Rai Grass

This is one of the most common grass in our area and its most non palatable grass for herbivores but in our garden it comes through cow muck. It means the cattle do eat it.

Animal deaths and Shashi / Bamera pugmark

Some animal deaths in the jungle really made me very angry and often you find yourself very helpless in these cases.

Charger, Bamera, Indrajeet and Indrani deaths are some of them.

While looking my old files for habitat shots I just found these two pictures of Shashi / Bamera pugmark.

Bamera had a small injury in one of his pad. For Cats that kind of injury is nothing. It's like a scratch for us.

Shashi / Bamera had this injury in his pad for months together and ultimately he died of septicemia of this injury.

You can see the pugmark in dry sand where constantly he is leaving a wet mark on the sand.

This all happened when Bandhavgarh have a qualified Govt Vet posted especially for looking after the wild animals.

Jungle Cat.

Not an easy subject to photograph. Sightings in this forest are very irregular. You need lots of time to let her accustom to your present but nowadays that's not possible only because of unruly guests ibn the park.
People do not respect other animals or do not respect other guests in the park.
This has happened only because of Guide and drivers who do not have any knowledge about Natural History of the area or one can say if tiger is not there then they don't know how to keep their guests interest in the park or how to keep their guest busy by showing other animals in the park.
luckily we found this cat in the area where other vehicles were not there so we had the opportunity to watch her pounce on a mouse in ten minutes time.

Chinku aka Mangu

At the time when this picture was taken on 9th Feb 2019 this dominant male tiger was less than 9 yrs old.
Experts says this his prime age but here in Bandhavgarh this male is facing tough competition from two young males who are just reached to their sexual maturity age.
This is only due to high density of Tigers in this area.
When we hear in other parks a male tiger survives 14-15 yrs of age and still roaming as dominant male we wonder why it does not happen here because they also claim

similar density there too.

Chinku aka Mangu

9th Feb 2019

This was the day when me and Kay were in the jungle and we reached to the spot, as most of the time we are the last to enter the park, people had already seen some tiger crossing the road twice.

But no one had any clue which Tiger it is except some Guides said for surety that it's a male.

People lose their patience very quickly in the jungle and sometimes Tigers do wait for the people to go away.

Patience rewarded and after about an hour we heard some leaves cracking and soon he appeared in that small opening in the forest.

It was Chinku aka Mangu.

Since last few weeks we were seeing some very unusual movements of male tigers in his territory.

Photos published on social media showed two different male moving in his territory, both young.

This day Chinku was restless and very alert. Looks ike he was expecting to face some other intruder.

He was not wrong.

Eucalyptus plantation.

This spot will be an eyesore in coming years. How this happened nobody knows. Staff said that they didn't knew that this is a part of the park. Management knew it only when the owner came for a NOC for electricity.

Glory Lily Gloriosa superba

Glory lily is said to be one of the most poisnous plant found in the jungle. At one time it was said that even LTTE people in Sri Lanka keep it handy for suicide.

Its one of the most striking flower in the jungle in Months of October November. At one time we use to see it a lot on road side but as the flower start catching the eye of plant thieves most of the Glory Lily rhizome is taken out by plant thieves.