The morning after I photographed a magnificent female tiger and her almost grown male and female cubs, a 45 year old mother of two, illegally illegally entered Bandhavgarh National Park.  The group of four women friends walked into the forest to gather firewood. Only three returned alive.  As Begha was crouched down to pick up wood she was attacked from behind by the female tiger cub and killed.  One of her friends was attacked by the cub’s brother and narrowly escaped with her life when her sari ripped free of the male’s claws and she ran away to raise the alarm.  By late afternoon the cubs had been scared off their partially eaten prey and chased far off into the forest by mahouts on their elephants, who were clearing the area so that the authorities could come in and rescue the remains. Before the attack, the forest must have been loud with the warning calls of langur monkeys watching from the trees, and sambar deer hooting like owls on steroids as they marked the progress of the big cats through the undergrowth.   If the women had understood these alarms, the language of the forest, they would have known of the imminent danger and perhaps escaped with their lives.

 

 

Tigers that actually target human beings as food are very rare and this cub will be observed very carefully in the future to see if attacking humans becomes a habit. Stephen Mills, a wildlife filmmaker and author of a book on tigers has a theory as to why relatively few people are killed. To a tiger, human beings are a strange shape.  Standing face to face with a tiger a man appears very large, yet as he turns, he all but disappears.  He has no ‘back’ like a more familiar prey, the deer.   This is very disconcerting to the 1 metre high and 3 metre long predatory tiger, who might assume that something as tall as a man might be several metres long.  As the striped cats prefer to attack from behind, it is crouching humans like Begha who are most at risk.

 

In one part of north eastern India, the Sundarbans, a swampy expanse of mangrove forest and one of the Indian tigers last major refuges, at least 50 people have been killed over the last 5 years.   Wildlife officials say that the numbers of deaths is maybe double that, as many attacks are not reported. Some of the 250 or so Royal Bengal tigers that make their home here have specialized in human prey, attacking fishermen in their boats at night or honey collectors in the forest.  Here forest officials have had to be creative in defending the people against tiger attacks.  For some years they handed out masks to people venturing into the forest which had a face painted on the back of the head.  Anecdotally, these masks lowered the human death toll for some years, as the animals like to attack from behind.  But now that the masks are not working so well as a deterrent, electrified clay fisherman dummies are being tested.  A 12 volt  inverter delivers a 300 volt shock to any tiger foolish enough to tackle it.  Honey collectors are armed with firecrackers to throw at stalking animals.  Few officials will admit it but an informal ‘Three strikes and you’re out’ rule applies as much to American criminals as man-eating tigers in India.  A repeat maneater will be darted, anaesthetized and removed to an Indian zoo.  But it is not always easy to identify the culprit animal.  One tiger was trapped using a buffalo as bait, after being tracked for twenty days.  No sooner than he was packed off to jail in a zoo, when another attack occurred.  Recognising a miscarriage of justice, tiger number one was released and eventually the real culprit apprehended.

 

The endangered iconic cats often prey on villager’s cattle but as India’s population grows, doubling since 1970 to reach over one billion now, conflict between wildlife and tigers is on the rise.  A hundred years ago some 40,000 tigers roamed India, now there are fewer than 4000, and because of disputes over counting methods, even that may be an overestimate.  Forestry department officials who run the national parks and tiger reserves use the pugmark method, finding a clear impression of a pawmark and making a plaster cast.  ‘The problem is that the same animal may make a different sized footprint, depending on whether it is walking or running, on a hard surface or soft sand,’ says tiger conservationist Sanjay Gubbi of Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) India, ‘Soft wet mud will take a much bigger impression than sand so the same animal may be counted twice.’  WCS uses much more modern camera trapping surveys to count tigers.   Each animal has a distinctive pattern of stripes on its side, face, legs or tail that can be used to identify it as an individual.  The society hopes to persuade the government to use this more scientific method of counting to provide a more accurate population estimate. There can only ever be estimates when counting what is a secretive and nocturnally active animal.  Tiger scientists suspect that there may actually be less than 2000 tigers left in India. A passionate tiger lover since high school, Sanjay says that there is no magic wand that we can wave to save the tiger, and no simple solutions.  ‘We must never lose hope. National park officials and biologists can work together to make a difference, stop habitat degradation, control poaching both of tigers and their prey and make sure that there are tigers in India for a long time to come.’

 

A few days later, I am privileged to be watching two tiger cubs lying sleepily on the forest floor from the safety of the back of an elephant over three metres up.  Like any domestic kitten, the tiger cub is drawn to the swishing of the elephant’s tail and takes a swipe.  Our elephant indignantly kicks mud in his face and the young cat backs off.  It is not impossible to secure his future, both the Russians and the Indonesians have clamped down on the criminal gangs behind the poaching.  India must follow.