Carnivora

19^th March

There are days when you head into the forest and you wonder why you bothered. The trees are there and they are as beautiful as ever, but not a bird stirs, not a monkey jumps, not a junglefowl crows and certainly not a tiger prowls. There are days like this when clients put on a brave face and tour leaders bear everyone’s lead-grey disappointment on their shoulders. Yes, there are days like this.

Today was nothing like that; nothing at all. It was astonishing.

Entering the forest we found fresh tracks of a leopard in the unmade road. A short distance further, there he was, padding nonchalantly ahead of us in the blithe cool of early morning. Our leopard, a male, stopped to scent-mark a tree and doing so turned the full stab of his gaze on us. He sprayed again and was lost in a dense stand of bamboo. Moments later he strolled through the long grass beyond and was seen no more. Magnificent.

The F9 female tiger at Katezari was not to be seen, though her family’s tracks were all over the road. In the dry hills above this wetland a chowsingha, a four-horned antelope, peered at us from the safety of the forest’s edge and, after a moment’s look, bounded away. Near here were very fresh tracks and fresh scat of the sloth bear, though the bear itself eluded us.

Abruptly one of our jeeps stopped in the road ahead of us. Here were three Asian wild dogs, flopped lazily in the road and at its edge. These gorgeous, lean animals are, quite unfairly, cast as the vicious red dogs of Kipling’s Jungle Book, the villains who murder Akela the wolf. In truth they are animals of incomparable grace and power who, through their intelligence and social bonds, hunt in packs and are as feared by herbivores as the tiger. Lying in the road and trotting through the grass beside it, waving their feathery tails, they looked far too friendly to be feared and we were thrilled to see them.

Reaching Pandherpauni what should we see but two of our familiar female tiger cubs, one in the road and another pottering through tall grass at its edge. Time and words fail but these peerless cats were a fitting end to our incomparable stay in a wonderful park.

This evening we are in Pench Tiger Reserve, which straddles the border of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh in the Seoni Hills, quoted by Kipling as the home of Sher Khan. There were many more creatures in the forest this morning and many along our journey to Pench but all I can name now are those which are new. New for our tour: rhesus macaques along the roadside close to Pench. New for my yearlist: Indian grey hornbills planing through the forest edge on long wings as we arrived.

Tomorrow Pench. Another forest, another dynasty of tigers, and the promise of another adventure.

New today

	Mammals
	leopard	Panthera pardus fusca
52	chowsingha	Tetraceros quadricornis
53	Asian wild dog	Cuon alpinus
	Birds
418	Indian grey hornbill	Ocyceros birostris

2012 Totals

Mammals: 53

Birds: 418

Reptiles: 11

Amphibians: 3

Fish: 2

Ten more things I love about Yala

1) Tufted grey langurs, with Beckhamesque crests (circa 1994) and soot-black faces, drooping and dangling from the trees.

2) Toque macaques, as yesterday, hearing the sound of jeeps at the lunchtime picnic spot, clambering along a branch over the river, dropping into the water to wade the final metres, and bullying tourists for their leftovers.

3) Unobtrusive, beautiful birds in the shady riverine forest: grey-bellied cuckoo, Asian brown flycatcher and black-naped monarch.

4) Innumerable orange-breasted green-pigeons whirring between trees. If you looked at a blueprint for a bird this colourful you would say it could never work. But it does.

5) Elephants, elephants, elephants; everywhere we looked, elephants. Bulls with no tusks and a bull with tusks, families of females with their young, mudbaths, scratching posts, dustbaths, wallows, little ele-infants; everywhere we looked, wonderful elephants.

6) Two Indian pittas having a tiff, bobbing through the bushes, flashing their celestial bums.

7) A mugger crocodile grinning from every pool of warm milky-tea water.

8) Skies sliced by swifts: crested treeswifts (what a bird!), house swifts and powerfully handsome brown-backed needletails.

9) A house gecko who nonchalantly strolls across my keyboard as I write.

