Vision of Life; by Sanjay: A Storyteller named Forest!

To learn something from you, the forest silently observes you and quietly listens to you! If you want to learn something from the forest, do the same thing… Mehmet Murat ildan.

Forest has many stories hidden within & only when you enter into those thickset of greens & start talking to the forest, you start listening to them… Me.

The First quote is by one of the most versatile (many call him insane) thinkers of our era from Turkistan & another one is by me as I also get tagged by same quality & there ends similarity between us but love for the forests is one more similarity, I must say! This summer when I started for Pench & Kanha via Nagpur, though the trip was for work also yet it has been quite a time I have visited at leisure & in summer with clear sky & temperature soaring above forty degrees all day long, & I was pepped up for meeting the Sal & Sag (teak trees & Sal trees) as more than tiger (many will smirk) that landscape fascinates me though seeing a tiger on that background is sheer magic! But, like my last n numbers of trips to Kanha in last nearly six years, while my car was on Samruddhi Highway towards Nagpur the clouds started filling the sky & downpour started & hailstorm stuck us with such ferocious way that we had to take shelter under a bridge & I knew the future of trip ahead! Well, I love forests in any weather & though personally I don’t like getting wet in gipsy yet when the sky becomes cloudy then you really can’t enjoy forest as the activity stops in the forest when sky doesn’t get cleared after the rains which has been a routine for me in Kanha for last many visits! And what happened to green forests like Pench & Kanha, it’s like a sheer wall of green Sal trees & the entire backdrop with low light becomes black or grey making it impossible to even see the colours of the birds which also get silent in such weathers! The logic may be entire forest’s life move around Sun & suddenly when for day long sun goes behind the clouds for day long then the animals & birds must be getting confused about their daily routine which is tied up with Sun’s movement & all jungle comes to stand still! What happens in tadoba (my experience), it does rains but in an hour the sky gets cleared & life resumes to normal, unfortunately with Kanha & Pench’s huge green cover may the clouds lingers a bit long here making the sky dark for long time, though its nature & we can’t do anything about it!

And I had meetings with senior forest officers at Nagpur for making Media (news media) aware about covering wildlife related news, which is an important aspect especially for people living in urban areas, so this was a work & wildlife trip. After the Samruddhi HighWay came in place, for me driving from Pune to Nagpur has become a routine yet the stretch between Pune to Aurangabad is still an issue with first nearly 80 km from Pune taking maximum time, yet once you are on Samruddhi & even if you keep a steady 90km/ hr speed, total ten hours it takes from Pune to Nagpur which was earlier nearly fifteen hours! First morning at Kanha & the sky was all black, there was chilling wind & usually when at this time of year (mid-April) you don’t even need a full sleeves shirt, I had to wear a jacket & now you can imagine the weather! From there for the entire six safaris there were clouds in the sky & the Sun just showed its face in phases & gave me the opportunity to click the Sal frames! Even the guides & gipsy driver’s mood was low as they knew with this weather sighting of the tiger & wildlife in general goes down & they were right!

