Up at 5.45am and off to the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve. It’s dark and cold, we are all wrapped in blankets, and we head out to the game reserve. We are all very excited. This is a 1,200 square km game reserve and in our jeep we have a naturalist/guide and he’s very good. Pretty soon the guide tells the driver to stop and he listens and gets us to listen as well. It’s the monkeys, they are calling to warn each other of a predator nearby. The sun’s coming up now –and then we see him—just about 150 yards away, and we can watch him in the open through field glasses for about 5 minutes as he walks along the base of the cliff. It’s a male leopard, about 400lbs. and terrifically marked with large spots and a long tail. He looks good and healthy. There are about 60 of them in this reserve and they are hard to see and so we feel lucky. He has to hunt, successfully, three times a day.
Then we are off again but this time for the real prize - a tiger. It’s what everyone comes to see. There are about 36 in this reserve including two new cubs. Two Tigers are pregnant and so each will produce up to 6 cubs and about 4 will survive. This park could support about 45 tigers (they need about 45 sq km each) and so the people responsible are doing pretty well with the husbandry of this place. Poaching remains the biggest threat to them (the Chinese continue to think that various parts of the tiger offer medicinal value or as an aphrodisiac) but the park rangers are managing to reduce the poaching year by year.
The tigers here run to 600lbs., much bigger than the leopards which the tigers sometimes hunt. Two more hours during which we spot a vulture, an owl, various parakeets, two large deer, a kingfisher but no large cats. Then the guide stops us again and makes us listen. It’s several peacocks and they are calling and warning each other and so we stay where we are and watch. No luck: we know a tiger is nearby but we can’t see him, the guide explains he’s probably hiding which gives us no chance of seeing him. It rained last week and so there is fresh grass which makes it harder. Also the deer have followed the new grass to higher ground where it can be safer but, our guide explains, the tigers will have gone higher as well to follow the deer. We have another chance this afternoon and so we will be heading higher as well. Only one of the tigers is radio tagged and that one’s radio signals cannot be tracked by the guides, it is to help the gamekeepers only. The guides are also forbidden from using walkie-talkies to tell each other about sightings, it’s all kept as low key as possible.
There are about 1,200 tigers left in the wild in India, most in preserves, and another 256 (he seems to know exactly) in zoos in India.
Queen Elizabeth was the last person to shoot a tiger legally; she shot two in this park in 1961.
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