Sahyadrica

Finding signs of wild animals in sandy stream beds, wide riverbanks, in dense forest understorey, often riddled with those of the domestic kind – the livestock – is like going on a treasure hunt. Every afternoon when we returned we sat under the warm winter sun listening to each other’s finds. I found a pile of scat on a boulder, full of hair, fluffed up because it was old and dry, and while I discussed my contemplation on the field to assign it to its rightful owner, my companions yelled their opinion at once: jackal hai re ! Well, jackals do love relieving themselves on boulders, unlike cats that prefer to do so away from a pugdundee , or antelopes that have specific latrine sites. On this particular survey, I stood on a 700 m escarpment overlooking the backwaters of Bansagar on Son. There was an undeclared competition among us; if I said I found tiger’s pugmarks, one of my colleagues found water trailing another’s by the river, and another found a tigress with adolescent c...

It is the coldest day of the year. I’m riding with Omprakash on his motorbike scanning for signs of one of Kanha’s enigmatic species – other than the tiger – the vultures. And there are none to be seen. We are scanning the Kanhari beat as three other teams scan different areas of Kanha known for their vulture populations. A beat is a small unit of a range, but it can be large enough for a team to explore within a few hours; and we have only two of those. It is .7 degrees below zero, and the grass is white as bone. The frost grows on it like fungus, crippling the movement of Kanha’s singing grasslands and turning them into silent tombstones. I am cold and cursing myself for not bringing hand gloves along as my breath turns to clouds. Our beat adjoins Kanha, from which the tiger reserve gets its name. It is one of the first villages to be relocated outside the park. Since then Kanha has seen a dramatic land use change. Agricultural fields gave birth to grasslands, and sal trees...