Wild Lessons

To witness acts of survival in the wild is a blessing for the rarest few – join the author as she narrates her first experience seeing a tigress imparting training.

- Aishwarya Sridhar

There is a deep sense of happiness in seeing a lush green forest. A thrill in scanning its carpeted leafy floor…a place where none can disturb you…echoing with bird songs and tiger roars…It’s not that I Love the city less, but I worship Mother Nature more.

To live this mantra of mine inspired by Lord Byron, I decided to take a break from a student’s life of exam fevers and drown myself in the sounds of the Common Hawk Cuckoo’s ‘brain fever’ instead. The sweltering heat of summer notwithstanding, destination Tadoba was still my first choice.

The Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR) is situated in the Chandrapur District of Maharashtra just 205 km from Nagpur airport, and is one of the best tiger territories in the whole of Central India. The landscape etched with tall teak trees and dense bamboo provides all the prey the big cats really need to survive – Sambhar, Spotted Deer, the Giant Indian Gaur and Wild Boar to mention a few.

One summer afternoon, after a long drive through dusty tracks that snaked their way through dense canopies, deep inside the tangled heart of this Central Indian forest, I arrived beside a small lake surrounded by tall dry grass and gnarled bamboo bows on one side and a mud bank on the other.