The Super-Shy Beast of Kanha

Encountering the giant "Balghat male"

Waiting is part and parcel of the life of a wildlife photographer. And so is being disappointed. Like, many times, over and over again. And sometimes several times in the course of a single day. Maybe it makes the remarkable sights that we finally end up capturing as adventurous and joyous as they are. It was one such day of disappointment during my trip to Kanha National Park in June 2022. It had rained pretty heavily that day, and after the rains, tiger sightings are abysmally down. So we were not hoping for the tiger to appear.   

We still wanted to make the most of whatever we could get in the situation. So we took our slim expectations to the buffer zone. Minutes later, we were told that a huge male called “balghat male” was sitting in the water. We rushed to the spot, marvelling at our good luck. But the luck ran out when we reached the spot because we had barely caught a glimpse of him before the shy tiger went into the woods. We expected it to step out at some point, so we waited. Nothing happened.

He stayed back for long and crossed from too far a place for me to get a good shot. He seemed so unwilling to come anywhere near us that he was changing the regular pattern of his movement, which tigers rarely do on account of any common presence and safari vehicles are so much a part of these areas that, to the tigers, they are virtually inedible, non-threatening, funny-smelling, wild animals made of steel and rubber.

Despite the disappointment, we remained on the trail, hoping to find the tiger walking at a distance calmly so that we could get a few good pictures. But this extraordinarily shy fellow didn’t seem to be in any mood to come any closer or just stop for a bit to let us click a few pictures.

We decided to wait and stick to the trail some more. Hope is a powerful motivator. So we moved on to wait on the next trail, but he did not stick to his pattern again, and again crossed from a place far off his usual spot, leaving us with no good shots although I did get a few.

We kept moving, tracking, and then decided to wait by the water body, expecting the tiger to come there for a drink of water. We waited for over 20 minutes around the water, but he didn’t appear and the safari time was running out. To make matters worse, there were just too many mosquitoes and insects due to the rains, and these wild insects are monsters in their own right.

Determined, however, we decided to put up with all that and keep waiting until the last moment of the Safari. And then, when it was only a few minutes left for the safari time to end, he appeared in the open, and for a good thirty seconds, he looked at us and we looked at him.

Tigers are magnificent, yes, but I am pretty used to seeing them and clicking them. This one, however, was astoundingly big, the biggest I have seen. I kept on clicking for the entire thirty seconds he spent in the clearing before strolling back into the woods. The pictures are not as good as I would have liked them to be, for they were clicked in extremely low light conditions, but they are still good enough for anybody to see the enormity of this shy beast. One has to see this massive tiger to believe that tigers are really huge creatures, packed with majesty and might.

Photo Credit: Aarzoo Khurana