The secret to India's tiger population success

Asambar deer sniffed the air in Madhya Pradesh’s Pench National Park. In unison, the surrounding members of its herd, each the colour of rusting iron, stopped grazing from the wind-rippled grasslands. Heads lifted, glistening nostrils flared and all eyes scrutinised the tree line. A languorous grey langur monkey – drunk on fermented mahua fruit and dozing on a fallen branch – opened one eye.

You can often see langurs and sambar together. They have a symbiotic relationship because sambar can detect a predator’s scent on the breeze from over a kilometre away; in return, the langurs are sharp-sighted when up in the treetops, and messy eaters too, sloppily dropping half-eaten fruit to the sambar below. Neither makes a conscious effort to help the other, but they are inextricably linked by an ecosystem.

Then the alarm call sounded. An unseen jungle babbler bird, invisible above a thick canopy of leaves, emitted the first signal. Through the bush telegraph the call was taken up by scores of other birds until the hitherto silent forest became a riot of panic and white noise. The sambar deer scattered, and then the langurs – all suddenly sober – zipped improbably up the smooth trunks of teak trees, some with their babies clutched to their chests.

Birds took flight, their maelstrom of beating wings a hailstorm of television interference against the sky. The jungle roared like radio static. Everything was in sudden motion but us; our driver slammed his brake pedal to the floor and our emerald-green Maruti-Suzuki Gypsy 4WD – ubiquitous and identical in India’s wildlife reserves – ground to a standstill on the mud-baked track.

“That must be him,” whispered our guide, Vanan, who had previously remained silent. I’d nearly forgotten he was there; the wildlife does all the work for him. The alarm call is a guide’s best friend but, after several days spent in fruitless search of our quarry across three of India’s tiger reserves, I too was attuned to the signals that warned of approaching predators. We spent much of our time stationary: watching, listening, waiting.

It was the end of a long day searching Pench National Park for signs of a Royal Bengal tiger. With little tree cover compared to some of India’s more densely forested reserves, I had high hopes that this would be the place where I would finally spot one. About four hours earlier, we’d had a false alarm when we came across a fresh paw print, or pugmark, on the track that was the size of a saucer. Embossed into the dusty ground, on top of the fresh tyre treads of other 4WDs, the tiger must have been incredibly close, but the evanescent cat clearly hadn’t cared to stop for tea.

On this occasion, however, we had a bit more luck. From a tangle of undergrowth, which we’d already scrutinised with binoculars and telephoto zoom lenses without discovering anything, a hulking tiger languidly stepped out onto the track. Scowling, with its cover blown and its prey beyond reach, it plodded across the roadway in front of us. Regarding our idling 4WD with house-cat nonchalance, the tiger vanished into the undergrowth on the other side of the trail, leaving a vacuum in his wake. We exhaled as one. The whole experience had lasted less than ten seconds.

For just a moment, that dusty track was a stage. In the faded pastel hues of the gloaming, in a theatre encircled by packs of bill-print-grey langurs, flocks of grey hornbills and sounders of ash-coloured wild boar, the tiger hogged the spotlight, burning bright as if lit by sodium lamps. But once he exited, stage right, enveloped by the safety curtain of the jungle, my heart dropped from the gods to the foot of the orchestra pit. The wildlife chorus groaned into the distance. The greatest show on Earth was over – for now.

The eye on the tiger

I have been besotted with tigers since infancy. So much so that despite being something of a night owl, this trip across India’s national parks and tiger reserves had seen me rising merrily each morning at 5am, when it was so cold that my camera lens – trained on dewdrop-bejewelled dawn landscapes and steam-shrouded waterholes – was clouded by my own hot breath.

But there was another reason for my enthusiasm, as
this is a special year for tigers. In 2023, India marks 50 years of Project Tiger, a conservation effort that has ensured now is the best time for sightings of these big cats in recent memory. Indeed, the number of wild Royal Bengal tigers in India has more than doubled in the 21st century alone.

Prior to this intervention, the situation had become desperate. Despite being the country’s national animal, an estimated 80,000 tigers fell victim to hunting in India between 1875 and 1925. Maharajas, monarchs, officials and trophy hunters slaughtered these creatures with guns, snares, poisons and spears. Their heads can still be found – stuffed, mounted and moth-eaten – on walls, while their skins continue to warm the floors of historical palaces.

This carnage continued well into the 20th century. Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth were even photographed on safari with a dead tiger, which was reportedly shot by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1961 in what later became Ranthambore National Park – it was the same year he became president of the World Wildlife Fund. The widespread practice of killing tigers for profit and sport led to a sharp decline in their numbers, and by the late 1960s, they were on the brink of extinction in the wild, with some estimating there were fewer than 600 remaining in India.

In 1973, the government, led by Indira Gandhi, initiated Project Tiger, a conservation programme aimed at managing and safeguarding tiger habitats. Additionally, the Special Tiger Protection Force was established to combat the menace of poaching. By the time of India’s 2006 census, there were still just 1,411 tigers remaining in the wild; today things are looking far rosier. On 9 April 2023, in honour of Project Tiger’s 50th anniversary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi released the results of this year’s All India Tiger Estimation, revealing there are now 3,167 in India. That’s about 70% of the world’s wild tiger population.

