“If you just watch a teenager, you see a lot of uncertainty.”…Jamie Lee Curtis
“This, teenager’s generation has given up on growth. They're just hoping for survival” … Penelope Spheeris
“A tiger's function in the scheme of things is to help maintain balance in nature and if, on rare occasions when driven by dire necessity, he kills a human being or when his natural food has been ruthlessly exterminated by man, he kills two percent of the cattle he is alleged to have killed, it is not fair that for these acts a whole species should be branded as being cruel and bloodthirsty.” …
“Most common thing between a sub adult tiger & a human teenager is, both are like unguided missile” … Me
Four quotes (including mine) for a sharing, that’s something I haven’t done in recent but such is the subject of it, yes there is Tadoba (after a long gap) & there are tigers but as the quotes of Curtis & Spheeris says, it's about teenagers in the tigers i.e. sub adult tigers & trust me this is total new experience for me also! The best part of forests is they never stop to surprise me even after being in them for more than two decades & this Tadoba trip was no exception to this & add UKPWS in it (plz google), the package gets more than complete, though on knowledge front it’s never complete! If you are wondering what’s so great about it then first, I always love to visit Tadoba & central Indian forests I Feb End to March End as during this time Flame of Forests are at their best i.e. Palash trees, especially the hilly terrains around Nagpur are full of them & add Mahua flowers & ripe fruits fragrance in them, well I have never been to Kashmir but had I been a Shahen-shah then I would have said, “Jannat Agar kahi hai to yaahi hai”! I know most will laugh & said this is utter madness as where is Kashmir with all its cool breeze even in summers & tulips beauty with almond & apple orchards, & look at these 40 degrees plus grey-yellow coloured land which breaths fire, how can I even dare to compare this with Kashmir! I don’t blame all such people but beauty is in the eyes of the person & for me, these dry lands with red palash & mahua trees are more beautiful than Kashmir or any place in the world as its these lands which are home for the tigers which you don’t find in Kashmir & I am sure this is what differentiates wildlifers’ from others! Ok, sorry Kashmir lovers, no offence but specifically the flowers near Nagpur are darker in colour than MP palash & reason is more the heat darker the colour of Palash & you can’t beat the heat of Umread/ tadoba region on temperature front as well on spice front when its food! So, I was happy for the red carpet on the yellow land of palash flowers with my lungs full of the sweetest fragrance of Mahua flowers, the summer in the wilds has started on a wonderful note for me!
Ohk, coming back to our subject (finally), this was a short trip & apart from tadoba I wanted to check on third gate of UKPWS i.e. Pauni gate & while I was hoping to see some new terrain, what I got to see (read as experience) made me realize how little I (read as we) know about wildlife which is actually now in our backyard, at least for the people of tadoba we can say that! This trip I came across sub adult cubs which are like teenagers if you apply the scale of the life span of humans to the tigers. A tigress looks after her cubs ideally till they get two & half years i.e. thirty months & trust me a sub adult tiger of that age nearly looks like a grown-up tiger in size though by mind & experience its still a teen ager & its this age bracket of the tigers which we must study as well look at as if you check the death tally of the tigers,’ then the maximum tigers die when they are subadult is a sad fact of tiger conservation! And if we want to avoid or rescue it then we must look after the lifestyle of sub adult tigers is my subject of sharing! What is happening in tadoba & UKWPS, because of increasing numbers of male tigers & new younger males the females i.e. tigresses which have cubs are unable to protect these cubs from the male tigers which are not their father! For those who don’t know wildlife, a male tiger always kills every cub of a tigress it is mating or trying to mate to create its own blood line or say to show its dominance! This for many may seem cruel but that’s how nature has made the tigers & on cruelty scale humans are far ahead than the tigers so be it! So, when a tigress is having cubs from X male tiger & if that X male tiger is not dominant like Chota Matka (plz google) who eventually succumbed to these dominance battles, then the new male tiger chasing her becomes a constant threat to her existing cubs as the new male tiger is bound to kill them if it founds them tagging along with the tigress! So, to protect them the mom takes a hard decision, she cuts the training short & detaches the cubs just after eighteen or twenty months when they are in their early teens & this is the biggest problem Infront of conservation of wildlife which we are missing, is my point of sharing!
This trip was full of my encounters (in the right & good way) with sub adult tigers & if it's fun to watch them then its lots of learnings also for me about the way these young tigers are trying to cope up with hardships of wildlife on their own! First, I saw one sa tigress (sa is a sub adult) which is the daughter of collerwali, a dominant tigress in tadoba moharli range & mighty Chota Dadhiyal male tiger! These are nicknames given to the tigers by the locals while the forest dept recognizes them only by code-numbers yet I prefer to use nicknames only, better connectivity with the tigers! This sa tigress has two siblings both females but this one is bigger & bolder & not even two years old, she looks size of her mom & hunting alone. Here, collerwali tigress is being chased by another male tiger named Shambhu & locals are expecting a faceoff between Shambhu & Chita Dadhiyal soon & collerwali doesn’t want her young daughters being caught in fire in this fight so she was moving with CD or alone leaving the three sisters on their own. The sa tigress though can hunt alone yet she was looking for her sisters & calling them as it’s a big forest & even for the tigers its not easy to find their siblings & another threat is too much calling can lead the male tiger who is not your father to your location!
