It Rained Cats and Cats | Beautiful Jungle Monsoons
The dark clouds started pouring down after a promising sun shine in the morning. Last night’s on-property safari was lucky enough to spot the big three of South India – The Elephants, The Indian Gaur and The Shaggy Sloth Bear. Before starting today’s evening safari, streams of thought rushed through my mind…will I be able to cater to the expectation of our curious guests who started their trip with great expectations? Will the rain gods be kind enough make our trail smooth?
The answer came as we progressed our trip which started with an awesome sighting of beautiful peacock who came out to the open ground to enjoy the fresh shower of monsoon.
This was followed by hundreds of spotted deer which made us to halt as they slowly crossed the road. Stags with marvelous antler stood at a short distance and cast an anxious look then followed the herd.
Because of the heavy monsoon showers, this ride turned out to be adventurous through the slushy and muddy terrain. As the light slowly gave way to darkness, our harvesting time started as we came across herds of Elephants, Indian gaur and large groups of Spotted Deer now and then. This landscape in and around our property itself, is one of the richest landscapes with a very high biomass! InnTheWild’s unique location within the valley makes it one of the best Wildlife Resorts in Bandipur and Mudumalai region.
So back to our safari…as the night started to fall upon us, the forest became totally covered in darkness; our curious eyes surveyed the jungle in gypsy’s headlight. As we were about to take a turn, we spotted something moving like a shadow and we immediately halted our vehicle. And boy were we in for a treat – it was a great delight to see one leopard in the headlight of the gypsy, it glanced in our direction but showed no interest. Not even curious enough to check on all the anxious pairs of eyes that were staring at it with great admiration. It got down from where it was perched and slowly walked away. The amount of excitement in our vehicle was beyond any description! 🙂
After that, we crossed black nape hares, mouse deer, wild boars, but all our minds were still fully occupied by nothing other than that magnificent creation of God we had just come across. Just then we came across its junior version, Leopard cat. These are more elusive than leopard itself and are always a rare delight to watch. Unfortunately, due to the darkness, we couldn’t get any post-worthy pictures of all of these, but the images are etched in our memories forever… 🙂
Even though we planned our on-property moon light safari, we had to first cancel it because of heavy rains. But then after ten the rain gods obliged and we decided to proceed for the on-property moon light safari, as our guests were checking out the next day. We’ll let them enjoy the rain in the jungle! 🙂 And what a treat we were in-for…something unexpected was waiting for us. None other than the Lord of Mudumalai! A tiger slowly walked away from the on-property lake, as we slowly rode our vehicle towards it…
This is why I love our jungles in the monsoons… 🙂
As narrated by Mr. Subish Sebastian, Senior Naturalist at InnTheWild, Masinagudi
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