A day in the life: filming tigers
By Theo Webb
While filming for the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Dynasties episode about Tigers, we stayed in a village next door to Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. Each morning at sunrise, we’d drive into the park and head straight to the territory of our tigress, Raj Bhera. Tigers are very site-specific and we knew the rough boundaries of her territory. She wasn’t radio collared and so to find her, we’d look for tracks in the dust roads that criss cross through the park. It’s not only the tourists and us that used these dust roads. A lot of the animals also use them, because it’s much nicer to walk on soft sand rather than twigs and thorns. This was incredibly useful to us because you can see what’s happened during the previous night. For example, whether the tigers moving in that area were male, female or cubs. It’s like reading the morning newspaper!
If you move when they are that close, they’ll stare straight at you and you feel it going through your soul and out the other side.
We were most interested in Raj Bhera, so it was her tracks we were particularly looking out for. Once we’d found them, we would then sit and wait. She would either reveal herself or, more likely, we would hear alarm calls. Other animals would signal her whereabouts by calling and sounding an alarm. The langur monkeys call at lots of things - leopards, tigers, jackals, snakes - so they’re the most unreliable of the animal calls but they’re a good starting point. Then you’ve got chital deer, the spotted deer you see in the film. They’re the next level of reliability. If you hear them it’s more likely to be a tiger or a leopard. After that, you’ve got the sambar deer, which have a honking call. They’re the biggest of the lot and so they have fewer threats - if you hear that, it’s very likely to be a tiger.
If the tiger is moving through the jungle you can actually hear the alarm calls moving, as it passes through different groups of animals. Sometimes the deer and monkeys would follow the tiger so they could keep an eye on it. Eventually the calls would either stop and you’d lose the tiger or it would come out of the forest and walk across the road or towards us. That was the key moment when we’d focus all our attention and film it for as long as we could.
You’d have three or maximum four hours in the morning when you would actually be able to see tiger activity. We’d probably see a tiger everyday, but not necessarily the one we wanted to film. In the monsoon when the vegetation was really thick it was much harder to see Raj Bhera. Tigers are crepuscular so they mainly operate a few hours before and after sunrise and sunset. They’ll sleep in the heat of the day, in a nice pool or under a tree. It was 40 degrees plus in the summertime. In the winter, you’d get frost in the ground, so there was a huge variation in temperature.
But tigers are very unpredictable, so you never know what’s going to happen when. Sometimes a deer would walk right past, and they’d continue sleeping in the middle of the day. At other times they’d get up and stalk right in the middle of the day. We’d often sit and wait for an entire day with nothing happening. But you could never zone out. One day there was only one window through a piece of vegetation where I could see the tiger’s tail occasionally flick. I had to have my binoculars on my eyes for hours because I knew that if she left, she’d move off silently and we’d lose her and be left waiting by an empty piece of grass, not knowing that she’d gone somewhere else.
The tigers are habituated to the vehicles and they’ll come within 10 foot of the car. If you move when they are that close, they’ll stare straight at you and you feel it going through your soul and out the other side. It’s very powerful. You know you’re not in danger, because they’re so used to the vehicles. But you’re essentially eye-level with them, in these trucks, which is sometimes quite alarming.
After we’d go home each night, the tigers would carry on with their nightly activity. Often they’d start getting active just as we had to leave the park at sunset. You could wake up the next day and they might be miles away on the other side of their territory. If they’d made a kill you’d have more of an idea. Each day was fresh and different.
