It is said in some circles that if the mountain will not come to you then you must go to the mountain.

We all desire to spot a Tiger in the wild. And to accomplish this, we visit various wildlife sanctuaries across the country. Well as I chanced to live and work in one, I have seen my fair share of Tigers in the wild. After a while, the novelty of the whole thing began wearing off, and I reached a point when even though I had not seen the big cat for half a year, this did not bother me.

Then one day I received news of a tigress having wandered out of the park and resting in a secluded spot that I much favoured! Now this is far from the park and the tigress would have had to cross several villages to reach the spot. The situation continued for the next couple of months.

One day I decided to finally go for a short safari into the park. As I was driving past the elephant camp, I happened to see the Rain Forest Officer. I stopped for a chat and spotted a tigress in a cage. It was the one that favoured my secret spot. We finally had an encounter!

A Tigress at Close Quarters!

She was tranquilized and to be released into the Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary. Bhadra has a reasonably good prey base, but not an overly healthy Tiger population. It is also well protected and the perfect place for her. She would have also invigorated the Bhadra Tiger ‘gene pool’.

The tigress and I continued looking at each other as if in an attempt to figure out which of us was the ‘mountain’.

The Tigress in a Cage

Vikram Nanjappa

Vikram Nanjappa likes to be described as an interested and well-informed amateur. He draws his inspiration from the band of men called the Orientalists, most of whom were amateurs. By profession, they were soldiers and administrators. However, today, they are remembered as giants of scholarship. Like them, his field of enquiry is ‘Man and Nature; (with an emphasis on Nature) whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other’. He currently resides in Bangalore and freelances as a writer and photographer. He can be contacted at nanjappavikram@yahoo.co.in.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 5th, 2012 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Carnivore, Destinations, Homes for Animals, Mammal, Nature, Predators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.