Among Tigers: Fighting to Bring Back Asia's Big Cats

Foreword, by Geoffrey C. Ward

I’VE BEEN LUCKY ENOUGH to know Ullas Karanth for more than three decades. I first met him in early February 1990, while on assignment for National Geographic. He was just beginning his pioneering work radio-tracking tigers and leopards in Nagarahole National Park in the Southwestern Indian state of Karnataka.

He had already shown that there was simply not enough prey in the Indian National Parks he studied to support anything like the numbers of tigers some of their directors claimed. And now, just within the last month, he had managed to immobilize, collar and release four tigers for radio tracking—the first Indian researcher ever to do so.

During that first visit he invited me to ride along with him in his battered green Suzuki as he drove first to one high point and then another, stopping to sweep his antenna above his head, hoping to locate one or another of his collared cats through his headphones.

He and I seemed to hit it off. Ullas was then, as he is now, utterly serious about science and uncompromising about conservation, but also mordantly amused by things within and beyond his chosen field.

He seemed to understand that accompanying a radio-tracker as he patiently listens for beeps only he can hear is not a spectator sport, and after I’d driven with him two or three mornings, he was kind enough one afternoon to climb with me up a lofty watchtower that overlooked a waterhole in the heart of the park.

Here are my notes of what I saw.

Four broad firelines had been cut through the gray-green jungle, and waiting there while the late afternoon shadows lengthened was something like attending an infinitely complex tennis match, my head swiveling back and forth from clearing to clearing as one by one the animals emerged for their evening drink. Each species had its own way of approaching the water. Sambar and chital clung to the tree line, ears twitching with anxiety. Barking deer, red-brown and little larger than cocker spaniels, undulated through the grass, heads down as if moving through waves. Three wild boar raced for the water, snorting as they went and scattering two peahens. A leopard appeared out of nowhere and disappeared as suddenly and silently as he came.

Larger animals came, too. A bull gaur materialized at the water’s edge, his body a dark, daunting wall of muscle out of all proportion to his small head and tiny, stockinged feet. As he lowered his horns to drink, mynah birds flitted on and off his massive shoulder.

Then, just at dusk, a young bull elephant splashed into the water, drank his fill, somehow sensed my presence, whirled around and around in melodramatic fury, flapping his ears and trumpeting all the while, then crashed off through the brush.

I’ve never forgotten that afternoon, never failed to be grateful to Ullas for sharing it with me. No subsequent visit to any jungle anywhere in India has ever given me as vivid a sense of what her forests had once been like and what, if science and rational management were applied, they could one day be again.

As a teenager in the mid-1950s I had lived in New Delhi where my father worked for the Ford Foundation and where I’d done some amateurish hunting, fascinated by the jungle but blissfully unaware of how bleak the prospects for India’s wildlife then seemed. I’d come back to India forty-odd years later as a writer, not a hunter, still fascinated by those forests but now drawn to tiger wallahs, the handful of men whose mission was to restore the tiger’s world to something like what it once had been. And so, over the months and years that followed that first visit to Nagarahole, I kept track of Ullas. I visited Karnataka twice on assignment to report what he and the extraordinary band of volunteers he’d gathered around him were doing, and I met with him over single-malt whiskey at my New York home twice a year when he visited the Bronx Zoo headquarters of the Wildlife Conservation Society whose India program he headed.

Among Tigers is his lively personal chronicle of the years during which he became what his mentor George Schaller has called him, the best tiger biologist in the world. The ingenious methods of monitoring animal population densities he and his colleagues developed—incorporating camera traps, line transect sampling, and occupancy modeling, all clearly explained here—are now employed in tiger range countries throughout Asia. Simultaneously, Ullas also became one of India’s most effective conservationists. He and his fellow citizens have used their constitutional rights to legally fight for the diversion of roads through protected areas, and closure of a vast strip mine that was ripping apart Kudremukh National Park in the heart of the biodiverse Western Ghats. They also developed a model voluntary resettlement plan which, without pressure or intimidation, has persuaded some two thousand families to leave prime tiger habitats and begin new and better lives beyond their borders.

