Friday, December 17, 2010

Day 122 Thursday afternoon December 2nd. Still hunting tigers.




We head out at 2.15pm into a different section of the Reserve (Zone 5, the territory of the romantically named tigers-T1, T3 & T5) and soon pick up large paw prints in the soft mud beside the road- apparently fresh from this morning. A little further up and a six-foot fresh-water crocodile slithers into the water hole ahead of us while an overhead monkey tries to pee and poop on us as we stop to look.
There are lots of deer, they stay near the monkeys because they can eat the figs, mangos and other tree fruit that the monkeys drop and the monkeys can see the big cats first and will warn the deer of them. A tiger eats about 15kg of meat a day but can go without food for about 14 days but he needs to drink every day; they are the only cat to like water and they can swim.
The gamekeepers track the cats by taking plaster casts of their unique paw prints and reviewing remote auto-trigger camera recordings, the tigers have unique markings.
The tigers don’t eat people but one killed a man and his donkey last April. They think it was a villager collecting firewood and that the man probably tried to defend his donkey by throwing stones at the tiger and so the tiger attacked and killed the man as well. The tiger was moved to a different game reserve. We drop off a Tracker at dusk and he leaves us barefoot and carrying his plaster cast kit to walk the two kilometers to his hut in the woods…..
We search until dusk anxiously looking and also listening to the monkey and peacock calls but have no luck.
We are going to try again tomorrow, it’s great out here.

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