A tiger’s taleWhat an Indian tiger’s bid for freedom says about humans and nature

One big cat, five elephants, 70 men and a month-long chase across India

THE tiger padded south. Slipping through the grey-green teak forest he wound around thickets of wild sage, cloaked behind its orange flowers. Gorges in the ruddy sandstone of the Vindhya plateau gave him respite from the midday heat. By evening, he had reached the banks of the Ken river, still swollen with monsoon rains. The forestry workers tracking his radio collar thought he would stop there. But he plunged in, swimming the Ken’s 400-metre span and carrying on south, leaving the Panna tiger reserve behind him.

Panna’s forest guards gave chase, crammed into Bolero jeeps, rattling yet indestructible. Behind them came colleagues on mighty tusker elephants. Their aim was not to capture the tiger; to do so would have meant a tranquilliser dart and, since the tiger had been sedated twice already in recent months, that would have been risky. Instead they sought to drive him back into the reserve. They used walls of fire set through the forest and great spools of plastic sheeting. They recruited entire villages to bang drums and sing songs. A tiger on the loose was, after all, a matter of life or death—for the tiger. Any Indian tiger outside a reserve runs a high risk of being poisoned, electrocuted or shot. And this one, though known only and rather impersonally as T3, was special.

India used to have a lot of tigers. Estimates put their numbers at the beginning of the 20th century at about 20,000. By 1972 just 1,800 remained. Their decline coincided with a near doubling of India’s human population, from 238m in 1900 to 554m in 1970. Forests where tigers had lived were cut down and converted to farmland. The animals which had been the tiger’s prey were hunted to meet people’s needs—as were the tigers, when they discommoded people, or when there was money to be made from pelts or other parts.

It was an extinction in progress, and in 1973 Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, decided to do something about it. The government started Project Tiger, which aimed to preserve tigers in their natural habitat. Nine national parks were converted into reserves, covering more than 16,000 square kilometres. The areas were “inviolate”, said Ms Gandhi. They were just for tigers, with all other human activity excluded. Villagers could no longer graze livestock or gather wood there. Guards were employed to enforce the new exclusions.

Today, Project Tiger comprises 50 such reserves covering some 70,000 square kilometres, which is a bit more than the size of the Republic of Ireland or West Virginia, though only just over two per cent of the area of India. The total population living within these fortresses is now about 2,000. To have maintained the country’s tiger population over four decades during which the human population more than doubled again is a significant achievement. But the limits to the approach are becoming ever more apparent.

This is partly because the reserves, especially the smaller ones, are such imperfect havens. Take Panna, the reserve T3 (pictured) walked out of, a 540-square-kilometre patch of tropical dry forest some 600km south-east of Delhi, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Raghu Chundawat, an independent conservation expert who studies the reserve, says that for a population resilient enough to bounce back from expected levels of poaching you need at least 14 breeding females. (The number of males in a healthy population will vary, but it is smaller; one male’s territory can cover that of many tigresses.) But Panna only has room for six, maybe eight, breeding females. That leaves no margin for error; the loss of one or two can doom the whole population. With the market for tiger parts in Chinese traditional medicine a constant source of demand, tigers in such small numbers depend entirely on their human protectors for their continued existence.

In Panna the protectors left something to be desired. In his book “Non-Stop India” Mark Tully, who for decades was the BBC’s Delhi correspondent, describes the techniques used to kill Panna tigers in the early 2000s. Poachers would trap the beasts in snares, then beat them to death using sticks. If the tiger made too much noise, a poacher told him, they would shove the end of sticks into its mouth, followed by clods of earth. For this they got up to 400,000 rupees ($6,200) per animal, a fortune in rural India.

In 2004 Mr Chundawat warned Panna’s officials that the number of tigers had dropped too low; without fresh recruits, the population would disappear. His warnings were dismissed as activist hype. Rajesh Gopal, then the director of Project Tiger, accused him of having a “hidden agenda”, and claimed that his reports amounted to “media breast-beating”. It would take four more years for the officials to face the fact that Mr Chundawat had been right. In early 2009, they admitted that their fortress had failed. Panna was not the home to 35 tigers it had claimed to be. It contained just a single male who had drifted in from elsewhere. At least it seemed to: because he was uncollared the authorities didn’t actually know where he was. To save Panna, new females would have to be brought in, and they duly were. But by the time they got there, the male interloper had apparently moved on.

Panna needed its own resident male. A strapping five-year-old in the Pench reserve, 650km to the south, emerged as the prime candidate. So on November 6th 2009, T3 was shot with a tranquilliser dart, loaded on to a lorry, and taken to Panna. It was not so different from his home. It had rocks to lounge on, game to hunt, streams to ripple his thick fur when he dunked himself in them. But T3 did not like it there. So he started walking home.

To herd a cat

T3 crossed the Ken on November 26th. He skirted Patori, a village on Panna’s scraggy verge, before finding a seam of forest snaking along under the lee of a sandstone ridge. He followed it up the gentle slope of the Vindhya plateau.