The obstacles Ullas overcame accomplishing all this are nearly as extraordinary as the accomplishments themselves. A mob burned his Suzuki and destroyed his field camp in Nagarahole. He’s been taken to court too many times to count.

Ullas, who has never suffered fools gladly, has sadly had to deal with more than his share of them: tabloid journalists willing to distort facts about his work to sell papers; forest ministers who knew nothing about the forests in their charge; venal local officials more interested in siphoning off funds than saving wildlife; Central Government officials who stubbornly refused to consider fresh approaches to long-standing problems; international organizations that lavish funds with little understanding of how they will be used—or misused; and living-room conservationists more interested in the fate of individual tigers– even if they have killed people—than in the survival of the species as a whole.

Through it all he has remained an optimist, committed to his cause, convinced that, if properly defended and managed, India’s forests can potentially hold ten to fifteen thousand tigers, three to five times the current estimate of around three thousand.

When he and I first became friends all those years ago, neither of us had grandchildren. He now has two. I have four. If, in the distant future, our grandchildren’s grandchildren are still able to see tigers in the wild, it will be in no small measure because Ullas Karanth never backed down from a fight, never stopped seeking to understand the beautiful, elusive animals he says he is hardwired to understand and defend.

Geoffrey C. Ward is an American historian and the writer of television documentaries including The Civil War and The Vietnam War and nineteen books, including (with his wife Diane Raines Ward) Tiger Wallahs: Saving the Greatest of the Great Cats.

Preface

I FIRST STARTED WORKING on an early version of this book in the year 2000, during a rare sabbatical at Columbia University provided by my employer, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in New York. However, soon after, my mandate to conduct wildlife research and real-world conservation—both at the same time—gave me no time to finish the manuscript. While the book was important, it never seemed as urgent as the crisis on hand. The manuscript languished in various forms until 2019, when my responsibilities to the WCS ceased.

Luckily, at that point in time, I met Jane Dystel, whose enthusiasm as a literary agent is exceeded only by her passion for tigers! Encouraged, I started working on the book in earnest. When Jane connected me to senior editor Jerome Pohlen at Chicago Review Press, I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

This story is a cocktail of three spirits: the hard science of tiger ecology, the dismal science of real-world conservation, and my personal journey as a naturalist. Natural history has always coursed through my blood, even as my career meandered through engineering and then farming before coming home to my true passion: understanding tigers.

After gaining freedom at midnight from colonial mastery the year before I was born, my India also stumbled along, trying to seek prosperity and equity for its impoverished citizens. Although India covers just 2.4 percent of the earth’s land, it is the world’s most populous democracy and also its sixth largest economy—one that is growing rapidly.

Despite this massive transformation, somehow India has managed protect three-fourths of the world’s wild tigers on just a quarter of the tiger habitat that remains. The big question now is whether India, one of the world’s top ten mega-biodiversity nations, can hold on to its biological riches while also addressing difficult social transformations coming its way. Recovering wild tiger numbers from the present abysmally low three thousand to something more befitting the country’s size and economic clout is a prime example of that challenge, which its top leaders are failing to even recognize.

In this account I have narrated my five decades of effort to understand and recover India’s tigers. For me, writing about the natural history and the hard science around tigers was far easier than narrating the complexities of my interactions with humans involved. Among them are seniors who mentored me, peers who stood by me, and students I groomed. Because of the constraints of space here, not all of them appear in this narrative. I have used real names or initials for such individuals, including several public figures. There were a few others who, driven by incompetence, corruption, vanity, or other personal reasons have played adversarial roles. I have masked their names with pseudonyms to avoid distractions from the key conservation issues involved in these contestations.

The first seven chapters of this book are focused on my own experiences in southern India’s spectacular Malenad landscape, when wild tigers came to the brink of extinction, followed by the near miracle of their sporadic recovery after the early 1970s. Unfortunately, after 2005, the global attention and flood of money directed at India’s tigers have led to mission-drift, stalling that early promise.

