All happy families are alike

The opening words of Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, are the title of this blog post because they apply to tigers as well as humans. When you see the famous tigress T15 of Pench National Park, known locally as Collarwali, with her cubs, you can hardly question this insight. I hope the featured photo captures this sense of ease within the family.

It was 42 degrees in the shade. The mother eased herself into the water. The cubs came running, and walked into the water. They nuzzled their mother, and she licked them. I’ve never seen The Family look more content than when she is watching tigers. She stood up on the seat of the open jeep, binoculars glued to her eyes, as I stood next to her and clicked away. The field of view was restricted because we had to look between trees to see the tigers. Still, it was a magnificent view.

Tigers love water. The mother took a long time cooling off. The cubs are smaller, so the heat affects them more easily, but they also cool off faster. They sat quietly in the water for a while, drank some. But soon they were climbing and scrambling over the mother. Very soon after that, like the impatient six month-olds that they are, they were out of the water and exploring their surroundings. The mother continued to sit in the water for a while. In the photo below you can see the streaks of mud left on her coat as the cubs clung to her.

Collarwali is a legendary mother because she has brought up six different litters, and managed to keep most of her offspring alive in the time that they were with her. This requires continuous hunting and feeding, especially in the last year or more. Tigers are quick breeders, but the cubs cannot live without a large base of prey for the mother. Pench, and a few other national parks have succeeded in stabilizing and then increasing the tiger population by keeping the rest of the ecosystem stable: the deer that the tigers feed on, the vegetation that the prey eat, the insects and birds which pollinate and disperse seeds, and many other strands in the web.

The Family was thrilled by this display of affection between the mother and the cubs, and very surprised when she found that the bond breaks completely when the cubs are about two years old. During this time the mother teaches them to hunt. I found it surprising that hunting is a learnt skill, not an inborn talent. To begin with, the cubs are taught to hold still so that the prey can come up to them. At the end they even have to be taught how to bite the neck of the prey to finish the kill.

The mother and children have to bond in order for this skill to be transmitted. But when the cubs are large enough to hunt for themselves, the mother pushes them out of her territory. They have to range out to find an unoccupied area, or take one over from an older tiger grown too feeble to protect its own range.

Tigers are lonely hunters.