Bhaiyalal and the Sapat tigress

© Suhas Kumar, 2009, (revised -2017)

Summer in Seoni is like a sponge that sucks all the juice from your body; sweat flows out from every pore leaving you limp and lifeless unless you are in the habit of drinking several litres of fluid every day. The trick is to drink water frequently and never come out without covering your head and face. I had braved five scorching summers in this district from 1985 to 1990 while I served as the director of Pench National Park.

When I joined Pench in June 1985, my predecessor Mr. Parihar - an officer from the old school admired for his skills as a wildlife manger and a popular bridge player among the local mandarins - had done some critical groundwork. He had got the territorial forest land and staff transferred to the national park and set up several patrolling outposts at strategic locations for it was going to be the core protection strategy to redeem the habitats from the relentless resource use pressures from the local people and their cattle of the thirty villages that were heavily dependent on the forests for grazing cattle, wood and other forest produce. When I assumed charge my foremost concern was to restore the degraded habitats and instill some respect for the new national park in the minds of the locals as well as city dwellers. While it was not so easy to convince the city dwelling picnic minded visitors that included a class of reckless mandarins who loved to enter the park at any godforsaken hour with powerful searchlights to watch wild animals, I was able to dissuade this practise by using a mixed strategy of persuasion and threat. But it was an arduous uphill task with the locals who saw the national park as a huge threat to their livelihood; with them, I gradually developed a love – hate relationship. And one of the hateful acts, which they enjoyed the most and I hated the most, was starting a fire in tinder dry forest.

Summer, besides its life-sucking heat also brings in its wake forest fires – for it leaves grasses parched and fire prone. In those initial years, the problem of fire got compounded further as after the national park came into being the collection of forest produce - that the local people have been gathering for generations and cattle grazing- was banned making villagers hostile. The park and its staff became their enemy number one. Many of them where so disgruntled that they were too happy to cause trouble in the park and keep my staff and me on our toes - one of their diabolic pastimes was to toss a live bidi (country cigarette) butt on the grasses along forest roads, give a hearty laugh and move on leaving a raging conflagration behind that took several hours of hard labour to contain. These fires were disastrous for wild animals, forests and us. There were certain days on which we had to deal with not one but several scattered fires.

This story that involves my dexterous driver Bhaiyalal in the backdrop of a firefighting operation that took place some 24 years ago. It was a sweltering summer night; the fan above my head was spitting gusts of hot air, and I was turning and tossing in my bed desperately trying to sleep. Suddenly the call bell gave a rattling shriek, and I was up on my feet in a jiffy. At the door the orderly of my friend Mr. Gupta was staring at me- his anxious face displayed the urgency of the news he had brought. The range officer, Karmajhiri had called Mr. Gupta's residence- as in those days the park office as well as my home was bereft of the modern means of communication – and he had requested Mr. Gupta to inform me of the forest fire that was raging in the park near Alikatta. Whenever such news arrived, my duty was to respond quickly. I sent for my driver Bhaiyalal who came cycling down within 20 minutes but the lady luck was not on our side for when we got into the jeep, and Bhaiyalal turned on the ignition the engine coughed once and then went dead, the battery was without juice. Ultimately with the help of my orderly the diesel jeep was pushed uphill to the main road and rolled down the slope - this worked as it always does with all trusted decrepit diesel vehicles - and we were off to the park via Badalpar dirt road as it was to save us half an hour. We reached Alikatta in an hour and a half. My staff and villagers from Alikatta were fighting the blaze using traditional means that consists of beating the flames with leafy twigs. Grabbing a leafy twig - which is hard to find in summer in a usually leafless forest - I joined the fire warriors. It took almost forty minutes to contain the fire, and by that time I was about to collapse from severe dehydration. I ran down the high bank to find a pool of water in the river bed for the Pench river is not perennial, and during summer water remains confined in small pools - doh or kasa as the local people call them – I found one soon and gulped the turbid yellowish water scooping it with my cupped palm; it was as if I were drinking the elixir of life for those few scoops of water brought me around and I was up on my feet and scampered towards my team. Reaching them, I ordered my team to inspect the perimeter of the burnt area to track down burning stumps and shimmering embers and douse them with water or soil, for a little negligence could start a new fire. After accomplishing this task, I instructed one of the fire watchers to climb up a tree and scan the horizon to find out if any other fire was blazing in the park. Soon we learned that a small fire razed along the river near the abandoned village of Sapat.