In the last two chapters I have tried to synthesize my science and these experiences to propose a pragmatic framework for recovering wild tigers in the future, at a scale which is both necessary and possible. I plead for boldly leveraging the irreversible transformations which are already underway in diverse domains, such as land-use change, energy production, agriculture, nature tourism, and economic demography, to recharge tiger recovery. I cannot honestly share the dreams of many of my conservationist friends that wild nature can be saved only by traveling back in time to an imagined golden age of harmony between humans and tigers.

My overall view is that if—and that is a big IF—we do the right things now, tiger populations can rebound even more vigorously in the future. If I can convince my readers to reexamine the flawed approaches to tiger recovery currently being pursued by the well-meaning animal welfarists, social activists, academics, bureaucrats, and donors, I will have met my modest goal.

K. Ullas Karanth

1

A Day in the

Life of a Tiger

I RECALL EVERYTHING about the day January 29, 1990.

It was 0845 hours in the emerald jungle of Nagarahole in southwestern India [MAPS 1 & 2, photo insert section]. The ten-meter-tall Randia tree I had carefully selected was 200 meters from the wild tiger resting near its kill. I climbed the rickety bamboo ladder gingerly and found just enough space to stand by squeezing my frame into a V-shaped fork in the tree. I held the loaded gun firmly.

Ten meters away, both to my left and right, teams of five men each were walking behind two riding elephants, goaded forward by mahouts sitting on their necks. Two other men sitting on the elephant’s backs unrolled lengths of meter-wide white cloth steadily to the men following them on foot. The cascading fabric was deftly picked up and strung to bushes by these men. Soon, the two taughtly stretched waist-high cloth curtains diverged deeper into the forest trying to encircle the tiger. If it was still there.

The men worked in pin-drop silence, so that the tiger’s acute ears would pick up only the normal sounds of the tropical jungle: two elephants lumbering along, noisily breaking off branches to feed, all the while emitting loud rumbles, squeaks, and growls. The cat would not suspect some trickery was afoot.

The elephants and men were soon out of sight. The beat for the tiger would soon begin. For centuries, such beats had been employed to hunt wild tigers to the verge of extinction. Now I was employing them to save the big cats. In the months and years to come, I hoped to track generations of wild tigers—from the time they were born, learned to hunt, roamed freely, dispersed, found one another, mated, raised cubs, and finally died—in the heart of the Indian jungle.

The stockade of beat cloth used to catch a tiger.

I practiced slowly moving the gun barrel—really just a tube of polished aluminium—in a gentle arc, concentrating on the foresight. I hoped the tiger would come down the jungle trail that cut through the Chromolaena shrubbery ahead.

I carefully tried to anticipate all possible scenarios. My feet, tightly wedged into the cleft, would be barely three meters above the shoulder of any tiger that came by. Even if I fidgeted slightly, the cat’s razor-sharp eyes or ears could detect my presence. If that happened, the big cat could bound away, giving me no chance to shoot at it. Or, in a worst case, it could rear up ferociously and pull me down like a rag doll. The second unpleasant scenario was unlikely, unless the animal was a nervous tigress accompanied by small cubs. Fifteen years earlier, Nepali forester Kirti Tamang had been pulled down and severely mauled by a tigress when he climbed a tree to get a better look at her cubs.

The weapon in my hand was a flimsy compressed-air gun that could only shoot a single plastic syringe and inflict nothing stronger than a pinprick to the tiger. I contrasted my situation with the one faced by the American trophy hunter Jack Denton Scott. In his book Forests of the Night, Scott claimed to be in grave danger while waiting on a high machan (tree platform), out of reach for even the most athletic tiger. Furthermore, in those ebbing days of tiger hunts in India, Scott was armed with a powerful rifle. In the end, the lucky tiger did not turn up at all.

