One Crazy Safari

Some safaris are so ‘dry’ that you are frantically hoping to see some form of life even if that form of life isn’t a big cat or a natural history moment. Then there are safaris where it rains big cat sightings to the point that you leave one big cat encounter and go looking for the next. Of course, at least for me, the former is much more common than the latter. On this blog, I narrate one of my most cherished jungle drives on which I saw predators like never before.

I and my mom were in Kabini in the peak of winter, and on this morning were the last ones to enter the park. All the other guests chose to go into the park from an entrance where a Leopard was seen the previous evening, hoping that the big cat made one of the trees in that area its temporary home. We didn’t want to end up following every other vehicle in the park, so I asked our naturalist to head to the same broad area but from a different entry into the forest. Although this approach meant we would head to the area where the Leopard was seen much later than the others, I found the idea to be acceptable as the dense mist was impacting visibility anyway.

Not more than a hundred meters into the park, our naturalist whispered the golden words everyone hopes to hear in Kabini, “Sir, Leopard!”. Sure enough, there he was right on the forest dirt track, a huge male Leopard walking ahead of us. Upon seeing us, he decided to alter his course slightly and walked off the track nonetheless still confidently gaiting towards his point of interest. We quickly caught up with his position allowing me to get a few pictures, and then we heard a series of cacophonous calls from Langur and Spotted Deer from the other side of the road. Our naturalist thought at first that the forest dwellers were reacting to the presence of this Leopard in the area, but soon enough the calls grew more and more panicky indicating that the root cause of these calls was a different one.

We left the Leopard to his routine and proceeded to an opening in the forest from where we would have a view of a small pond which was frequented by a resident Tiger. As the pond came into view, I noticed there was indeed a majestic striped cat that had come down to the water for a drink causing the jungle to come alive. We spent a few minutes composing images of the Tiger in the thick foliage on the edge of the water when to our utter surprise we heard more alarm calls ahead of us, and with this incredible luck of already having seen two big cats in less than 500 meters of being into the forest, we decided to go ahead and check the source of the new calls. Sure enough, we found another predator, this time a pack of Dholes (more common as the Indian Wild Dog) on an early morning hunt.