The fire we detected was not very far from us. My team- six fire watchers, the range officer, range assistant, the local guard and I crammed into the beleaguered jeep and proceeded towards the likely location of the fire. To reach the spot we had to leave the forest road to Sapat and turn into a disused haulage road – that was in operation when transportation of felled timber from the submergence area of Totaladoh dam was on till a year ago. After about 200 metres Bhaiyalal suddenly stopped the vehicle as the road was in disrepair, and the jeep couldn’t move further. I asked him to wait in the jeep and rest of us proceeded towards the fire that was still about a mile away. As I along with my team entered the dense, dark jungle – the radium on my watch showed it was 1 A.M. - with only a torch to show us the path. I had this nagging premonition that all was not well. We had walked only a furlong when the frantic shrieks of Bhaiyalal reached us – "sahib, sahib, sahib." Shouting back at the top of my voice, I turned and ran full speed tipping over a fallen branch which tore my trousers and gave my shin a bad bruise – following me were nine others, also shouting in a chorus. We reached, where the jeep was, to find Bhaiyalal shaking and shivering as though he was in the grip of malaria.
The account of his nightmare that Bhaiyalal gave us goes like this – "Sir, you saved my life. As soon as you people left a tiger came and stood just by my side. I hopelessly tried to start the vehicle but couldn't, I tried to blow the horn and put on the lights nothing happened as the battery was bust. Then I shouted to you and after hearing the uproar that you all were making the tiger moved away, sir. "
I got worried about the safety of my team members. I hoped that the fire which was spreading along the river bank would, in all likelihood, die naturally after reaching the moist river bank. Thinking this, I ordered my team to leave me at Alikatta inspection hut and proceed to Chchindi matta camp, stay there overnight and come back to me early next morning. Chchindi matta is a tall hillock from where a sizable part of the park can be seen therefore I had asked the team to rest there for the night. From there, any fire could be detected easily, and they could have come back to me in time to embark on another fire fighting expedition. This plan was executed. The night went off peacefully, and at 5 O'clock in the morning I heard them coming. When they alighted from the jeep I could see that all of them were excited, when I asked them what was the cause of their bewilderment they narrated an interesting tale - while coming back, at the spot from where we had taken the turn on the haulage road, they came face to face with a tigress with two cubs by her side. I was happy to hear this as sighting of cubs was good news for the nascent park but I told Bhaiyalal how lucky he was to have escaped unhurt yester night - for a tigress with cubs is unpredictable and had Bhaiyalal attempted to get down from the jeep and run he would not have been, in person, reporting to me the sighting of the mother tigress and her cubs that morning.

That escape from the tigress got deeply etched in the psyche of Bhaiyalal and later culminated in another fascinating tale that I would recount later. 
@ Suhas Kumar

The Tigers of Bhopal: No Land for tigers.

©Suhas Kumar, Oct 31, 2015

A hapless young male tiger strayed away from its already depleted and deeply fragmented habitat, which once allowed tigers of Malwa to travel far and wide in search of new home and mate, into the outskirts of a rapidly expanding Bhopal city. The tiger entered a fenced compound probably in the night and when the first rays of the sun struck, he was at its wits end when he found himself on totally unfamiliar grounds. He couldn’t gather courage to move away and find his way back home as the clamour of the city and activities of humans had already begun and soon he was surrounded by a huge crowd and a team of rescue personnel. He knew he was in grave danger, he tried to escape – jumped on to an asbestos roof but his heavy frame was too heavy for the sheets – a sheet broke and he fell into an empty room – trapped.

The rescue team climbed onto the roof and immobilized it. The tiger was then safely transported the tiger to Van Vihar for a health check up.The next step after rescue and health check–up was to release the animal in a suitable habitat as a  healthy full grown wild animal has no place in a zoo - he belongs to its habitat, alas habitats are all usurped by we humans.