Project Tiger’s conservation initiatives have involved educating village populations near to the parks on the benefits of conserving the species; remunerating locals who have lost livestock to tiger attacks; increasing the amount of protected land on which tigers can roam free; boosting the number of park rangers to combat poaching; and – most boldly of all – only allowing tourists access to 20% of any of India’s national parks and tiger reserves. This gives tigers the range and privacy to thrive, unseen, in the remaining 80%.

Yet life continues as normal in the parks. Each day at lunchtime, fleets of 4WDs would converge in the safety of numbers and wide-open terrain. Always glancing over our shoulders, it was here that we drank chai and ate packed lunches of pakoras and boiled eggs, prepared by our lodges and spread out on table cloths on the bonnets of our vehicles. Then we returned to the trails in the blazing heat and pointed our lenses at the long grasses, scanning for dips and depressions where a cat might make its bed to bask in the afternoon sun.

We also stalked the tiger’s favourite prey: sambar deer. When spooked, these animals can reach speeds of over 65kph, while a tiger can only sprint at 55kph. Since these big cats can’t outrun their prey, they need to get within 15m to strike, so the tiger has become a master of ambush hunting. It also has one big advantage: like many creatures the tiger hunts, sambar have just two types of colour receptors in their eyes, making them red-green colour blind. For them, a tiger’s orange fur is indistinguishable from the jungle greenery, which makes India’s legendary predator far more elusive. Even human eyes struggle: a tiger’s stripes look just like bamboo leaves when cloaked in the forest.

Tigers aren’t the only threat here. We also saw antelope and white-tailed deer being stalked by dholes – wild Indian dogs that hunt in packs and devour their prey alive.

“When there’s enough of them, they can even take a tiger down,” said Vanan, rousing himself as a lone dhole skipped past our wheel arch and glanced up at us with innocent eyes.

We clocked pompous peacocks parading their plumage, and I spotted, perched on high and near perfectly camouflaged against the bark of the tree hollows, diminutive collared scops owls watching me watching them. But I saw not another tiger at Pench.

Silent alarm

Before long, I moved on to another of Madhya Pradesh’s famous tiger reserves, Kanha National Park. At lunch, on my second day there, I noticed a gaggle of locals and tourists excitedly passing camera screens around. As part of Project Tiger’s initiatives to minimise the impact of tourism on tiger reserves, the use of radios and phones are forbidden in many parks. These guests had sighted and snapped a tiger in the morning, but since visitors, guides and drivers are prohibited from communicating tiger locations to each other, the occupants of my vehicle had not.

Unlike safaris seeking the African lion – pretenders to the title of ‘King of the Jungle’, since they are neither the largest of the big cats, nor do they live in a jungle – you won’t see 4WDs encircling groups of lazing tigers on sparsely vegetated savannah. These big cats are solitary creatures, who only socialise to mate, and Kanha is densely forested with evergreen sal trees, which means sightings are far less frequent. If you do spot one, however, you will likely have it all to yourself here.

On our morning excursion we were graced with sightings of the endangered barasingha, colloquially known as the swamp deer, which was rescued from the precipice of extinction through Kanha’s dedicated breeding programme. In the afternoon we spotted golden jackals, a ruddy mongoose and the immense gaur – the world’s largest, wild bovine species. A male spotted deer, seemingly signifying his victory in combat to the females of his herd, wore a crown of dried grass on his antlers that, when lit by crepuscular rays, glowed with the inner
luminescence of a halo.

The sun had started to set on my final drive around Kanha Tiger Reserve. As the light faded, so too did my hopes of seeing a tiger. Satish, our appointed guide for the day, had positively crackled with enthusiasm throughout our safari, but as twilight fell, his eyes glazed. In the tangled sal forests that bordered the roads, it was already nighttime. Our driver, Arun, was winding a sinuous course back towards the park gates. All was quiet, for now.

The soft pads of tigers’ feet ensure their movement through the undergrowth is almost silent. While this makes them formidable hunters, it does offer us one advantage: tigers don’t like the feel of the forest floor against their delicate paws, so they will often take to trails that have been worn smooth by safari vehicles.
There had been no alarm calls, no shrieking monkeys, no stampedes foretokening his arrival, but nonetheless there he was. He’d been there all along, an insurmountable distance of a metre away. As he slipped out of the forest and onto the track, it was as if the tiger had pressed the mute button on the wilderness. He brought with him a deafening silence.

For the past week, across a dozen wildlife drives, I had felt like these tigers had been evading human detection, but he wasn’t hiding from us. With king-of-the-jungle confidence, he strode along the pathway towards us, staring straight down the barrel of my camera lens. He was anything but camouflaged; his vibrant coat read much more like a warning. Beautiful and deadly, dangerous and endangered, he seemed to drain the pigment from the surrounding jungle. Everything else just faded to grey.

“This is him!” gasped Satish, jigging in his seat with excitement. “This tiger is young, but he’s expected to become the next alpha male in this region.”
With juvenile insouciance, the tiger lifted his pink nose – yet to turn brown with age – and sniffed the air, inhaling the sweet scent of some blooms hanging from a tree. For a moment, he luxuriated in the belief that he was the jungle’s next monarch. Thanks to the work of Project Tiger over the past 50 years, he may well grow to become just that.