10) Oh, and our final two leopards, at the eleventh hour. One, big-necked and broad-faced, apparently a male, draped over the branch of a tree; the other, slender and agile, perhaps his female, bouncing through the tree around him before, getting no response, settling beside him to doze. 

Long may they prowl here in Yala, these priceless cats, and all the creatures with whom they share their jungle.

New species from a second glorious day in Yala

	Birds
390	brown-backed needletail	Hirundapus giganteus
391	grey-bellied cuckoo	Cacomantis passerinus
392	black-naped monarch	Hypothymis azurea
393	sirkeer malkoha	Phaenicophaeus leschenaultii
394	yellow-eyed babbler	Chrysomma sinense
	Reptiles
11	Indian flapshell turtle	Lissemys punctata

2012 Totals

Mammals: 44

Birds: 394

Reptiles: 11

Amphibians: 3

Fish: 2

Kotiya

4.30am: off for another day in the beautiful forests of Yala. Ten things I loved about yesterday:

1) Flower-filled forests reaching the sea. Who would have thought to put a wondrous national park on the beach? Good thinking.

2) A grizzled giant squirrel, hoarily lovely, slipping through the trees beside our jeep.

3) Herds of chital in the grassland and plentiful families of wild boar (big here, bigger-seeming than in India); after all, those leopards have to eat something.

4) Our bus-driver's assistant Tharanga, with the severe good looks of a leopard and a leopard's eye for wildlife. He has been polite, efficient and gravely quiet all week but once in our jeeps in the forest, in his element, he opened up, laughed heartily, spotted many distant shapes and shared his stories of travels and wild animals: 'I see leopard this tree; this one one, that one two.'

5) Sri Lanka junglefowl cocks trotting on pencil-thin legs along the road. Stunning.

6) Our first leopard, dozing in a tree. Not the best of views but, as leopards always are, heart-breakingly beautiful and, a bonus for us, seen by our whole group.

7) A second leopard seen by the whole group; the leopard to end all leopards. For an hour and a half a sturdy male sat close to us in the grass, in full view, dozing, yawning and occasionally fixing his gaze on a herd of chital nearby. In Sri Lanka lives the subspecies Panthera pardus kotiya, named for the Sinhala word for a leopard: kotiya. These leopards are intensely marmalade-coloured, closely spotted with black, and staggeringly lovely. Our male, with a powerful face and strong shoulders, looked almost jaguar-like in colour and muscle. When ready, he stood up, stretched indulgently and strolled away into the bush. As with the blue whales, sometimes words fail.

8) The first year crested hawk-eagle which flew into a tree above this leopard and the white-browed fantail which, offended by the eagle's presence, grew so agitated it twice landed on its back.

9) A golden jackal having a snooze in the short grass as we drove out of the park.

10) A ruddy mongoose scurrying past the jeep as the evening light faded.

It's a superb park and I'm very excited to be heading to it again now, though it's Saturday and the park will be busy. In Tharanga's words, 'Tomorrow locals so much.'

Those who have never seen a leopard under favourable conditions in his natural surroundings can have no conception of the grace of movement, and beauty of colouring, of this the most graceful and the most beautiful of all animals in our Indian Jungles.

Jim Corbett

Man-Eaters of Kumaon

New species from a glorious day in Yala

	Mammals
41	grizzled giant squirrel	Ratufa macroura
42	leopard	Panthera pardus kotiya
43	golden jackal	Canis aureus
44	ruddy mongoose	Herpestes smithii
	Birds
382	crested hawk-eagle	Nisaetus cirrhatus ceylanensis
383	white-browed fantail	Rhipidura aureola
384	Sri Lanka junglefowl	Gallus lafayettii
385	Jerdon’s bushlark	Mirafra affinis
386	jungle prinia	Prinia sylvatica
387	Malabar pied hornbill	Anthracoceros coronatus
388	chestnut-headed bee-eater	Merops leschenaulti
389	brown fish-owl	Ketupa zeylonensis zeylonensis

2012 Totals

Mammals: 44

Birds: 389

Reptiles: 10

Amphibians: 3

Fish: 2