At 0900 hours sharp, the walkie-talkie in my breast pocket crackled briefly.

The tiger beat had begun. The teams of beaters, all the men now safely on elephant back, were approaching the tiger cautiously. The two elephants had to maintain the right spacing. They had to get close to the tiger, trying to gently push the tiger, without letting the wily cat sneak back past them unseen. Their goal was to quietly persuade the tiger to come my way. I was confident they could, because they were led by my old friend and extraordinary naturalist, Forest Ranger Chinnappa.

In Nagarahole, groups of tribesmen wandering in the jungle occassionally shooed away wild dogs, leopards, or even tigers off their kills to steal the meat. A wild tiger’s natural instinct is to quietly sneak away before the foraging men found its kill, hoping to come back and consume it later. I wondered what this particular tiger would do.

At 0902 hours I heard a low growl, quickly followed by the alarmed cackle of a silver-hackled jungle fowl that rocketed off the ground to a safe perch. The tiger was on the move. But was it coming my way?

I waited for what seemed like an eternity, but my watch said it was only five minutes since the beat started. Suddenly, I saw a ghostly shadow move through the dense brush of Randia stems one hundred meters ahead. My heart was pounding, I feared, almost loud enough for the tiger to hear.

Then I saw it: a big male tiger, padding calmly, with its massive head held low, glancing from side to side. He was a picture of power and grace. The shade cast by Randia foliage painted harlequin patterns, black filigree on sunlit gold. The tiger turned left, changing direction to a trail leading away from me. Then he froze in surprise, his left forepaw lifted off the ground. The curtain of bright white fabric in striking contrast to the greenery, which barred his way, worried him. He turned around and followed another trail, this time heading in my direction.

I swung the gun around slowly, hoping I would not catch his eye. My best chance was a broadside shot, through an opening in the shrubbery seven meters ahead. I clicked off the safety catch, steadied the gun, and looked through the scope. I was now seeing the tiger like floating pieces of an orange-and-black jigsaw puzzle. I kept the barrel moving just ahead of the tiger’s muzzle, and stopped. As his head, shoulder, flank, and, finally, thigh emerged in the crosshairs, I squeezed the trigger ever so gently.

There was a soft pop of compressed air. The silvery syringe with its bright red tailpiece shot out, zipping furiously like a gigantic bee. I saw it sting the tiger’s massive thigh. He jerked, cursed the dart with a loud growl, hopped a couple of steps, and stopped. I froze too, not even daring to breathe.

Finally deciding nothing was amiss, the tiger continued padding down the trail. I saw the rippling of his thigh muscles eject the syringe, which dropped to the forest floor. The muscle-bound big cat walked away with all the swagger of a bodybuilder. Soon he was out of sight.

I fished out my wireless handset. Choking with excitement, I whispered, I got the tiger. The beaters at the other end instantly fell silent. I got down from the tree and examined the empty syringe. The tiger had got his full dose, eight hundred milligrams of the tranquilizer. Good!

Next came the second nerve-racking part of the hunt: I had to find the sedated tiger quickly. The sooner we found him, the safer he would be from any chance encounter with another tiger or a bull elephant.

By now the capture team reassembled around me. Ranger Chinnappa, standing at six feet, five inches tall, towered over everyone. He was from the local Kodava warrior caste, and was eight years older than I. Chinnappa had schooled me in jungle craft in the years since we first met two decades earlier. We found we shared a passion for saving wildlife, not hunting it, which was the social norm those days. Over the years, we developed a deep bond of friendship.

With us were two more men from the same warrior caste: forest guard Subbayya, a well-built, mustachioed former soldier in his forties, who was Chinnappa’s able deputy; and the veterinarian Nanjappa, a professionally competent, compact man in his thirties.

The rest of the team was comprised of the two elephant mahouts (drivers) and a dozen trackers. All were skinny, unimpressive-looking men from the local Jenu Kuruba (honey gatherer) tribe. Their darker complexion, curly hair, and unique facial features indicated their earlier and stronger links to original migrants from Africa, the first humans to colonize the Indian subcontient seventy thousand years ago. These tribesmen were masters of jungle craft.

