Text by: Neha Sinha
In a forest, there are many secrets. In Pench Tiger Reserve, I counted them. A newly emerged butterfly sitting on an old, browned rock, camouflaged, and yet looking like a speck of dust. A slip through the rocks that looks like a cave in the dappled tree-shade. Trees with scratch marks on them, etched by unknown claws. A common-hawk cuckoo that looks like a shikra when it fixes its gaze on you. A huge ficus tree that crumbles rock, wrenching it apart slowly, invisibly, in its own time. A jackal running through gilded grass, and then suddenly leaping out on to a rock like an exclamation mark. A leopard looking at you with the patience of something that likes to stay hidden, even as you are completely unaware. A wasp feeding slowly off another predator, a spider.
Yet, what could be a forest’s greatest secret?
I think it is this: a mother raising her young. More specifically, a solitary tigress raising her cubs. Of the many times I have visited Pench, amongst the most special sightings was a little confusion in the grasses. Standing upright in our vehicles, we were doing what most people do in tiger land – attempting to emulate the patience and dignity of a tigress. The sunlight was like nails in our eyes, the heat oppressive, solid, undeniable. We were quietly waiting for a tiger or wild animal to cross the dust road. Minutes passed with no movement on the road. But the grasses to our left rustled. A head sat up, blinking. A young tiger cub, a smudge of brown, looking like a plucked bird, or like it had just been given a thorough lick by its doting mother. It gazed around itself, disoriented. Yet, it had that smug look young tigers always have – ‘When I grow up, I will be a tiger’. Then, it suddenly turned and trundled away, as if it suddenly remembered its mother’s instructions: Stay a secret. Stay hidden.
(Top) A male chital deer, with a resplendent head of antlers looks up from Pench’s undulating forests. The Central Indian landscape is considered the most important landscape for tigers in the world, with a high breeding rate. However, the area is threatened by multiple projects. Photo: Dhritiman Mukherjee (Above) Look again, dead centre: A leopard pins his gaze at the author while she fumbles to notice him back. Leopards are camouflage experts and will blend in effortlessly amongst rocks, shrubbery and tree trunks. This photo almost did not happen, until the leopard moved and revealed itself. Photo: Neha Sinha Cover: Collarwali strolling through Pench forest. Tigresses will often spend days away from their cubs, looking for food. At this time, young cubs stay are trained by her to stay hidden, usually in rock openings or cave-like structures. Photo: Aditya Panda
Tigresses are extremely careful about raising their cubs – they do so under a veil of secrecy, guarding them with their very lives. The threat is often unknown tigers. Tigers fighting with tigresses to kill the cubs of another tiger is well documented – the mother will give her life if needed. In his book on Panna, The Rise and Fall of the Emerald Tigers, biologist Raghu Chundawat mentions how a tigress raised her cubs in a cave. When a sloth bear ambled into a denning cave, the mother moved her cubs to another site. These are not stress-points we are easily able to distinguish. That is why understanding the life, and the death, of a successful tiger mother becomes so important.
Recently, the Madhya Pradesh forest department gathered together to bid goodbye to a special animal. They had garlanded her with marigolds, wrapped her in a white sheet and strewn rose petals all over her. This was a farewell for a tigress known by many names – Collarwali, because she wore a radio-collar and T- 15, the code-name scientists and the forest department gave her. She was a lot like her mother, Badi Mata, both super mothers.
In her life, Collarwali taught us many things.
First, the importance of a good habitat not just for tigers, but also that which can hold a secret – comprising places where a hunting tigress can hide her helpless cubs. In Pench tiger reserve, Collarwali – who raised 29 cubs, one of which was sent for the successful colonization of Panna – perfected the art of hiding her cubs. She kept some of them on an island in the Pench river. To be reunited with them after spells of hunting, she would swim up to them.
