Our next stop was Pench National Park and Tiger Reserve, or as we started calling it, Pench Leopard Reserve. You’ll understand why in a minute.

Pench National Park was established in 1983, and the area was the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. We saw a few of his characters there, like Tabaqui, the Indian golden jackal.

And Mao, or Mor, the peacock.

And there was Shere Khan (The Tiger King), the man eating Bengal tiger, and the arch enemy of Mowgli.

However, we didn’t see a lot of tigers at Pench, but there seemed to be leopards everywhere!

Jim Corbett, who we will hear more about next time, wrote in his famous book The Man Eaters of Kumaon;

“Those who have never seen a leopard under favorable conditions in his natural surroundings can have no conception of the grace of movement, and beauty of colouring, of this the most graceful and the most beautiful of all animals in our Indian jungles. Nor are his attractions limited to outward appearances, for pound for pound, his strength is second to none, and in courage he lacks nothing.”

And as if to underscore those words, this leopard had recently brought down a Sambar Deer that was at least twice its size. I will spare you the photos of that, but it was one big buck. How he did it we will never know.

And as always, there were plenty of birds and other creatures.