9th April 2011. In the morning safari some jeeps saw a pair of tigers walking form zone 1 of the Ranthambhore national park towards the Kalapani anicut in Zone 6. In the evening I booked a jeep for zone 6 and we found the mating tigers (T24 male and T39 female – both young adults)…
A Little Bittern (Ixobrychus minutus) was sighted and photographed for the first time in the plains of India. A keen birder from Delhi Wing Commander Vijay Sethi photographed it on the 22nd and 23rd May 2010. He found the bird near Malik Talao in the heart of the park. He was accompanied by local naturalist…
Wildlife is on the brink by PANKAJ SEKHSARIA Wildlife is on the brink and it is high time we took a critical look at our conservation realities and policies. Most that share landscapes with wildlife, for instance, live extremely low impact lives yet they pay the biggest cost for conservation. Question of survival: Tribal settlements…
It’s been a long time since I posted on the blog. I was on a long vacation and got back to Ranthambhore about 3 weeks ago and since then I have been busy trying to make a living. Yes some of us have to do that. Here are some updates from Ranthambhore: 1. The Park…
In my last post I had written about digging of wells and making waterholes in the Indala plateau. We just finished digging the third well and have got three water holes going already. The three wells were dug near non-perennial streams and in places where there were “small wells” (locally known as kui) on such…
Recently a judge in the Rajasthan High Court passed a ruling that Ranthambhore should be closed for 2 days in a week so that the animals can get “rest” from tourists. The Park is shut for tourists during the monsoons from July to end September. The people living around the park have a free run…
“Machali” in Hindi means fish but for regular visitors to Ranthambhore Machali is the resident tigress of the area around the Ranthambhore fort. This area is one of the most scenic parts of Ranthambhore, where three of the six lakes of Ranthambhore are located. Machali is by far the most famous tigress of Ranthambhore and…
The rest of the National geographic crew – Sue (the big boss), Becky and Andy (the cameraman) landed in Calcutta by midnight. On the 1st of April we went to get shots of a male tiger in the Calcutta zoo. This tiger had killed a girl in a village that was just on the outskirts…
Sundarbans – the largest Project Tiger Reserve in India – is a tidal estuary where the only modes of travel are small to medium sized slow boats. It is truly a boat country. On the 25th of March, we went to the office of the Field Director of Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, which is in a…
When I was in Bharatpur, I got a call from a guy from Bangalore called Lesley, who wanted to know if I would be interested in working on a two week project on Tigers of Sundarbans, , with the National geographic Film and Television department. He was the India co-coordinator for this project and told…