Surprise Sighting of the “Sloth”
I set out on the morning nature walk with a few friends and was pleasantly surprised to have a large group of guests join us that day. I spent a few minutes along the fence of our resort property talking about the beauty and diversity of the Mudumalai region. I explained to our guests that spotting our “wild friends” would be purely chance and they can be lucky if they are attentive to the sights and sounds in the forest. They fully understood and we continued on our walk with a lot of excitement and enthusiasm.
We were just a few minutes into our walk and to my surprise I saw a black image near the teak trees (tectona grandis), as if searching for something. I first thought it was a tree shrub, however I soon realized it was a “Sloth bear”. Read more
Encounter with a “Masinagudi Charger”
I had spent the day reading the “Black Panther of Sivanipalli” by Kenneth Anderson, the great hunter of Scottish origin who had settled in India and whose books are hailed as classics of jungle lore. Towards evening I engaged myself spotting the flying beauty plum headed parakeet and the stork billed king fisher. All of a sudden, in the evergreen forest to my left bordering the resort, I noticed the “horns” with a distinctive elliptical cross-section at its base, a characteristic that is strongly male. I leaped down from the machan where I was watching the birds and ran about 800 m in the direction of the horns I spotted. I could not get a clear view of where the beast stood, and when I did find him, to my surprise I found that he was a gaur or the Indian bison and was looking in my direction. It seemed as if he was noticing my actions for quite some time now. I quickly tried kneeling to hide myself. Read more
