We weren’t going to tip over, at least I didn’t think so. But when our “guide” clonked out and bounced onto the rubber floor our raft of four plus him started twirling in the fizzy white water like an alka seltzer dissolving in a glass.
This was my first time on Nepal’s Rapti river and my rafting experience was very limited, although fortunately on a few rivers in Alaska that seemed as cold and wild as this one. But I was no paddle captain. Thank goodness that the other two rafts – both behind us – seemed OK. Until we saw in the distance what we had been looking for, but what was now suddenly a mortal threat:
Shafts of early morning light bending through the canyon revealed us to him. He stopped drinking and whipped his head right at me, his long dripping whiskers slinging bits of sun into the frigid air above the rapids. The anger of the river glistened in his onyx stare. I twisted on my seat to keep my focus on him, the raft barreling right towards him like a floating merry-go-round: One of the most magnificent creatures in the universe, the Royal Bengal Tiger.
Time stopped as I remembered the grizzly chasing my raft on the Noatak north of the Brooks Range and I wondered with a silent morbid chuckle if I had some unique affliction. On that particular trip the “professional” was also out cold bouncing on the rubber floor like the bubbles in his really bad bourbon. One of the few times I’ve ever held a gun was when I rolled him over to get his rifle and shot over the head of the grizzly who turned and ran.
No gun this time. Yes grizzlies are probably more aggressive than tigers. But this Shere Khan wasn’t high tailing it. The current was fast and he seemed frozen if steadfast, two front legs planted in the foam as if waiting for his cheese burger to be delivered.
All the planet’s apex predators are threatened, today. The two great cats face their greatest challenge from people competing for their habitat.
Often classified as poaching, outside Vietnam and Cambodia there seems little motivation to kill tigers for body parts. As with lions in Africa it’s basically to eliminate the most serious threat to their stock. Additionally in India the need for firewood which is no longer available in the populated areas outside protected reserves, pits villagers and predators square on.
The Indian sub-continent tiger population was probably as low as 1200 in the early 1970s. At the same time as elephants were classified by the new CITES convention as endangered in 1986, so were tigers. India in particular was on a mission to save them mainly because of Indira Chandi’s stated goal to save them.
They’ve done a masterful job. Today there are likely 3200 tigers roaming India’s 54 protected and specifically designated “tiger reserves.” But therein lies the problem.
The Indians approached saving the tiger far too narrowly.
When I saw my first Bengal tiger in 1983, the average territory size described by the then famous tiger researcher, Charles McDougall, often approached 100 sq. miles. Any tiger seen outside only a handful of actually protected reserves was usually in the cross-hairs of a gun. Because there simply wasn’t a lot of good research prior to McDougall we really don’t know what a truly wild tiger’s natural territory was.
What we do know is that today it’s less than 10 sq. miles. In some of the older reserves, like Corbett, it may be as low as 2 sq. miles.
The fearsome predator that turned my spine to ice on the Rapti River is for many viewing them today, a pussy cat. Quite unlike most apex predators, collections of non-family member tigers, and even groups of male tigers are seen regularly together. This is wild behavior inverted almost to captive behavior.
Moreover, the biodiversity of these tiger reserves is wanting. There is only an average of 22 other larger mammal species in any of India’s tiger reserves except Kazaringa. (It’s considerably better in Nepal.) The terrain is monotonous because so many of the plants, birds and insects have been in such catastrophic decline.
But Indian conservationists have figured out how to nurture the tiger in these stressed outdoor environments. Fantastic anti-poaching efforts have become a model worldwide, wells are being struck everywhere to insure a constant supply of water, and the tiger has learned two important things to get fat:
First, it has learned to survive on a couple prolific species of pretty docile deer that almost like Africa’s zebra seem to be able to eat anything that grows. So the need for a greater variety of food – which the lion needs – is absent. Second, it has learned to tolerate large numbers of people and vehicles.
At least for the moment lions aren’t quite as accommodating to surviving as tigers seem to be. They definitely tolerate tourists, but nothing like tigers in India.
Perhaps the best example is Ngorongoro Crater where as recently as five years ago there were over 100 lions. The post-Covid explosion of tourists has reduced that considerably. No official count has been taken, but between my own and colleague observations I’d say as much as half the crater population has moved off into the Serengeti.
Only ten years ago there were at least 45,000 lions in sub-Saharan Africa and about 2,500 tigers in the Indian sub-continent. WWF claims there are now 23,000 lions (but I think that way too high). Today worldwide there are probably 4,500 tigers. It’s unimaginable to me, but the trend lines point to the day when there are more tigers than lions in the wild.
Neither will soon disappear. There are more than 10,000 tigers breeding in captivity like zoos, with a few thousand more lions. In fact the burgeoning lion population in zoos has provoked an irksome debate over euthanasia.
As EWT prepares for my 50th year of guiding in the wilderness, we’ve decided to look for tigers in Nepal, not India.
The vast wilderness of Nepal that forty years stretched from the raging rivers near the Indian border to the untouched peaks of the Himalayas abutting Tibet are certainly in trouble. Many of the terai forests, untended grasslands and fern-covered river banks are stressed by malls and textile factories which though not yet in view can be heard or smelled when the wind is right.
But it’s better than India. Nepal’s Chitwan and Bardiya reserves have 65-90 larger mammal species, including one-horned rhino, swamp and sambar deer and Asian elephants. There are far fewer visitors than in India, and “wildlife management” is broader and not so species-directed. Agricultural and other economic development is impressive but considerably behind India’s.
It may not be what I first saw rafting through Chitwan, but even a fraction of what created my indelible memory more than forty years ago is worth the chase.
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EWT’s “Land of Shere Khan” tiger safari operates March 18-28, 2024 under the leadership of Liz Heck and Hasan Rahman, a leading Asian tiger expert. The photo of the tiger above was taken by Hasan.