Our team of tiger catchers was all male, except for the two beautiful female elephants. Unlike the men, these stately ladies would not flinch even while facing a wild tiger at close range. They were really the linchpins of this tiger beat.

I had posted Raju, the best among the spoor-trackers, as a scout on a tall Terminalia tree about one hundred meters down the trail from where I had darted the tiger. From his much higher perch, Raju looked out for the tiger after it was darted, and picked up its spoor. The rest of us followed him, fanned out in a semicircle. Behind us came the elephants with their mahouts, also scanning the jungle ahead of us for the tiger.

In late January, the earth was parched and the dry leaves littered the forest floor. Untrained eyes could never detect tiger spoor here. But Chinnappa and these hawk-eyed tribesmen could pick up minute clues—overturned leaves, grass pressed down by the passage of a heavy animal, or the faintest impression of a single toe. Tracking tiger spoor is an art, rather than a science. I was pretty good at it, but no match for these true masters.

From my scientific training, I was aware that within a few minutes the sedative would begin to paralyze the cat’s hindquarters. Thereafter, tracking its spoor as it dragged its hind feet would be easier. Within ten minutes, muscles of the tiger’s forequarter would also become immobile, compelling it to lie down, reluctantly. How far the tiger was able to go depended on its weight, physical condition, and the amount of drug injected. The farther it moved, the harder it would be to find. Beyond a few hundred meters, finding spoor would be nearly impossible.

After fifteen nerve-racking minutes, an eerie yell ahead startled me: it was tracker Raju. My heart skipped a beat, and then his words sank in: Huli sikthu, saar! (I have found the tiger, sir!) The English honorific sir phonetically degenerates into a saar as it rolls off the tongues of the Kannada speakers in southern India.

A great weight lifted off my shoulders as I raced forward.

Raju told me how he had seen the big male tiger cross the dirt road, barely fifty meters from where I darted it. Raju was now in full flow: I leaped down from the tree like a langur monkey, Saar, to dash after the tiger. He was walking all wobbly, like a drunkard returning home from the arrack shop, and added, I followed him sir, barely an arm’s length behind, totally fearless. I know you have injected him with the most powerful drug in the world, and he would do me no harm. These seemed like the words of a brave man.

I cracked a smile, and reminded Raju and other tribesmen of the events that unfolded three weeks earlier, after I had darted my very first tiger, Mudka. That was the first tranquilized tiger these men had ever laid their eyes on. When we found it, it lay on its flank, its massive chest muscles heaving as it breathed. It occasionally twitched its ears, and, most ominously, its cruel yellow eyes were wide open.

Only four of us had approached the fallen tiger: Mel Sunquist (my collaborator at the Univeristy of Florida), Ranger Chinnappa, Guard Subbayya, and me. The trackers had stood twenty meters away, watching us in alarm. We of course knew the tiger was temporarily harmless because of the loss of muscle control induced by the sedative. To these jungle trackers, however, the tiger seemed menacingly awake, and our actions entirely suicidal.

After much coaxing, the tribesmen had, one by one, inched forward to gather around the tiger. They hesitantly joined me to assist in measuring the tiger’s body dimensions with a tape.

Then the tiger moved its head head ever so slightly, and it was like throwing a firecracker at a flock of feeding pigeons. The tight cluster of tribesmen around me exploded. They dashed off helter-skelter, seeking the safety of any nearby tree. Five of them, led by Raju, clambered up a pole-sized sapling of Phyllanthus with the agility of langur monkeys. Unable to bear their combined weight, the sapling had bent earthward, forming a graceful arch. The terror-stricken men hung on for dear life, their feet just inches off the ground. With their glittering black eyes and skinny frames, the dimunitive men strung along the bough tightly looked like giant fruit bats clad in khaki shorts. My peals of laughter had not helped. It took much coaxing for them to resume work.

