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.