The forests of Madhya Pradesh are mostly teak, but in scrubbier areas closer to villages the hardwood gives way to eucalyptus and Coromandel ebony, its leaves used to wrap the local cigarettes, known as beedi. There are white-barked ghost trees that gleam in the sun, mangoes, acacias, and the mahua tree, its flowers beloved by elephants and humans alike. Wild sage, or Lantana, an invasive species from the Americas, fills every available cranny in thick bunches. The air smells of baked earth, and is filled with the noise of songbirds hidden in the canopy. Kingfishers streak over the streams, their paths traced on the retina in time-lapse turquoise.

When T3 had to leave the cover of the forest, he padded through fields of lentils and sesame, chickpeas and mustard. Here the scents are more domestic: parched cow dung, acrid but pleasant, and the sickly-sweet spice of chai, cooked on an open fire. Every moment in this human landscape was a risk. A villager might see and shoot him. If a farmer found an animal T3 had killed, he might add poison to its flesh—thus ensuring the tiger’s death when he returned to the kill for another meal.

On his tail, desperate to help him, was Rangaiah Sreenivasa Murthy, the Panna reserve’s field director. He had been put in charge just a few months before, in May, to oversee the restoration of the park’s tiger population. From the start, Mr Murthy ruled his reserve with a balance of authoritarianism and kindness. Workers remarked on the willingness he showed to sit with them for meals, a breach of caste they took as a sign of support and respect. At the other end of the social scale Lokandra Singh, a member of the local royal family, proclaimed him the “finest forest worker in India”. But though in general Mr Murthy is jovial, his sharp temper prompts rapid, angry ejaculations in Hindi when he is disappointed—especially if the disappointment has anything to do with his tigers. This happens with some regularity; no one is as obsessive about Panna’s tigers as Mr Murthy.

By the time T3 left the park, Mr Murthy had built up enough goodwill that Panna’s entire staff rose up and gave chase at his command. Their numbers were boosted by villagers paid 250 rupees a day for their services helping the team navigate unfamiliar landscapes (an outlay which also helped to reduce the risk of shooting or poisoning). A roiling retinue of guards and villagers, elephants and jeeps spread out across the countryside. Walk into any of the tiny villages Mr Murthy’s men passed through in the weeks that followed and at least a handful of villagers will know his name. It is unusual fame for a forestry officer.

This retinue moved in two different modes: search and chase. T3’s radio collar had a battery life of several years, but a range of just a dozen kilometres. When the park workers couldn’t pick up its signal, jeeps were dispatched with hand-held antennae to hurtle up and down the red-dirt back roads. (At one point, Mr Murthy had road-building machines brought in to lay down better surfaces for the tired Boleros.) When a ranger on top of an old water tower or on the peak of a small hill picked something up, the location would be relayed back to camp, passing from jeep to jeep through on-board radios until it reached Mr Murthy. The order for pursuit would be given, and the lumbering caravan of men, jeeps and elephants would gather itself up and return to the chase.

Sometimes the signal would vanish; sometimes the tiger would appear. Two days after T3 left the park, when he was still close by, Mr Murthy’s troupe tracked his signal down to a stretch of dense forest near the village of Matipura. As darkness gathered they formed a two-kilometre line of men, cars, elephants and fire along a rough track that ran north-south across the tiger’s path. The headlights faced east, beaming back towards Panna. Fires were lit every 20 metres. Hundreds of villagers joined the line, gathering around the flames to stay warm, beating drums, playing music and singing. Rambahadur, Panna’s biggest tusker, plunged into the jungle, guards and a local villager on his back, aiming to drive the tiger out. He went the other way; a flash of orange slipped between two cars and disappeared back into the forest heading west. By the time they had raised the alarm, he was gone.

On another occasion Deo Singh, who lives in Ghoghara, a village on the ridge T3 followed, was sitting on Rambahadur, acting as guide to a forest guard, when the elephant pushed over some debris to reveal T3. Mr Singh says he remembers how big the tiger was and that it had stripes on its chest “like swords”. Directed by his mahout, Rambahadur started to whack the cat with its trunk in an attempt to shoo it back towards the reserve. But, again, the tiger slipped away.

A self-willed world

At Nagda, a village down the road from Ghoghara, an old man on a Zimmer frame (an unusually advanced walking aid for rural Madhya Pradesh) was less impressed by T3. He says he remembers the times when the ridge was often used by what he calls, in Hindi, “jungley tigers”. The villagers would see the wild beasts’ paw prints and hear their roars. With his radio collar and lagging entourage of humans, jeeps and elephants, the man said he thought T3 was distinctly domesticated.

He has a point. Life in a well-protected tiger reserve is hardly wild, despite the idea that they provide a natural habitat. Corbett, India’s oldest reserve, is dotted with over 200 camera traps. The Wildlife Institute of India has experimented with drones. Pregnant females inside parks are under constant monitoring. “Tiger habitats are controlled and manipulated by humans,” says Valmik Thapar, a well-known tiger conservationist in Delhi. There are no fences, for the most part. But some are arguing for them, saying they would better protect the tigers.