Tiger is not a refrigerator that you can  lift, transport and install safely   somewhere else - they are living creatures, they are part of a larger system and before they could be rehabilitated one has to find out a safe place (in terms of intra- specific dynamics, availability of prey, water and cover). Usually when a tiger or leopard is rescued and caged the whole town wants to see the poor animal; especially the public representatives, the news reporters and the local mandarins pressurize the forest officials to keep the animal in the cage until the last member of their family takes a peep at the animal. This causes a lot of trauma to the captive animal and in some cases the   irritated animal damages its canines or  loses its claws as while venting its anger on the iron grills of the cage. When this happens, such impaired animal cannot be released in its wild habitat and spends rest of its life languishing in a small enclosure of the zoo.

The rescue protocol and the law (section 11 of the Wildlife (Protection) Act demands release of captured healthy animal in habitat suitable for it as early as possible and under the law the chief wildlife warden has the exclusive authority to take a decision.  In order to save it from further persecution and trauma, the forest staff don't keep rescued tigers on display for VIPs, news reporters and public – to them, the life of the tiger is more important than satisfying personal needs of individuals and to soothe their inflated egos.

As I said suitable habitats for tigers have become scarce and those areas that qualify as suitable habitats have enough tigers already. Each tiger needs a large territory where it performs its life functions and if the resources are scarce, it defends this piece of land with all its might. In areas where food, water and cover are abundant tigers have been found to tolerate other tigers to a greater extent, but here, this tolerance is fragile – as such tolerance can easily wither away with any negative change in the conditions of the habitat. Therefore, when it comes to rehabilitating a tiger into a tiger habitat understanding these factors and finding a suitable place for release is part of the protocol. As I understand, in this particular case the wildlife wing had three choices in mind – Nauradehi sanctuary, Satpura tiger reserve and Panna tiger reserve. Nauradehi is under heavy biotic pressure from 69 villages inside its boundaries and numerous others just outside the periphery, and as a result the prey population is insignificant. Besides the staff in Nauradehi is not trained and equipped for intensive monitoring of tigers. Reintroducing tiger at this stage here might   lead to serious man: animal conflict as cattle would become the staple prey as natural prey is already depleted.

Satpura tiger reserve has received 5 tigers from outside in the last three years. These tigers have occupied the relocated village sites and prey on feral cattle and herbivores who have responded well to the restored habitat. Now, at the moment there is hardly a vacant place where another tiger may settle down. On the north eastern side of the reserve a few villages have been relocated recently, the habitat is still recovering, prey population is low and the feral cattle are hard to find as villagers from these villages took away all their livestock when they shifted out, therefore this site, at the moment is unsuitable for releasing tigers. The management is on its way to translocate some chital from Pench tiger reserve to catalyze rapid growth of prey here. I hope that a year from now this particular area may be in a position to sustain one or two tigers.

Considering the facts mentioned above, Panna tiger reserve stood out as the best choice among the three available choices. The Panna tiger reserve has a huge core area and a much larger buffer with some suitable habitats to sustain tiger. The habitats have improved and the prey base has responded to this improvement. The Tiger reintroduction plan for Panna tiger reserve, emphasizes on the importance of bringing one male from other area to refresh the genetic stock. There is a sound protocol as well as trained professionals for monitoring of tigers, therefore, shifting this tiger to Panna was the best possible option for the wildlife managers. The threat that a tiger might succumb to intra-specific fights, diseases or poaching is omnipresent, the only precaution that a manager must take is to remain vigilant and ready to ward off the external threats such as poaching and manmade destruction of tiger habitat. We need not be overly sentimental about territorial fights, cannibalism, abandonment of cubs by mother and cub mortality as this is the way the nature works. Even interfering too much in case of an injury caused naturally is uncalled for, this should be done only when the tiger is incapable in cleaning and licking the injured part or the injury is such that it needs immediate surgical intervention.

