Welcome To The Kingfisher Wildlife Diaries – John Bailey
November 12th 2009
Close Encounters of a Big Cat Kind
If you will excuse me for a couple of entries. Just back from the lower Himalayas where the wildlife is so sensational it takes your breath away. Of course, we're lucky here at Kingfishers in Norfolk with the wide variety of species on view but, travel five thousand miles to the east and you're into another world. Let's take 4th November as a typical day of hair-curling excitement.
At first light, there is heavy breathing and deep coughing not far away into the jungle beneath the cabin, towards the river. It could be boar. It could be deer but I'm very confident that there is something very different out there. The sound is terrifying yet reassuring simultaneously...so deep, so sonorous, so emanating from the soul of the earth.
There is early morning excitement, fifty yards away on the lip of the camp, before the plunge down to the scrub forest on the river floor. A tiger has been seen passing through the grounds of the small temple halfway down the hillside. A male apparently, almost certainly the animal that I have been hearing only half an hour or so before.
As we walk on our path to the village, we pass three cows, grazing alongside a dried-out stream bed. On our return, the palest of the three lay dead surrounded by her unblinking, uncomprehending companions. She had been mauled, her windpipe severed, her life ebbing away.
Later in the day, fishing the home beat just outside the camp, at dusk, I waded from the river to find fresh pug marks - leopard I think, using in the marginal sand. Ramesh, our guide, remarked he had heard a samba deer snort in fear and provoke the answering cough of a leopard, gruff at being discovered.
On the walk back through the scrub and long grasses, our head torches illuminated the eyes of a big cat watching our progress just fifteen yards away. Eighty percent chance leopard Ramesh said. Twenty percent tiger.
That was seven p.m. the remainder of the night past uneventfully but believe me, there is an indescribably thrill of living so close to leopard and tiger in such virginal jungle. Back in the UK, I wish I hadn't taken my fishing rod at all but spent my entire time with camera, binoculars and, of course, guide. Without a guide, you are not only at danger but you really don't know where to start. It's a bit like otter watching down on the Wensum. Only there, of course, you're unlikely to find an otter-mauled dead cow!