An exclusion of the human that relies entirely on omniscient human enforcers makes the reserves oddly artificial: they are absolutely natural in what they contain, absolutely unnatural in their conception. It also makes the tigers’ situation precarious. Their protection is handled by local forest departments, which often lack wildlife expertise; if the local department is not led by someone who cares about tigers, their protection suffers. And excluding all humans from reserves creates tension with local villagers, who often want to graze their animals or forage for firewood—a problem with nature reserves around the world that is keenly felt in India.

New ideas are emerging of how to replace the fortress approach. Mr Chundawat says Indian conservation should focus on fostering “satellite habitats” around the primary reserves—patches of forest big enough for two or three breeding females which would not require as much protection as a fully fledged reserve. The satellites would offer refuge to tigers which, like T3, lit out for the territories; they would function as a backup to the primary reserves. Mr Chundawat envisions, in time, a network of tiger populations that are more integrated with the humans who live next door.

In this vision, the arrival of a wandering tiger becomes a positive event for villagers, an opportunity to offer tourists homestays, or put on small-scale safaris. Getting local people to embrace this, though, will be something of a challenge. In rural Madhya Pradesh official literacy rates are around 65%, while real rates are often far lower. That makes it difficult to start tourist enterprises which take advantage of possible tigers. Mr Chundawat optimistically suggests starting small, tapping into local knowledge to encourage tourism based on bird-watching and wilderness retreats, for instance. If a tiger comes by it will be a welcome bonus, not an unwanted new neighbour. Such approaches have been making headway in parts of Africa.

You can see something like this in operation on the fringes of Ranthambore, a reserve in Rajasthan. An outfit called Tiger Watch sends camera-trap photos to the phones of local volunteers. They keep watch on the tigers as part of their normal lives—a more relaxed and more sustainable form of tracking than Panna’s maximum-security surveillance. It also leaves the door open for those villagers to build businesses based on their local tigers.

The wanderer returns

The villagers T3 came across were not yet ready to be welcoming. On December 20th a farmer from the village of Ramna, about 200km from Panna and 300km from Pench—almost halfway home!—was heading out to work in a field of ripe sugar cane when he came upon the tiger lurking in lush shadow. Word reached Mr Murthy’s troupe quickly, but by the time he arrived the villagers were scared and angry about the tiger’s presence. Some enterprising locals declared that, since the tiger had settled in their field, it now belonged to them. Mr Murthy was having none of it. He asked the value of the field, then bought it on the spot, handing over a wodge of rupees. Fires were lit; Rahmbadhur crashed into what was now government sugar cane. Again T3 was flushed out; again he quickly disappeared back into the forest.

The men started to ask Mr Murthy what more they could do when all their best efforts had come to nothing. T3 was intent on travelling south, and there seemed nothing anyone could do to stop him. Mr Murthy called Delhi and asked whether the tiger might be returned to Pench, as he clearly wanted. They refused: Panna was getting T3 or it was not getting a male tiger at all. So Mr Murthy was left with no alternative but the tranquilliser dart. On Christmas Day T3 was shot next to a small pond. The sleeping tiger (pictured) was trucked north to Panna. His winding 450km-journey remains the only documented case of an apparent homing instinct in a wild tiger.

His return saved Panna. Soon he met T1, a female brought in from another reserve. By April, she had borne a litter. Today Panna’s population is back up to 35 or so; younger tigers have started leaving the park, looking for more space. T3, now a great-grandfather, has settled down.

But Panna’s success was won only by becoming ever more of a fortress. Mr Murthy built 11 watchtowers across the park, from which guards look out for the splotches of red light that poachers use to attract animals at night. Each breeding female wears a radio collar and is monitored around the clock. When a pond went dry a few years back, Mr Murthy installed water tanks to fill it back up. Some say this drove one of the tigresses away, leaving her abandoned cubs to die. Mr Murthy says he had to take extreme measures to pull Panna back from the brink. “What Murthy did, only Murthy could do,” says Mr Chundawat.

Now, though, Mr Murthy has gone on to a job in Bhopal, the state capital. The new boss, Vivek Jain, takes a less direct interest in tigers. Panna remains both fortified and fragile. India’s human population is still growing, the trade in tiger parts persists. The long-term survival of tigers lies in aligning their interests with an improvement of local people’s lives—of being a sight people believe is worth seeing, and which people will come to look at when they can.

For such magnificence to depend for its future on being instagrammable seems to offend against dignity. But what else is there? The obsessively monitored fortresses cannot last forever, and they are hardly the natural habitats they were once believed to be. There will always be wildness in the ways of animals—in what they choose, unbidden, to pursue. But to seek the natural, in India as elsewhere, must also be to accept that the world of the wild is shared with, and shaped by, humans; to be a human who loves nature is to try and make that sharing work. The idea of powerful creatures in the vast untouched wilderness has a sublime thrill to it. It also has a certain cosiness; it is the imaginary ideal where many human ideas about nature grew up. But as T3 discovered after he swam across the Ken, you really can’t go home again. “The old world is gone,” says Mr Thapar. “We cannot bring it back.”

This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline "A tiger’s tale"
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