The issue of tigers in Bhopal

Next morning all the Bhopal dailies were blaming the tiger for coming to the city – Berasia mein tiger - log dahsaht mein". How callous of them. It was not the public who were being terrorized by the tiger but this poor tiger that was shivering with fear of the thousands of humans who had gathered in large number - shouting and jeering.

The News papers reported that the hon'ble – NGT has asked the government to keep the tigers within their habitat and to see that they don't enter areas where humans live. Is it not ironical to erroneously believe that the tigers are the intruders? I wonder who the encroacher is – man or tiger?. The City of Bhopal sits within a tiger habitat and in the last 15 years the city has grown rapidly eating further into the wilderness - fragmenting and destroying tiger’s home. Look at the maps below showing the forest cover in and around Bhopal town  2015 and 1960 to comprehend the situation: -

The city of Bhopal is surrounded by a garland of forested habitat. Though, this habitat is fragmented at places by the human habitations and developmental infrastructures, the tigers still can move throughout this garland taking advantages of nalas, and riparian vegetation (along the river banks) . The Ratapani sanctuary is a secure habitat where tigers have been breeding. Over the years the habitat has improved and the number of tigers has increased, necessitating young tigresses and tigers to move out from within the sanctuary boundary to the forests outside the reserve to find suitable breeding and foraging places. My personal knowledge is that tigers movement in Kerwa has been reported every year since 1996, it is another matter that in those times media was not so proactive to seek out tigers and the news about tigers nor the Kerwa area was so full of academic institutions , human colonies and a heavy tourist inflow. The only change in the behavior of tigers that we see now is that some tigresses have begun using Kerwa and Smardha forests for breeding and raising cubs.

Tigers make news especially when they are seen around cities, only a little commotion precipitates in media when a tiger is seen around a village. Is it an elite abhorrence of tigers? The facts that stares in our face remains that the city dwellers are under real threat from rising number of criminals in Bhopal and from among animals they are more prone to contracting rabies from a huge population of stray dogs as well as their pet dogs and cats and getting a deadly bite from the snakes that have become more active as their dwelling holes and crevices are being dug out and destroyed by colonisers ; on the other hand the tigers around Bhopal pose a marginal threat, in fact, they are themselves seriously threatened by humans.

Possible Strategy that may resolve the problem :

1. Plan the expansion of the city rationally in order to preserve the garland of the extant green belt around Bhopal.

2. Identify all movement paths that a tiger might use to stray into human dwellings, fence these areas off with a combination of mesh-wire and solar power fence. Both type of fences would need intensive up keep and monitoring.

3. Train and place at least 6 professional teams to monitor and report tiger moment 24X7 outside Ratapani sanctuary, and issue timely alerts.

4. Identify suitable potential tiger habitats outside protected areas (in territorial divisions and buffer zones), carry out required habitat augmentation work to enhance prey base, build capacity of the staff and equip them in a way to combat wildlife crime and monitor tigers in their areas. Once this is is achieved the wildlife wing may be able to rehabilitate tigers straying out of natal areas into towns in such potential habitats.

5. Improve habitat protection and development of grasslands in Kerwa, Kathotiya Ratapani, Badi and Samradha forest and augment water sources where necessary in these areas. Once the habitat improves translocate chital from PAs with surplus chital population.

6. Implementing this plan will entail a huge capital and recurring expenditure, but in a state that is committed to conserving its natural heritage, this is the only logical way to protect the Bhopal tigers from vanishing into oblivion.

Shift tigers ?

I would emphatically say 'No' to any suggestion that involves shifting all tigers inhabiting Kerwa and Samardha forests to other areas. The reason is obvious but people don't want to see reason – Once a tiger is removed, the dispersing tigers from Ratapani will occupy the vacant territory. Secondly at the moment we do not have any area left where we may safely release tigers from outside. As I said earlier we have to create such safe release areas to accommodate tigers that are threatened by human intolerance.

Note : Views expressed above are solely my personal opinion based on my very long experience of managing wildlife and guiding the management of wildlife in Madhya Pradesh and not written in any official capacity.

 Bhopal Forest spread maps 2015 and 1960