide discussions as people gathered out of curiosity. Working as a foreign researcher has its challenges, but attracting attention is certainly not one of them; in Sahas’ words, I am a “crowd magnet.”

The interviews portrayed a spectrum of conflict. The media is exaggerating the truth – no one has been killed in the park. Yes, one death occurred in Tadoba years ago. No, three deaths occurred this year, all in winter. Yes, we are happy to live in the park because the tigers never bother us. No, we wish we lived elsewhere where we did not have to collect bamboo for livelihood. Yes, leopards eat our goats and dogs. No, tigers and leopards don’t come near the village.

Different people, different perspectives, different answers. Is it true that villages outside the park experience more tiger attacks than interior villages that have higher densities of carnivores? Why have the attacks been focused on the eastern side of the park? And, if the records are true, why don’t locals living in the area know about the high number of tiger attacks? Luckily for my PhD, I’ve left Tadoba with more questions than answers. But if I want to get anywhere in solving this ecological mystery, I may have to study mindreading in addition to Hindi.

Tadoba Tiger Reserve

The landscape in central India is brown, the deciduous forests mostly bare of leaves. Flowering trees spot the hills with brilliant orange, yellow and pink, standing out starkly against the barren land. We've been tracking the temperature - 108 degrees F in the shade, which translates into: 5am safari, back to the house by 9am to avoid the sweltering heat, talk with villagers or sleep through the afternoon, then back out by 4pm to again drive through the park or walk along the roads. We've seen a tigress, walking calmly in front of our car for 15 minutes, as well as the common palm civet, gaur (bison), wild dogs, bats, sambar, chital (spotted deer), chousingha (antelope), wild pigs, rhesus macaque, langur, Indian flying squirrel, and plenty of impressive birds – black headed ibis, crested serpent eagle, kingfishers, Indian roller, and in Melghat, the forest owlet, a very rare and possibly endangered bird.

A Rare Sighting (Melghat Tiger Reserve)

We met at dawn. Yawning with smiles, Sahas and I threw our gear into the SUV as the sun crested the high mesas surrounding the Semadoh rest house in Melghat, marking the new day. As we drove along rock-studded dirt roads, Bora, our local guide, explained the rarity of the species we were about to observe. The species was once believed extinct, but though new groups were recently discovered in a few forests in the Western Ghats and nearby areas, the population had yet to be estimated.

A village whirled by, a river, then trees. Our driver turned the car off the main road into an empty forest – few leaves and hardly a bird in sight. Bora imitated the species’ call and described how we might see it, that it might take a while before it appeared. Sahas and I grabbed our cameras and binoculars and we three spread out, treading lightly among the crackling dry leaves that blanketed the forest floor. I began systematically scanning the landscape for mobbing songbirds that might betray the location of our carnivorous target and strained my ears to hear the familiar call. But hardly a minute passed before Bora pointed and said calmly in Marati, “There it is: the forest owlet.”



Small and mottled brown with the characteristic white abdomen, she was perched high on the dark branches before us, watching us. I imagine she knew Bora by now; Sahas and I were merely a few more captivated tourists he had brought to her feet. She twisted her head, scratched her feathered face and flew to a tree nearby while Sahas and I cooed at her every move. She was a beautiful owl, sitting in the empty forest, alone. Her solitude seemed to highlight her value - rare, perhaps one of only a few hundred or thousand of her kind. I marveled at her as she looked down upon us again before flying off into the day. Sahas mentally checked off the new lifer on his bird list while I quietly pondered how many more lifers the forest owlet would serve before the bird itself was checked off as extinct.

Melghat Tiger Reserve

I just left Melghat Tiger Reserve this morning and am heading to Tadoba Tiger Reserve by road today. The Melghat landscape was stunning, with beautiful undulating hills, though it made seeing animals very challenging. The park claims to have a significant tiger (64) and leopard (154) population, but we can't imagine how, since the small ungulate prey base doesn't seem adequate to support such a large population of cats, and all I can deduce is that there must be more ungulate populations in the core (we were only able to visit the small Tourist Zone). Thankfully there are few incidents of tigers killing humans - only 1 death several years ago. About 25 cattle are killed by leopards and tigers every month, which is comparable to rates in Gir and Panna.

The Forest Department was extremely helpful and assigned a range officer to show us around, as well as provided us access to roads and a tiger cattle kill that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to see. The Forest Department Semadoh rest house accommodations in Melghat were excellent. Though “load sharing” prevented us from having a fan during much of the afternoon and early evening, we had electricity all night and morning, enabling us to sleep relatively soundly despite the intense heat. The porches look onto the dry Sipna River, which apparently runs rapidly during the monsoon, and the huts were surrounded by an interpretation centre and museum nested beneath teak trees. The Tourist Zone was only a 10 minute drive from Semadoh and the core would probably be about 20 minutes by car. Though Melghat Tiger Reserve is less commonly known among the system of tiger reserves in India, its well-established infrastructure and kind staff make it one of my favorite protected areas so far.

In Search of the Perfect Meal

What makes the perfect meal? Is it the taste, the flavors that linger in your mind long after the last bite is finished? Is it the quantity of the food and the nutritional value that keeps you energized? Or is it the convenience of the meal, the optimal McDonald's equilibrium between time and effort? My goal is to answer this question - from the perspective of a tiger.

Motivated by my own obsession with food, I've become fascinated by the choices carnivores make when selecting prey. Dare this sound like an esoteric topic to the non-ecologist, the question becomes more urgent when applied to landscapes such as India, where large rural populations live adjacent to forests. Imagine you are a tiger, crouched low in the dry grass, debating between a quick-footed chittal deer or a slow-paced bullock. Which would you prefer? When the cat chooses cattle, conflict arises and can result in death or injury to the livestock, cattle herder and the carnivore. Compounded by drought or other harsh climate events, human-wildlife conflict may become exacerbated, increasing the risk to both wildlife and people.

Personally, I don't eat meat. I'll take a juicy handful of palak paneer to a steak any day. As I travel through central India in pursuit of these ecological answers, I'll also be searching for the ultimate Indian dish, relative, of course, to my testy foreign stomach biota.


This summer, I'll make two trips to India. In May, I'll travel through central India, visiting five tiger reserves to observe their wildlife populations and assess the level of conflict in the area. I'll visit Melghat and Tadoba in the state of Maharashtra and Pench, Kanha and Bandhavgarh in Madhya Pradesh. From June-August, I'll be based in Jaipur, Rajasthan to study Hindi through the American Institute for Indian Studies.

I hope you'll continue to check in on me as I travel this summer as I search India for the perfect meal. I'd love to hear your comments or tips on everything from optimal foraging theory to the best dhaba (restaurant) in town. This research is not only for the academic world and my own palette, but aims to benefit the people and wildlife that struggle to coexist - not only in India, but in every country.

Bon appetit, or as they say in Hindi, svadist khana (delicious food)!