After our flight back to New Delhi Marjorie and I said goodbye to Bill and Sue, who were continuing on to Varanasi and Amritsar, two of the more interesting cities in northern India. Marjorie and I would be heading north and into the foothills of the Himalayas, early the next morning, in search of “one more tiger picture”, as Marjorie would say, to Corbett National Park and Tiger Reserve. Corbett is one of my favorite places, and I was hoping for another great experience for Marjorie as this was her first time there.
After a six hour drive north to Ramnagar we entered the park for the one hour ride in our safari vehicle to the Dhikala Zone and rest house. Half way to Dhikala it started to sprinkle. Then it started to rain. Then it started to pour. Our driver Firooz and guide Prakash pulled the tarp over the top and propped it up with a piece of bamboo cut and fashioned for this very purpose. My head provided the second prop and we went the rest of the way to camp like this.
Things didn’t get much better that afternoon as the heavy rains continued. However, Prakash insisted we should go out, but we prevailed and decided to sit that drive out. A good choice. We slept all afternoon to the accompaniment of the pleasant sound of a steady rain on our roof.
It was still raining the next morning, but it looked like it was letting up so off we went. After an hour or so, things started to clear up and reveal the magic that Corbett is.
The park sits in the Himalayan foothills, in the northern administrative district known as Kumaon, which borders Nepal to the east and Tibet to the north. It gets cold at night and hot water bottles are standard issue this time of year. A large number of migrating birds come through here in the winter months including this Pied Kingfisher. They hover over the water, much like a harrier. Looking, looking, looking ….
… until diving and scoring!!! Sorry, I didn’t catch the score, but did catch the result!
Numerous other birds, including many large raptors, hang out in northern India during the winter.
Corbett National Park and Tiger Reserve, India’s first, was created in 1936 and is named after British civil servant, and hunter turned conservationist, James Corbett (1875 – 1955) who was a local official in this area during the 1930’s.
Corbett wrote the classic book, “The Man-Eaters of Kumaon” which details his many forays into this untamed area, tracking down tigers and leopards who had devoured local farmers as well as there livestock. Its estimated that from 1907 to 1937 man-eaters may have killed and eaten more than one-thousand humans here. And then there were the man-eating leopards who accounted for another 400+ killed.
During his career as a tiger and leopard hunter, Corbett is credited with bagging 19* documented man-eating tigers and 14 leopards, saving untold human lives. Later he was instrumental in the development, and protection, of this area as a national park.
One afternoon while cruising along the Sambar Loop (named for the area where tigers often hunt the big Sambar Deer) our guide Prakash suddenly told Firooz our driver to stop. He said there was “alarming” going on and wanted to stop and listen. Sure enough a Kalij Pheasant pair were sounding alarms indicating there was an intruder in their neighborhood.
We looked back behind our vehicle and out of the bush popped this jungle cat. It looks like a large house cat, and is about the same size. However, looks are deceiving. We were told that this cat can bring down a small Spotted Deer, no easy task. Leopards can have trouble bringing down small Spotted Deer. The jungle cat didn’t wait around for long and quickly disappeared into the bush but allowed me one little pic. Meanwhile the male and female congratulated themselves on saving each other, at least for another day.
Corbett National Park is also home to a large population of wild elephants including this little family.
One sunny afternoon, we were cruising along a section of the Ramganga River near where that first photo was taken. Across the river, near the fork, a tiger was sitting hunkered down in the tall grass, watching the river go by. We too sat and watched for awhile when suddenly it got up and started for the river. Sure enough it was going to cross to our side. Stopping to check us out he continued across, (Yes, we have video), and crawled up the riverbank hidden just around the bend.
Prakash and Firooz had a good idea where it might be headed. As with all Indian parks, and most parks in Africa, vehicles are confined to designated tracks and aren’t allowed to go “off piste”, or out of bounds, as it were. We drove up the valley a little ways and waited. And waited some more. Suddenly there was a rustling in the bush and we saw the young tiger making his way towards the track we were stopped on. After a short interval he stepped into a small window of afternoon light as he passed by parallel to us.
And then, across the road and back into the jungle he went. Marjorie had gotten to see the subject of one more (and perhaps my last?) tiger picture. And so it goes.
* One man-eater, The Champawat Tigress, was credited with 436 human kills in Nepal and northern India before she was finally brought down by Corbett in 1907.
After the park and tiger reserve were established Corbett turned from hunting down man-eaters to photographing them.
“Apart from the difference in cost between shooting with a camera and shooting with a rifle, and the beneficial effect it has on our rapidly decreasing stock of tigers, the taking of good photographs gives far more pleasure to the sportsman than the acquisition of a trophy, and further, while the photograph is of interest to all lovers of wildlife, the trophy is only of interest to the individual who acquired it.”
“As an illustration, I would instance Fred Champion. Had Champion shot his tigers with a rifle instead of a camera his trophies would long since have lost their hair and been consigned to the dustbin, whereas the records made by his camera are a constant source of pleasure to him, and are of interest to sportsmen in all parts of the world.” -from The Man-Eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett.
And so it goes, as they say. You can see more photos from this trip at my Flickr site by clicking on;
https://www.flickr.com/photos/
If you would like information on booking or organizing a trip like this please feel free to contact me and I will get you hooked up with our handler on the ground in India at Nature Safari India. They have done a stellar job of putting together trips for us there since 2018. I highly recommend them.
