India is blessed with abundant bird species. In the crush of humanity there is still respect for life. Royalty may have their hunting preserves, but the culture of killing was never really the domain of the everyman, who saw life as sacred. White cows walk the thoroughfares with the equanimity of a maharani, and Macaques steal your lunch or your rings and are not poisoned. Birds ride the skies with carefree abandon, more than a thousand different kinds, multicolored and exotic.
In Kanha the wild Peacocks were screaming and strutting their glorious tail display through the foggy clearings as a reminder that the world in all its imagination held nothing more beautiful than they. A pair of Collared Scops Owls peeked out of their nest hole, and a Painted Partridge, speckled black and white with a dash of russet like a helmet on its head, scurried across the dusty dirt road. You can get jaded in India as one stunning bird after another crosses your lens: Crested Hawk-eagle, Sirkeer Cuckoo, Brainfever Bird (which monotonously calls “brain fe-ver, brain fe-ver, brain fe-ver” until you get the disease), Green Bee-eater, Grey Hornbill, Brown-headed Barbet, Large Cuckooshrike, Black Stork, Coucal, Red-rumped Swallow, Black-headed Oriole, Scarlet Minivet, Plum-headed Parakeet, Paradise Flycatcher with its long white tail, and on and on and on. Just saying the names is exotic.
By 10 a.m. we were on the backs of Elephants crashing through a dense forest of sal and bamboo in search of a Tiger that was eating his kill of Spotted Deer. We went in one and two Elephants at a time to where the Tiger lay in the brush, so well camouflaged in the flickering sunlight that had you been walking ten feet away you would never have seen him. He growled at the intrusion of his mortal enemy the Elephant but stayed protectively near his bloody kill. He was sleepy with satiation, which gave the four of us sitting ten feet above in the howdah a perfect opportunity to gaze at his magnificent coloration. No two Tigers are alike. Of course, no two anything in nature are alike, but a Tiger’s stripes and dots are clearly identifiable. This was a magnificent young male, his pale yellow eyes fixed on ours until I felt sure he would rise from his morning bed and leap on the Elephant’s thighs toward us. I was sorry we had disturbed his quiet refuge, but I was not sorry for the indelible image of his magnificence, which I carry with me to this day. I had looked into the eye of the Tiger.
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
So begins William Blake’s seminal poem. It is not a poem about seeking to know the Tiger but to know its creator. It is a poem of wonder, of the inexplicable, of the mystery of being. In an age of reason, how do you explain the Tiger? It is also a metaphor for our own divided nature: “Did He who made the lamb make thee?” As human beings, we long for the gentler, rational side, our better natures, but in reality we must confront the ferocity of the Tiger in us, the wild part. We are apex predators alike, and the predator in us is alive and well.
Alan was quiet. But then, I have seen him that way before around big cats. Perhaps the small stuttering boy remembered the pacing Jaguar in the Bronx Zoo and his pledge to save him. Perhaps the indignity of the Tiger being gawked at by human beings in his forest home made Alan sad. I don’t know, but I do know that as a scientist he appreciated the superb condition of the animal. The Tiger was about twelve years old, he said, and weighed five hundred pounds.
At day’s end in India, with Alan Rabinowitz, whiskey, and a cigar
The Elephants finished their morning work, and after lunch we watched them bathe in the river, the mahouts scrubbing their thick gray hide with long tined brushes while they rolled on their sides and lifted their trunks, spraying water over themselves like a showerhead. A five-month-old baby took it upon himself to race out of the water and play with us on the shore, bumping his side against our legs and making circles around us like a big dog. The more we laughed, the more he engaged us body to body, until his mother began her ponderous wade toward the hilarity. The mahout intervened and pushed the little one back in the water, where he began to butt his patient mother instead.
Mahouts are born into their profession and a young Elephant is given to a young mahout to train, a relationship that endures until death. There are gentle mahouts and there are mean ones, just as with animal trainers anywhere. Elephants have been as indispensible to Asia in clearing the land as oxen were to North America. In Asia they are still used for logging and increasingly for tourists who want the experience of riding in a howdah and watching the animals perform. Thailand has few wild Elephants left in their forests, so in the northern city of Chiang Mai, a tourist mecca, the local Karen people have been illegally importing Elephants from Myanmar to the west, poaching their population of these remarkable animals. Life is hard for wild Elephants today; they are chased for capture or killed for their tusks. The working Elephant may have a better life; though enslaved, it is given food, a bath, and shelter.
