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.