Fishing for Tigers

Fishing for tigers is a lot like fishing for fish. You get out of bed while it's still dark and freezing. You collect your gear, a camera and 300mm lens instead of a pole. You take a ride down to the ol’ fishing hole, the grasslands. You watch and listen carefully, or rather your guide does for the telltale warning call of the barking deer.

Fresh tiger tracks.

With a little luck, you'll bag yourself a keeper. I had no such luck, but from the back of my elephant I could see that a tiger was very close, this past Wednesday morning.

Our intended prey, the tiger, spied from a half kilometer away. See that little orange dot in the middle?

This week my group traveled to the Jim Corbett Tiger Reserve, an 800km² national park dedicated to “preserving” tigers and their habitat.

Brittany snaps a photo as we wait to board our rides, on a cold, misty Wednesday morning. The sun had not yet risen.

That morning I rode upon one of three elephants, their experienced drivers forming a net in an attempt to flush our target out from his hiding place amongst the marijuana bushes. We couldn't have been more than 50 meters away, and I know this because a few hours later, from the old British hunting platform turned hotel, we spied the same tiger moving across the grasslands from the very place our elephants had gone.

The sun finally rises over the grasslands and Ramganga river. By this point my gloveless hands were numb, so the warmth was well received.

A wild boar spotted from atop my elephant.

Corbett is an interesting place. As a government-run resort, I expected much less than excellent food and friendly staff. Our bunks were relatively comfortable, although others in my group complained more than enough about the cold. It's one of a dozen or so national tiger reserves intended to save this king of the jungle, and by doing so to preserve the rest of its habitat including various species of deer, birds, leopards, wild elephants, panthers, wild boars, and flora.

A herd of deer across the grasslands.

To reach the tourist center requires a 30km drive on roads that are washed away by monsoons and rebuilt annually. No people are allowed elsewhere; theoretically, it's nature at its purest.

Crossing an offshoot of the Ramganga river, which was dammed for agricultural irrigation just outside of Corbett park in the 1970s.

But to create this wilderness required evicting some 10,000 villagers during the 70s and 80s. Driving through the surrounding area, I saw hotel after hotel, resort after resort, an entire industry built for the park's tourists. So the village farmers have become waiters and bellhops, or else have kept on farming on less fertile land given by the government as compensation. How can there be compensation enough?

Josh and Hannah ride off into the fog.

In America we have national parks and wilderness zones—amazing forests devoid of people's influence. India has the same, but in America we like to think that these parks were created in places that truly were and have always been “natural”. India has no land still untouched by a billion people over a millenia of agriculture. I enjoyed the park, as did the other foreigners and upper-class Indians carrying $10,000 cameras and sporty sunglasses. Countless impoverished villagers enjoyed the same land for hundreds of years, and they're likely more impoverished today because of it all.

Absolute genious: management of vast marijuana plantations by the Forest Department. Even more genious: letting tourists take elephant rides through them.

The whole idea of tiger preservation is noble but subject to criticism on many levels. For one, these pristine grasslands and forests aren't really pristine—they're actively managed by the Forest Department. Every spring the department burns the grass to prevent it from becoming a truly natural forest, in order to provide enough food to sustain enough deer so we can fish for more tigers.

Encounter in the morning mist.

I'm not trying to sound too critical. These are the sorts of criticisms I'm being trained to express in my Sustainable Development class. As I said, Corbett was a very interesting place. You can see that although I didn't have a close-up tiger encounter, there was plenty of other wildlife.

A monkey being curious about Josh's hair.

That includes the wildlife within the compound, despite the electric fence installed some years ago after a cook was mauled by a "playful" and "curious" tiger named Jynx, according to the wildlife warden who in my opinion gives the tigers a little too much credit.

An adorable family of monkeys.

Anyway, hundreds of "playful" and "curious" monkeys could cross the fence at any time—they were obviously quite accustomed to people. I was once alone in my dorm with the door propped open when I was startled to see a monkey literally tiptoeing into the room. A huge deer had also managed to sneak through the fence; he let me pet him, though I was careful to avoid being gored by his antlers. (I've yet to get the photo of that from Lindsey.)

It's good that Corbett was so exciting, because for the rest of this coming week I'll be doing nothing but homework, typing my 25 page final project report.^*

^* Actually that's not quite true: on a recent shopping trip to Nainital, I was sitting in a post office when two men began speaking with me in Hindi. One claimed he was a police inspector but was quite drunk, and wanted me to come home with him to have chai and meet his daughter (“Do you like Indian girls?”). The other kept saying in English, “We friends now,” and then pulled out a little ball of newspaper. I said, “What's that?” to which he replied, “Do you smoke?” “Sometimes.” He then repeated “We friends now,” and dropped the little ball of hash (“charas”, चरस in local tongue) into my bag. I'd never seen hash before but I'm told it's quite a significant amount. So this should serve as a little repreave from homework.

Just for good measure, here's a photo of me butting heads with a cow. I was actually trying to kiss it, but it's horns (and diseases) scared me off.

Next week we'll present our projects to our CHIRAG mentors, take two final exams, and then relax with one final blowout party on the 10^th. On Monday the 11^th the group travels back to Delhi.

After that I'll have about 5 days to myself; I'm thinking about travelling to Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, before flying back to Seattle early on the 19^th. So that's it—my India experience is almost over. I'll tell a few more stories about Delhi and Varanasi and then see you all in Seattle!

-Peter
2 December, 2006
Sonapani (district Nainital), Uttaranchal, India

A rare group picture, from the British hunting platform within the Corbett Tiger Reserve's Dhikala compound. Top row: me (Peter, holding the camera's remote control in my hand), Brian, April, Adam, Paul, Nathan, Matt, Tara, Hannah, and Hannah's boyfriend Jeff. Center: Evan (with the bandana) and Pat. Front row: Keith (group leader), Rajesh (Forest Ecology instructor), Sayeed (Hindi instructor), Lisa, Lindsey, Brittany, Katie, and Monisha. Sitting in front: Josh, Sarah, and Sarah's boyfriend Brian.