The next morning I abandoned my birding buddies for early-morning Tiger spotting with Alan. As the sun was rising we saw a pair of huge Fish Owls, like our Great Horned Owl except for its exclusive partiality for frogs, fish, and other things aquatic. February is breeding season for owls in India, so they are seen in daylight more often.
Our jeep was not far into the forest when a mahout rode up on a small Elephant and led us to four Tiger cubs cuddled together like giant kittens in a jumble of lantana leaves. Alan said they were probably about eleven months old. One took off into the brush, then another and another while the mahout kept circling and circling around the snarling fourth until she too leapt away to safety.
As if that precious sighting weren’t enough for a lifetime, an hour and a half later in an open field we saw four more cubs, thirteen months old, one gnawing on a Spotted Deer leg in the tall dry grass. They were lazy and full in the morning sun, staring at us with their honey eyes, the same color as their soft bed.
With abundant deer prey and no human predation, Kanha’s Tiger population was increasing. Our group saw twelve of the cats in three days. They roamed the park and its buffer zones freely. Sometimes they wandered outside the zone and attacked villagers or their animals. As tribal villagers encroached more and more on the buffer zones, crossing through the park to get from one place to another, making contact with Tigers was inevitable, and it sometimes resulted in death for both.
“The number-one challenge for conservation in India is animal-human contact,” said Belinda Wright, my dinner partner in Delhi one night. “One hundred and eighty-nine people were killed by leopards alone in 2003.”
I was shocked. Millions of India’s 1.2 billion people live next to forests and parks. Today the slow extirpation of predatory animals in contact with humans is a foregone conclusion despite the country’s ancient respect for all living things.
In a new residential district of Mumbai, one of the largest cities in the world, twelve people, most of them children, were killed by Leopards in 2004, and twenty-two others were attacked. The Leopards’ ancestral home was a sprawling nearby park, and one Leopard was on a ball field so often that it became the mascot of the ball team. As one mother lamented to the BBC: “It is really weird that in a city like Bombay [Mumbai] we have to live in fear of Leopards.” Indeed! If even one person was killed by a Mountain Lion in New York’s Central Park, that animal and all its cousins would be exterminated posthaste.
Belinda Wright founded India’s Wildlife Protection Society. She is a photographer and filmmaker who has dedicated her life to saving her country’s Tigers and other endangered animals. Her mother, Anne Wright, was on Indira Gandhi’s original Tiger Task Force and helped create India’s Wild Life Protection Act. India’s wildlife laws are some of the strictest anywhere. A man who kills another man can get bail—but not a man who kills a Tiger.
India’s population is poised to exceed China’s in the next few decades, and land is being rapidly developed to accommodate the expansion, replacing wildlife habitat. The Leopard and the Tiger, squeezed into smaller and
smaller habitats, are now prey themselves, falling to angry villagers and greedy poachers. It is getting harder and harder for Belinda’s organization to safeguard the animals hunted in their own designated sanctuaries.
We saw the extent of the problem in the next Tiger reserve we visited. Bangalore, in the southern state of Karnataka in the Western Ghats, is a short plane ride from Mumbai. Ullas Karanth, a leading Tiger biologist with WCS, met us in the reserve, Nagarahole. It was fifteen degrees hotter than in Khana and the controlled burning along the forest roads added to the heat and smoky vistas. Still, graceful rosewood, teak, and sandalwood trees swayed in gentle breezes.
Ullas had visited my Putnam County home in New York when Alan brought him one day for a picnic lunch by our babbling brook. We walked in the lush deciduous forest hillside, where the Wood Thrush fluted and a Phoebe snagged flies over the water, and Ullas commented on the abundance of downed wood on the forest floor. Why wasn’t it used by the people? We have more than enough, was my answer. “This would never happen in India,” said Ullas. Later, looking around at White-tailed Deer picking up drop apples in the orchard, a Wood Turtle nipping watercress at the water’s edge, a Water Snake sunning in the grass, and a Great Blue Heron darting fish in the lily pond, Ullas said, “All you need is monkeys in the trees.” It had never crossed my mind that we have no monkeys in the United States.