Now, I teased Raju about his bravery in the presence of that tiger. Everyone joined in the laughter. Finding this tiger had released our bottled-up tensions. Although we had a lot to do, my team was ready to work with clockwork precision.

Plotting the Hunt

Earlier that morning, when it was still dark, I had left my field camp in Nagarahole. I drove into the jungle along the dirt road to check the baits I had staked out to catch tigers. Raju sat huddled in the back of my little green Suzuki 4x4, wrapped in a blanket to ward off the morning chill.

Our first stop was a location labeled SKR 1.4 on my field map. The label meant the point was exactly 1.4 kilometers from my camp in Nagarahole, along the bumpy dirt road to Sunkadakatte in the southern part of Nagarahole Reserve [MAP 2, Point 1]. As I drove up to the location, my headlights lit up the bait: a fifty-kilogram water buffalo calf tethered by its front leg to a wooden peg driven into the ground. The calf was lying down, peacefully chewing cud. To its luck, no tiger had come its way the night before.

I was not happy about being compelled to use live bait. However, because wild prey animals were plentiful in Nagarahole, tigers were not as attracted to dead meat as they were in Southeast Asia. Nor did the tigers readily enter box traps set to catch them, as they do in areas where wild prey are scarce.

My buffalo calves came from among the millions of surplus cattle that wreak havoc on India’s forests and pastures. Upper-caste Hindus who shun beef sold these calves to whip-wielding cattle traders. Herds of them were force-marched for miles, without any fodder, on their final pilgrimages to primitive slaughterhouses. The butchers, usually devout Muslims, had to follow their own religious diktats. They would slit the animals’ throats with razors, reciting sacred texts to dispatch the animals heavenward painfully.

I had purchased a few such calves that were en route to a butchery. For the next few days, they fed on lush jungle grass during the day, then were staked out at dusk. I hoped that a passing tiger would notice them, creep up undetected, and swiftly deliver the killing neck bite. I was sure these animals suffered far less while serving the cause of my science than they would have to propitiate two great religions of the world. In any case, that logic was convenient to my agnostic mind.

Ten minutes later, as I drove up to the next bait site [MAP 2, Point 4], Raju stood up in the back of the car and yelled, This buffalo is gone, Saar! One end of the severed rope, however, was still attached to the wooden peg. This was a good sign. First, the buffalo had not simply slipped the rope off to irretrievably get lost in the forest. Second, a leopard could not have bitten through the thick rope; a tiger had taken this bait, and from the size of its paw prints, the killer was likely a big male.

The blood stains on the dew-soaked grass showed that the tiger had dragged its kill on an animal trail into a dense patch of secondary forest riddled with thorny Lantana bushes. The tufts of coarse gray buffalo hair plucked by these bushes indicated the path taken by the tiger. The drag mark headed down a shallow gulley running northward.

It would take painful ground tracking, at times crawling on all fours, to figure out where exactly the tiger was hiding its kill. Instead, I relied on technology. I had tied a small radio transmitter, commonly employed for tracking raccoons, to the stubby horns of the buffalo. The signals from the transmitter would tell me where the kill was. I hoped the killer would be close by, guarding it from potential thieves—other tigers, leopards, sloth bears, and even wild pigs—until he had his fill.

I quickly got out my telemetry gear: a receiver slung from my shoulder, into which an H-shaped Yagi antenna and earphones were plugged. Based on the direction from which the strongest signals were coming, the kill was at a compass bearing of thirty-four degrees to the north of the bait site. But how far away was it? To figure that out, I had to get more bearings to triangulate the kill’s exact position.

Listening carefully, I walked 250 meters eastward along the dirt road to get a second fix. Then I walked roughly the same distance to the west and got a third fix. The carcass and—if all went well—the tiger would be at point where all three compass bearings converged. Plotted carefully on my field topographic map, I estimated the tiger was a couple of city blocks away from where I stood.

I could imagine the scene: