Who is the "king" of tigers? - Bengal or Amur

[GuateGojira]

(08-21-2014, 08:00 AM)'peter' Wrote: The hunters mentioned above all hunted with Corbett and all had the same approach regarding measurements. Corbett's Bachelor was 10.7 'over curves'. Mazak (1983) assumed the tiger would have been 305-310 cm. 'between pegs'. However, if we use the differences between both methods mentioned above (2-5 inches), the Bachelor probably ranged between 10.2-10.5 'between pegs'. This means he was at least 310 cm. in a straight line (similar to the Sauraha tiger). Judging from the photographs Corbett published, his tail wasn't exceptionally long or short. My guess is the tiger was well over 200 cm. in head and body straight.

Those who saw him agreed the tiger was very tall as well ('as large as a Shetland pony', one hunter said). We can only speculate about his weight, but Corbett was as experienced as they come and he wrote it was the largest tiger he saw. This in a time when there were much more tigers in India than today.

I agree it is unlikely Corbett weighed tigers (but there's no doubt he measured many). I read all his books and everything written about him and never found a weight.

I still have doubts regarding the weight of the Hasinger-tiger shot in Uttar Pradesh, but I am sure some exceeded 700 pounds a century ago. Smythies' record seems more convincing than Gorings Central Indian tiger, because the details do not add up. The conclusion I got to is the Goring tiger probably was very fat. 

 

I see that you agree with me that the Bachelor of Powalgarh seems larger than what the simple length suggest. That tiger was huge and taking in count that Jim was not short of height, this huge male tiger looks as large as the largest Amur tiger from Yankovski; Mazák did not saw this, but this was probably because his heart was for the Amur tigers.

From the books that I have read from Corbett, I have only saw two tigers been measured: The Bachelor of Powalgarh with a total length of 322 cm and the tiger of Pipal Pani of 312 cm, both over curves. Maybe in other books there are more measurements, but these two are the only ones that I am aware.

I have found that both tigers, the record of Smythies and the record from Goring-Jones, are reliable, the problem is the method of hunting. According with Smythies, ALL tigers hunted in Nepal were baited, as the method of hunting (now used to capture tigers) use baits and all the tigers were hunted at kills. Now, how much can eat a tiger in 12 hours? Well, this is simple, Sunquist (1981) found that male-female tigers eat between 14-19 kg in a day (24 hours), based on wild and bait kills. This means that a tiger could eat between 7 to 10 kg in a night, but an exceptional one could eat more. For example, the record for a meal made by a tiger came from a male in Nepal that ingested 35 kg in one day! So, using this figures, the 320 kg tiger from Smythies could weight as low as 285 kg empty, but based in the normal food intake of Nepalese tigers, the empty belly weight of the record male hunted in Nepal was probably between 301-306 kg. Dr McDougal (1977) states that this male measured 328 cm in total length over curves, which means about 311-314 cm between pegs, about the same length than Sauraha. Check the image:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Now, take this jewel, from Wikipedia:
"Evelyn Arthur Smythies, CIE (1885[sup][1][/sup] - 1975[sup][2][/sup]), was a distinguished forester and philatelist, born of British parents in India.[sup][3][/sup] Smythies was an expert on the ecology of Uttarakhand and Nepal.Smythies was educated at Clifton College,[sup][2][/sup] and received his degree in geology and a diploma in forestry from Oxford in 1908, then served in the Indian Forest Service[sup][4][/sup] from 1908 until 1940, based in Nainital. He was Chief Conservator of the Forest of Nepal from 1940 through 1947.[sup][5][/sup]Smythies' The Forest Wealth of India appeared in 1924. That same year, with C. G. Trevor he authored Practical Forestry Management.[sup][6][/sup]Smythies and Jim Corbett proposed that an area around Ramnagar, Uttarakhand be made a "National Park" to protect the threatened tigers and other living things. These include the tiger, elephant, chital, sambar, nilgai, gharial, King Cobra, Indian muntjac, wild boar, hedgehog, common musk shrew, flying fox, Indian Pangolin, and nearly 600 species of birds. In 1936, the Hailey National Park came into being as India's first National Park. It was renamed the Ramganga National Park after India's Independence, but later it was renamed the Jim Corbett National Park in today's Uttarakhand."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._A._Smythies

I am going to be direct now, but based in these evidences, this means that Smythies was indeed a "scientist" in the Victorian sense of the word. So, in this way, we can state that the 320 kg figure is not just reliable but "scientifically" proved and vouched, and thanks to the studies of Dr Sunquist in Nepal, we can adjust the weight and prove that there is at least one verified record of a tiger of up to 300 kg, proving that the often quoted figure is real, although from Nepal, and not from Russia.

I think that the tiger of 700 lb (318 kg) was probably also gorged, which means that it probably weighed 298-304 kg. This last tiger measured 304 cm (210 cm in head-body), which suggest it was measured between pegs. It had a shoulder height of 102 cm and a forearm girth of 55.9 cm. Finally, its skull was of 362 x 266.7 cm and weighed 5 lb 2 oz (2.3 kg), the heaviest in Rowland Ward's Records of Big game tiger skulls (version of 1914).
  Reply