Diary Entry of a Wildlife Photographer
Location: Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve, Maharashtra, India
Date: 28 February 2018
I was on a normal afternoon safari. After the excitement of the morning sighting of T-54 (Matkasur), the dominant male tiger of the tourism zone, I thought I had seen it all and I’ll just soak in the forest sun.
In the morning we were driving back to the exit gate where we saw him secure a place near the waterhole under the shade of a big Jamun tree. I got a classic picture that depicts the arrival of summer in this forest!
We decided to check his whereabouts in the afternoon as well. We reached the gallery view of Jamunbodi. He was still lying down and I was joking as to how lazy a tiger can be. Five hours, and he was still there! But within five-minutes of our arrival he stood up, looked behind and started walking back. Little did I know what was in store for us for the next half-an-hour.
As soon as he went away from our view a long stress call of a sloth bear was heard. We decided to check out what was happening. We were overwhelmed with what we saw, a face-off between a mother sloth bear and the sub adult sloth bear with T-54.
The desperate mother sloth bear came in between T-54 and her sub adult. A royal rumble began. The sub adult left the place with the agony of losing its mother. We could hear the deep sounds coming from the back, while the mamma bear showed us what it takes to be a mother and what a mother can do to save her offspring.
T-54 tried his best to knock her down and there was moment, of about 5 minutes, when we thought the mother had given up as she lay still in the trap of T-54.
With great disbelief we saw her giving a full aggressive blow to T-54, the unique design of the sloth bear’s hair stopped T-54 from delivering a killer bite. The bear’s most vulnerable part of the body is its snout and the chest. But she rolled into a fur ball and didn’t allow T-54 to bite into that part of her body. Then with a full thrust, she tightly smacked T-54 across its face and moved away.
The slap left the tiger dazed and now it was T-54’s turn to be afraid. He gave up and ran for his safety, still being chased by the mother bear. Clearly the mother bear had won this round of the epic fight.
(Mritunjay Tiwary gave up city life to work for blind people and the girl child in rural Bihar but retained his passion for wildlife and landscape photography)
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