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Book Review: The Valmik Thapar books ``Wild Tigers of Ranthambhore`` ``The Tiger`s Destiny`` and `` Tiger The Ultimate Guide``
Thapar is a film maker and conservationist that spent over 25 years filming and observing the tigers of Ranthambhore and he contributed a lot to the conservation of tigers in general and in Rajastan in particular.
The three books share a lot of the material so I decided to combine them together to lessen duplication:
Wild Tigers of Ranthambhore is very much like a diary that Thapar wrote with the park director Fateh Singh Rathore dating back to the mid 1970`s and up until the year 2000 , some tigers became famous thanks to Thapar s book and films tigresses like Padmini, Noon, and Lakshmi and tigers like Genghis and Kublai..their behaviour shed new light on tiger-tiger relations, family life, hunting strategies , and interactions with leopards and mugger crocodiles:
* Padmini killed a nilgai bull and shared the kill with 8 other tigers including her cubs from current and previous litters and even unrelated adult tigers, Padmini controlled the proceedings directing which tiger was allowed to eat and when ( no two adult tigers at the same time) so she was dominant even over the adult male, 9 tigers on one kill but with good table manners, no squabbling , no noise, no aggression and Padmini was ruling the show!
* Genghis was an adult male who developed a previously unobserved technique and hunting sambar: He would hide in the tall grass on the bank of a lake and wait for sambar herds to waddle into knee deep water , the deep water will negate the sambar best advantage speed, Genghis then bounds into the water and almost invariably catches a sambar for an easy meal, this technique led him to confrontations with mugger crocodile that usually went his way, even when he lost a kill to them for 12 hours he managed to regain it with the crocs unable to break through the tough sambar hide. He even taught his mate Noon how to hunt that way.
* Kublai was the perfect father and husband...his mating sessions with Noon are the only time Thapar watched such event, the tenderness he showed towards his cubs and his mate made biologist reconsider the role of the male tiger as a father and as a mate
* Then there was Lakshmi a confrontational tigress that feared nothing: She started by terrorizing her sisters and evicting them from their natal range, then she turned on her own mother and deposed her as queen of the lakes, she fought with several males to protect cubs and carcasses, she chased and treed leopards, she stole kills from crocodiles and famously killed a large crocodile ( in poor shape I admit but still she showed who was boss)
* There was a magnificent account with great pictures of a struggle between Noon and a magnificent sambar stag, the stag escaped injured and died a month later, Noon killed another stag the next day, she was an excellent sambar killer.
The book boasts hundreds of great pictures of tigers, their prey, and competitors ( Leopards, striped hyenas, mugger crocodiles, golden jackals, and sloth bears)
The Tiger s Destiny:
The first part of the book describes the cult of the tiger and its effect on culture, art,and religions in various parts of Asia
The second part is about the life of the tiger which is very similar to the data of the first book but with a little bit more on the predation on wild boar and how this strong prey can challenge tigers except the experienced ones, he describes an account where the boar defeats the tiger and escapes,and another where the tiger kills a large boar.
Kills of sambar, chital, nilgai, peacock, langur,wildbaor, and mugger crocodile are documented with great photographs
The last chapter is about the future of the tiger in which Thapar shows his concern for the plight of the tigers and how he personally has seen their decline and change in behaviour.
The Ultimate Guide: It lives to its name in the sense that Thapar compiled a good amount of the current knowledge of tigers and had a number of experts to contribute including western and Indian biologists, conservationists, and park officials.
One of the contributors Dr Andrew Kitchener presents a good analysis on the validity of subspecies versus clines and ecotypes and the conservation significance of that versus the genetic significance.
Most of the information provided is about the Bengal tigers but Thapar did well to have Dale Miquelle and John Goodrich to contribute to include the Amur tiger as well.
The book is a great source of rare information such as:
* A photo of a tigress suckling her full grown son who is bigger than her.
* An account that Thapar witnessed where a tigress killed a male tiger while defending her cubs, he also quotes W.Ritchie a British forest officer who witnessed an Assam tigress killing a male tiger in 1950 (also to protect her cubs)
*The timid behaviour of male tigers against man versus that of tigresses ( he quotes Chundawat and the tigers he studied at Panna)
*The unusual vocalization of tigress Machli in March 2002 , roaring 226 times in one week
*A number of unusual prey items: A jungle cat, pangolins, monitor lizards, grass hoppers, seals in Russia, and pythons
* Dangerous prey that have killed attacking tigers: gaur, water buffalo, wild boar
* Connell (1944) account of a dhole pack killing a male tiger ( he killed 12 out of 22 dholes that attacked him) and Anderson (1950) of another pack killing a tigress after she killed six dholes out of 23. And a third tiger losing his sambar kill to a pack of dholes in Ranthambhore in 1959 ( Keri Singh) recent tiger-dhole interactions however are in the favour of tigers.
* Interactions with sloth bears ( with mixed outcomes) are described also tiger dominance over leopards.
* An emaciated young male in Russia that was 85 kg only and in a very sorry state, they named him Vladimir, treated him and kept him captive, he recovered remarkably.