Here is where one needs to take as much advantage to enter into conversation with guides & get as much information about the forests at large from them instead of getting frustrated with nature, is what I will recommend! As the guides & drivers are pandora of information because they have grown up in these forests & unless you open them up to tell the stories about trees, places, tigers by starting a dialogue with them as not many tourists are interested in doing that, these people won’t speak on their own! I started asking questions about everything around & even when I thought I knew most of the things about these forests I realized how little I know! The guide told me about a creeper named Bohemia Bilai & the story of how this name got. It’s a creeper which has big identical leaves like twins & the name Bohemia Bilali is from the names of twins of an Englishman who first discovered the creeper! The creeper is very strong & used as rope also in nearby villages as well the leaf is used to make eating plates & bowls! On one such cloud-filled sky drive the guide showed me a big tree of which bark has been peeled off till nearly 12 ft height & asked me who could have done this! I knew India Gaurs eat bark of the trees but to this much height is impossible & even monkeys can do such job as limitations of their teeth & tiger can’t peel of the bark in this fashion while sharpening its claws or making territory markings, so who it can be as there are no elephants in this part of the forest; & answer was, Porcupine! Such a small animal & this was totally new information to me. Interestingly, Porcupines with danger of dealing with its thrones are the most favoured food of a tiger & many tigers have got seriously injured in killing a Porcupine yet never give-up the hunt! The guide’s take was, the tiger wants to eat the heart of the Porcupine for reasons only known to the tigers, lol! You may laugh & many will say what's the use of this rubbish information & if no sighting then what's the use of going to the forests, well your choice is all I can say! As, indeed we all go to the forests to see those yellow black stripes by spending our time as well as money but to see a tiger is something that depends on a lot many things & nature (weather) is one major of them which you can't control! But by interacting with drivers & guides you can get to see many things in & around the forests which or else takes a back seat in our zest of seeing a tiger. As well, the more you start knowing about finer details of the forest the more interesting it becomes to see a tiger or any wild animal, because now you start understanding the language of the forest & once you achieve that, you are able to enjoy any sort of weather in the forest with tiger or no tiger sighting!

One interesting thing this time I get to observe in Pench this time & off late in Kanha is not many tigers walk on the road & reason may be the tigers (male & female) that have ruled for more than a decade in these two forests have passed away. Reasons of tigers death are death by age (legendary Collerwali in Pench & Munna at Kanha) & few have died due to territorial fights & few in man-animal conflict but outcome is the tigers which are habitual with the humans (read as tourist’s gypsies) are gone & the new tigers are shy & not used to the sight of tourist vehicles. Outcome is the sight of a tiger walking boldly on the road & vehicles following them are becoming rare in these forests as it will take some time for the small cubs today to grow up & by then they will be used to people looking at them & click click of sound of camera shutters (Maya tigress at Tadoba actually seems to love that)! And to make this happen we need to be patient & train the drivers as well guides (and tourists) to be patient for allowing the tiger to come & road & get used to the sight of the gypsies as agreed we do keep distance but till a tiger gets habitual for the humans around it will always keep away till it starts understating these vehicles means no harm to it! And this is why the chances of sighting a tiger in the buffers is more as tigers in the buffer zones are more used to the humans around & feel safe & don’t move away from the road by the approaching vehicles!

Lastly, we had been to Pench where we assisted local women for the setup, they have been running at tourist information centres by providing them utensils on the request of Pench Forest Dept (MP) & felt nice to see the wonderful setup here for the tourists at Khawasa buffers. The toilets in Pench forests are immaculately clean & posh as well there are restroom stops in the safari, something Maharashtra safaris needs to look into from the tourist’s angle! Though we have been blessed with some sightings of tigers as well as clicking some wonderful snaps of wildlife on the background of Sal trees, the trip gave me something which I wanted to tick for a long…

Leap of Faith!
It was a rain-washed trip right in the middle of April in Central Indian Forests, yet the forest always sends you back with happy moments! This was one such as since long I wanted to click an image of a spotted deer jumping full length in air & knowing my photographic skills (lol), I knew it is harder than I can imagine as deer are very fast. to spot their movement & from moving gipsy, to lift camera, aim at one deer, adjust all settings for that mode & click, in time, all these needs to happen in few seconds, so in so many trips I tried but failed yet never given up the hope! One way was to use some engineering logic & be observant when gypsy is slow or halted at one place (for tiger alarm calls, what els) & look for the movement of deer around & be ready. In this way also the problem is you dont know which deer will jump & when! yet, this time waiting for checking alarm calls I saw herd of spotted deers moving across a stream & I knew there always are some young ones which want to cross the hurdle in different way as that's one way to test your strength & a bit of showoff also & I was ready when this guy decided to get its feet wet & jump across the stream & I was ready, so, finally did it!...

With that, I said adeus to Pench & Sal walls with a promise to come back soon to listen more stories & to learn more about them!

Sanjay Deshpande

smd156812@gmail.com

Sanjeevani Dev.

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