IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Sahgal, B.; Scarlott, J. | |
| This heaven and this earth: will India keep its promise to _Panthera tigris_? | |
| 2010 Book Chapter | |
We were in the tiger capital of the world. The sun had barely warmed the mist of a chilly mid-morning in January at Ranthambhore's Rajbagh Lake. We had given up on seeing a tiger. Our consolation was the lake itself, its serenity broken only by the family of boars rooting around at its edge. And then, as if conjured from the very air, she appeared, padding silently down to the shoreline in front of the ruins of the summer palace. Even from this distance we could make out her powerful shoulders as she elongated her feline form to drink at the water's edge. Thirst quenched, the tigress moved toward a small island in the center of the lake, stepping and hopping from rock to rock, stripes appearing and disappearing amid tall, golden grass. After a brief disappearing act on the island, she re-materialized near our jeep. Finding the waters of Rajbagh irresistible, she drank again. This time we saw the concentric ripples formed by a tongue as pink as the pinkest lotus flower. The tranquility of our moments with this tigress belied the fearsome struggles of her species' long history with _Homo sapiens _in India. Her ancestors were hunted down through the centuries until the contest between man and tiger reached a fever pitch, utterly desperate, utterly one-sided. With the advent of firearms and industrialization, and through years of Empire and Independence, wholesale slaughter and habitat destruction brought a dwindling of India's tigers from an estimated 40,000 in 1900, to numbers a child could count by the late 1960s. |
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