Kanha India - Tiger Park

from the Ray I. Doan Photographic Collection

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One evening we watched this female Tiger walk down the road toward us.
She then took a drink out of a small puddle before disappearing into the jungle.

Kanha: Pronounced (Ken-ah). This is a very large Tiger Park in central India. The area was set aside as a Wildlife Preserve by the British in 1902. Part of that was because the area was so remote and the jungle so thick no one wanted to live there anyway. It has a similar history to many of the Tiger Parks in that it was also a hunting preserve for the rich and famous.

This park is large enough that it has two widely separated entrance gates. This park also has longer gate hours because you have longer distances to drive. One gate was open from 6:00 AM to 11:00 AM and the other gate was open until noon. This park had the most tigers, a hundred plus, but I found it to be the most difficult park to see the tigers. This was because in most places the jungle was so thick that a tiger laying down 50 feet away was probably invisible. With the elephants you had a chance at tiger sightings, otherwise you had to be lucky.

Kanha has no limit on the number of vehicles allowed in the park. This means that whenever anyone sights a tiger near a road, there is, in short order, a traffic jam. There is almost always one car with a baby crying, and the other vehicles have the local guides shouting back and forth to each. Then there are doors slamming and tires skidding as people jockey for the best positions. It always seemed to me that it would take a mentally deficient tiger to walk into the scene that usually developed along the roads.

In spite of all that, I had one close up and personal encounter with a tiger on a road in Kanha. We were driving a back road one evening when our guide spotted a tiger walking in the jungle. How he spotted it, I'll never know. Even when I knew right where it was I couldn't see it two thirds of the time. It was a big male, patrolling his territory, and he was following a path that was angling toward the road.

We were the lead vehicle of three jeeps and we were all starting and stopping, trying to find a good spot to see the tiger. We came to small cleared slash, that angled off the road, and appeared to be a spot where the tiger would walk into the open. We parked up ahead of the other jeeps and waited for our big moment. The tiger walked up to the edge of the open area and then laid down, inside, basically out of sight. We were in the worst spot to see the tiger.

However, no one had a very good view of him, and everyone thought he might walk out into the open, so quite reigned. Everyone was waiting patiently for the tiger to move, but every five minutes or so another jeep drove up to the end of the line. With the constantly increasing noise level, I was beginning to despair of a good tiger sighting coming to pass. All of a sudden my driver started the jeep and raced down toward the next curve in the road. Why I didn't know, because the tiger hadn't moved.

Then I saw her. Another female tiger was walking around the curve in the road, about 50 feet from where we had stopped. She kept on walking toward us, viewing us with a very intent look in her eye. She was one and half bounds away from us, and I was hoping she understood she was not supposed to eat the people in the jeep. I guess she did, because she walked over to the edge of the road and took a drink from a small puddle and then walked off into the jungle. I took 12 shots of her with a 200 mm f2.8 lens. Even thought I had ASA 400 film in the camera, it was so dark, I was shooting at 1/30 sec. hand held with a bean bag. Four of the shots turned out blurred, probably nervous hand shake, but eight were good with one exceptional image.

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This page was last updated: March 15, 2008