Ullas’s definitive study on threats to Tigers in the late 1990s revealed the extent of illegal hunting both within and outside all the Tiger reserves, mostly to satisfy China’s insatiable appetite for Tiger bone for the medicinal market. In Nagarahole, Ullas was clearly worried about the poaching of all wildlife. Without enough prey, the Tiger would not thrive, and they were walking lucre for poachers. The Chinese market for Tiger parts was so lucrative that it was nigh impossible for the local people, including officials, not to be in on the take. Although naive villagers might kill a Tiger for a few hundred dollars, at the end of the line a Chinese merchant could get as much as $50,000 for the animal. The lustrous skin fetched a high price on the fur market, or as a wall hanging or rug; the bones were ground up and used as an elixir for just about anything. The penis bone is supposed to confer virility—although as Prince Philip is said to have quipped, “The Chinese don’t need aphrodisiacs.” The number of dead Tigers making their way to China did not satisfy the demand, so China began to farm them for market. In 1993, bowing to world pressure, China banned trade in Tiger bone and Rhino horn. Illegal poaching and trading was never stamped out, however, and, with the promotion of the State Forestry Administration, an estimated two hundred Tiger farms began to market body parts and Tiger wine. These farms hold between five and six thousand Tigers today, far more than those in the wild. If the government believed farmed Tigers would quell the need for the wild Tiger, it was gravely mistaken. The desire for a “superior” animal only increased illegal poaching of the wild cats for traditional medicine, wine, and pelts.
A government program called LIFT—Living Inspiration of Tribals—is responsible for the resettlement of tribal peoples out of forest reserves. On our 2004 visit, four hundred families had voluntarily relocated from Nagarahole, and eight hundred more were waiting. Each family received land, two bullocks, a house, and three years of government help to get started. One of the new settlements had neat adobe-like row homes with prosperous plots of garden vegetables and flowers, a baked-in-the-sun development like planned communities anywhere. I asked an older man, through translation, how he liked his new home. His cryptic reply was “My home is what it is.” Then he added that he missed the breeze that came through his old thatched roof. He had gained the security of health care and better economics but lost the roots of his past. Unfortunately, men and wild animals cannot coexist in many wild places—we human beings keep taking too much.
Ullas had much to be proud of in Nagarahole. The wildlife had rebounded as people were relocated: Asian Elephants, herds of Gaur—wild cattle you do not want to confront on a forest trail if they decide to charge—families of Wild Boar rooting in the muddy banks, maroon-backed Indian Giant Squirrels in the trees, and hundreds of bird species.
One morning, as we waited patiently in the chill mist in our open jeep, the perfectly camouflaged face of a Leopard was illuminated low to the ground in sunlit vines. The cat cautiously emerged, deliberating whether he wanted to cross the road fifty feet from us, and then slunk back into the thick underbrush.
Leopards are more common than other cats in Asia, and far more secretive as well. They are magnificent creatures that can carry prey three times their weight up a tree to a large branch where it and they are safe from Tigers and Hyenas out to poach a meal. Leopards are the most adaptable of all the big felids, living in cold Russian climes as well as in the hottest deserts of Africa and Asia. Their adaptability has kept them alive, although the trade in Leopard fur and the fragmentation of their habitats continue to promote the decline of the species.
While no one wants or expects to live with a wild animal in a city—least of all the animal—out in the Indian countryside there are signs that education about wildlife is taking hold. Regular workshops have taught villagers to (1) listen for the warning cries of monkeys, deer, and dogs, (2) know the cats’ routes, which are pretty regular, (3) clear the village periphery of grass, shrubs, and garbage, (4) go in groups when nature calls, and (5) use flashlights after dark to make the Leopard think you are looking at him. One villager claimed to know when a Leopard or Tiger was near because, he said, “He stinks terribly.” This man even said that despite Leopard attacks he would prefer to live with the Leopard than without, because “tribals depend on the forest for their livelihood, and the health of the forest depends on the Leopard”—a sophisticated definition of the need for biodiversity.
