The tigers of Ranthambore

As we drove to the airport on our way to an extended weekend in Ranthambore national park, The Family said “We probably won’t see tigers. Let’s think of it as a nice break”. She’s been to Ranthambore several times, seen many of the tigers there, and returned with fantastic pictures taken on a dinky little camera. On my only previous trip to Ranthambore I returned with a photo showing the rump of a tiger in bushes by the road: I’d never known it was there. Spotting a tiger is a matter of luck. By going in the wrong season, we knew that luck was against us.

The wildlife sanctuary is one of the oldest in India: the erstwhile Maharaja of Jaipur donated his hunting park to the nation, and it was made into a sanctuary in 1955. It gets its name from the Ranthambore hill fort inside its current boundary. The fort is about a thousand years old (although its origins are disputed), and currently on the UNESCO world heritage list. The park is now 392 square km in area, and tourism is allowed in only a small fraction of this. The parts of a sanctuary where tourists are not allowed is called the core area. Among the large national parks, Ranthambore has a fairly small core area.

In spite of this, the effort has been fairly successful. When we talked to drivers, guards or shopkeepers, we were told of new tiger cubs, three year olds, and the death of the iconic tiger Machli. On my first visit to Ranthambore, I’d met the legendary conservation worker, Fateh Singh Rathore. At that time I heard from him the idea that the stakeholders in wildlife conservation are the local people as well as the wider public, and that only a partnership of the two can succeed. The organization he was part of, Tiger Watch, has clearly been successful in the effort to involve the community in conservation. The locality seems to be fully invested in this effort now, and earns good money though tourism. Tiger conservation is a rallying cry: because a tiger is an apex predator, you cannot preserve it in the wild without preserving its environment.

Contact with humans changes animal behaviour. I saw one example of this in the Mizo hills, where unchecked hunting has depleted the hills of birds, and made them extremely wary of humans. I saw the opposite here, where treepies land on humans to beg for food. Neither of these is natural behaviour. The problem of plastic trash is strong: the photo of the peacock which you see above was taken inside the park. Conservation workers are aware of this problem, which is why tourism is not allowed inside the relatively large core area of these sanctuaries.

The Family was right. We travelled in the large cantors, which take about twenty people. Tourists are becoming very responsible now: people talked in undertones, keeping absolutely quiet when the guide called for silence, there were no attempts to feed animals, and there was no littering. We saw no tigers or leopards, although there was at least one sighting every day while we were in the park. We sat at firesides every evening, and listened, enchanted, to the stories of the people who had seen tigers that day. We enjoyed ourselves, and returned with a reasonable bird list.