Then I met two sa tigresses which are daughters of another most famous tigress of tadoba, Choti madhu. These two are also nearly twenty plus months old & have started moving alone & creating their own territory. This is the tricky part as till now they are tagging with their mom but now the same forest area needs to be divided in three of them, which means less space & food. Recently a reel has gone viral about villagers (do mind not tourists) & locals are filming a tiger on their cell phones on the road & the tiger is running away from them. It's not a grown-up tiger but one of the sa tigresses of choti madhu. They have been seeing villagers & people on road since they were tiny cubs & often cross the main road from tadoba to Chandrapur among vehicles yet in search of food & territory they are wandering bear village as their mom has left them already. Both these sa tigresses gave us good time & I could observe them moving through forest & making their markings. It's these markings which are in the form of urine, and rubbing their body on tree bark & claw marks which makes other tigers aware of new tigers in the area as well this will help them to find their mate also!
About the video gone viral, the forest dept has banned any vehicles stopping on this main road which now is frequented by many tigers but the point is, why to ban stopping of safari vehicles also which are there by paying the charges & which follow every rule, is my question! Rather the forest dept should ban any private vehicle without purpose on this (or any such) road & keep twenty-four hours patrolling along the road so illegal tourists will be curbed on all roads passing through forests. This will make tigers also feel safe as well reduce such shameful acts of humans chasing a tiger on foot just to make insta reel. As I said it was sa tigress so she shied away but had she panicked & attacked these humans then we would have declared her as a threat to humans & sent her to the zoo or killed her! And all this sa tigress’s fault is, her mom has left her without proper training because we have taken their space & on the other hand, we only are troubling her like a circus animal, rather than supporting her, is my point of sharing!
Lastly, we went to Umred Kharandala Pauni Wildlife Sanctuary where again I got to meet more sub-adults, adding more knowledge to me about this category of tigers. Here there are two tigresses X Mark & Shadow & both have sa cubs which are near separation & trying to make their living on their own. At the same time the famous F2 tigress which has five cubs, all of them have separated from her & now imagine a forest where there were two male tigers & three female tigers now there are nearly nine more tigers in the same space, what kind of mayhem must have been happening here & I am not counting other tigers existing earlier in this! Needless to say, villagers around these forests are having sleepless nights as on the very same day I was in UKPWS, F2 tigress's one of the sa cubs have killed (sorry for the word) a villager & the situation was tense. When I enquired about the incident, the deceased man was a youngster of twenty-two age & had taken his cattle to graze. One of the sa tiger has attacked his cattle & to rescue them this boy got exposed to the tiger & eventually got killed himself! This is bound to happen as first these sa tigress is not fully trained to kill in an instant the way a grown-up tiger does & then they have grown up seeing humans around so they are not that shy with humans like core tigers where human exposure is near zero. And then hunger makes you do the weirdest things even for the humans, these are just teenagers though they are tigers. And then even the villagers also need to understand, if you try to take away food from your pet dog, it also snarls at you, here you are trying to intervene in the lunch of a hungry tiger, which must be avoided! But again, the involved human was also a teen-ager, & he must have thought the tiger would run away seeing him! Now the scene around all these forests is that you are not even getting workers to work in fields with such kind of incidences as grown-up tigers are survivors & they understand rules of survival & first rule is keep away from humans! But the sa tigers are desperate to survive & with their incomplete training & lack of strength to hunt as well to protect themselves from other bigger tigers they are bound to get involved in such a situation, for which we the humans are responsible & we only must find solution, is my subject of sharing! On Pauni road where we left the two male sa tigers just a few hundred meters from that spot village main road was there & group of village women were waiting for a bus unaware of two tigers relaxing inside the forests so close! On one hand this is a very heartening sight but on the other hand we are sitting on a time bomb as sa tigers are unpredictable & you never know what will happen with them, something we must make humans aware & trin to handle & fast!
Outcome is, as I have already mentioned, most deaths of the tigers are of these sa tigers as they are not trained to deal with obstacles which humans have made around the forests & the death comes in many ways, by electrocution, by falling in open well, by road or railway accident & if you survive all these then even by another big tiger! Some where our land policy makers must sit with forest dept & find a balanced solution as space is something even humans are fighting wars over it but for these sa tigers, the only army they have is their young body & a curios brain & we all know that isn’t enough to win any modern day’s war of survival! Only if some of the humans decides to stand in between the people around forests & sub-adult tigers, taking right steps, then there is some hope for these teen-age tigers or else I can see the darkness ahead for the young tigress which even their sharpest night vision can’t see; adios with this warning or request to those few humans!
*There is lot to share about sub-adult tigers & observing them, will do that in part 2 (Dhurandhar effect, lol) just one thing the place I was staying at Moharli gate i.e. Vasundhra has developed a small courtyard where flowering plants have been planted & it was like fairy land in the morning hours with butterflies, which are a very important aspect of wildlife & forests. I decided to make such patches in every project I will build back in my concrete jungle, as these are small acts but they can do so much nice support to nature!
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Sanjay Deshpande
Sanjeevani Dev.
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