Alan had no clear role on this Indian trip, other than as director of the Asia program, managing the work of Ullas and his colleagues. He gave a talk around the fire one night before dinner about animal-human contact and the bushmeat trade, but Ullas was our host and teacher. It was not Alan’s usual place to take a backseat—nor was it George Schaller’s.
George knew as much about Tigers as anyone in the world. He conducted the first scientific studies of the Bengal Tiger in India in the early 1980s. His book on the subject, The Deer and the Tiger, is considered the bible by many biologists. George could have spoken volumes about Tigers and the issues at hand, but with a grace that is uniquely his, he stood back and listened. I watched him in the lamplight, leaning against the wall, arms akimbo, as this new generation of Indian environmentalists took the lead with passion and integrity. His encouragement of younger scientists was legendary, from Jane Goodall to Dian Fossey to Alan Rabinowitz and now Ullas Karanth. His commitment to conservation was firm and clear:
If animals come into direct conflict with humans they need to be dealt with…The principal issue is to reduce conflict between man and animal. Regarding human rights and animal rights, you can do both, even in poor countries. The basic thing to remember is that we are wholly dependent on species, on the natural community for survival. When we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. Everything we need, want, use and buy comes from nature. So we must protect it and all its species, but try to mitigate problems.
George Schaller has been one of the greatest influences in my life, not only regarding animals and conservation but also on how one behaves in the world. His tall, lean body treads lightly on the earth as if at any minute it might take him into the realm of the sky. He is soft-spoken, with a will of steel. In a room full of people he will speak of conservation as a process that is never done and can never be abandoned. He will talk of animals forthrightly, hiding the deep emotion that can just barely be glimpsed in his dark eyes. He is with human beings but his thoughts are always outside, on the vast plains of Mongolia or Tibet or Alaska, on the savannahs of Brazil, or in the bamboo forests of China, where he and his beloved wife, Kay, studied the Giant Panda in 1980. George handed out cards to hunters in those forests
that said, “All beings tremble at punishment, to all life is dear. Comparing others to oneself, one should neither kill nor cause to kill.”
George Schaller, looking spiffy for a night at the palace, Jaipur, India, 2004
We arrived the next evening at the palace of the maharaja of Jaipur. A flotilla of painted Elephants and Camels were lined up in the courtyard, with baubles, bells, and ribbons draping their bodies like so many Christmas ornaments. Had they ever known a life in the wild? It was doubtful. Their captivity spoke of an excessively opulent time, which I for one could not mourn. We were treated to a masterful dance in the moonlight by a eunuch—a skilled actor—another throwback to servitude. We dined in the flickering candlelight of a vast banquet hall, which had entertained throngs of dignitaries for 150 years.
I was sitting next to “Bubbles,” the current maharaja, who in his seventies and having recently suffered a stroke was suffering my company as best he could, as I was his. Conversation was halting. The palace kept up pretenses like a tottering dowager empress whose painted lips and hair had seen better days. Bubbles needed the income we tourists provided. The inlaid mirrors and jewels, the colorful cushions and bolsters that lined the floors, the dozens of rooms flowing together under graceful arches, served only to remind me of the time when thousands of Tigers were killed for sport, Elephants were broken as working animals, and the disparity between the rich and poor was at its height. Today is a better time, for all the battles waged.
My friend Susan Sollins, me, and Bubbles, the maharaja of Jaipur, at his palace, India, 2004
I looked across the room at my fellow trustees, and my heroes of conservation, George, Ullas, and Alan. How different it all is! We come with cameras now instead of guns—most of us, anyway. We believe in the rights of animals and of human beings. I watched Alan a few tables away. He was sitting back in his chair, quietly, a sad look in his eyes. Perhaps he longed for home and the sweet reward at day’s end of Alex and Alana in his life, or maybe the cancer was wearing him down. I suspected otherwise. My hunch was that he was trying to figure out how Tigers were going to survive in their island reserves within the multitudes of villages pressing on them. What kind of genetic health could they sustain over the years? Surely they would go extinct like the pygmy Taron people of Myanmar without access to new genetic strains. How do you keep Tigers forever? The answers would bring him full circle.
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 7