A life well lived: a magnificent portrait of Collarwali in Pench. Following the lives of confiding tigresses like Collarwali gives insight on the needs of other tigresses that may not be in well-known or tourist areas. Photo: Aditya Panda
“To approach the island, we needed to use elephants,” remembers Subharanjan Sen, additional principal conservator of forests, Madhya Pradesh, who was deputy field director when Collarwali was born. What he saw there amazed him. Collarwali had killed eleven to twelve chital deer and lined them up. For her five cubs. “She wanted them to practice. It was like a how-to-hunt workshop,” Sen says. “She was devoted, particular and precise.”
The other thing Collarwali teaches us is the importance of a tigress for the fate of a tiger reserve. Usually, we speak of tigers when referring to the reserves – but while a stud is important, it is far more important for the area to have breeding tigresses. Collarwali helped Pench become a successful tiger reserve, through the several cubs she had. And her progeny also went on to Panna.
The lessons to take from the life of a much-watched tigress in the public eye is the importance of good denning sites — and the fact that we need a variety of them for the tigress-family to feel safe. Given the opportunity and safe habitat, a tigress can well have cubs in double digits in her lifetime. This is not to disregard tigresses who don’t have as many cubs, but to emphasise that they have the potential to fill an area with cubs, and that such areas should be secured.
There are younglings in the grass: tiger cubs are trained to hide when very young, and wait for their mother patiently as she forays out to hunt. Cubs are frequently disciplined by the mother to do this, until sub-adults are large enough to accompany her to the hunt. Collarwali, like many other tigresses, brought dead deer to her cubs so they could learn to tear into meat. Photos: Aditya Panda
Perversely, even next to the richest, most well-known forests, large projects and large-scale destruction is underway. In April, a young tiger was knocked down by a vehicle on National highway 44 near Panna. In Panna, the same area that homes Collarwali’s genes, the Ken-Betwa river interlink promises to create obstacles for tigresses and their cubs through mountains of muck and valleys of water.
About 100 square kilometres of the area will be submerged by water (including nearly 60 square kilometres of the critical tiger habitat), and tonnes of muck will be generated through digging for the dam and associated river-linking, all within Panna tiger reserve. In West India, Sariska tiger reserve was burning with a forest fire this summer. Panna and Sariska both have something nefarious in common – they lost all their tigers to poaching and other factors. Both were repopulated with tigers with animals brought from other reserves in their respective states. Yet despite these long-term efforts to have tigers roaring again, the areas are unsafe again. Sariska was once connected to the Aravalli mountain range, and tigers were able to go to other areas. Now, the reserve sits like an island, surrounded by towns and highways in the shadow of Alwar, which is part of Delhi-NCR.
(Top) A tiger’s stripes help it blend seamlessly into grasses. In forest ecosystems, the role of shrubs and grasses is often overlooked. For a predator, the cover is essential. Many incredible natural history moments have been witnessed in grass meadows, where a tiger will streak out towards its prey. (Above) Heatwaves and carelessness have combined to form a new threat – forest fires. Forests with dry undergrowth, pine needles, dry grasses burn like kindling. To avoid this threat, forest departments and communities draw ‘firelines’ – controlled burning of undergrowth to avoid unmanageable fires. Still, with searing temperatures and global warming, forest fires are a growing threat. Photos: Chaithanya Krishnan/Getty Images (top), Joe McDonald/Getty Images (above)
To survive an event like a forest fire (let us consider it was a natural event) – or a flood (in Panna’s case, it will be manmade), animals need safe places to disperse to. Later, tigresses need safe places where they can keep their cubs a secret.
These places are missing today, even in our most well-known reserves. Collarwali may have been a celebrity, but we would be missing the point if we didn’t learn the larger lesson from her life – we need safe breeding and dispersing areas for young tigers.
And the biggest learning is no longer a secret – we need to safeguard our reserves from wilful destruction – we must say no to river interlinking that drowns forests and larger highways that kill cubs mothers worked hard to train and raise.
Tigresses are full of common sense and precaution for their bloodlines. We would do well to learn from them, instead of pretending that tigers and tigresses will somehow find a way.
