Wildlife and Wildlife Photography - Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, August 2016

Honestly my this trip to Masinagudi was to spot the Black Panther, but as we all know that precious things we do not get so easily, so this trip was incomplete as I did not get to spot Black Panther.

Masinagudi trip was planned a month earlier & there were many additions & then deletions, but lastly ‘Hum Paanch’ (Five of us) were left from 10. Five of us were Sandeep, Sumit, Lingraj, Rohit & Yours truely.  So we took one of our friend’s car & left on Friday the 12^th August 2016. It was my first trip with friends, & I wanted it to be the memorable one. The plan was to stay at Masinagudi for 2 nights & then move to Ooty, Coonoor & then back to Bangalore.

The route plan was to go through Bandipur National Park, I had my camera ready & this time it was NikonD3200 with Nikkor lens 70-300mm, now the reason for not going to the higher models, the weather played the major role in deciding the model. It is really a very user friendly & it helps you to learn a lot. This was supposed to be my first all night trip & the longest road trip so far.

So we started on 12^th night & we reached Bandipur at 4:15 hours & we had to wait because the gates would happen only at 6:00 hrs. So we had some clicks & then I took out my camera & was ready to take the first picture of the trip.

By 6:30, we were through the gate & we saw both side, huge herds of Spotted Deer, then came Bison & Elephants, & by 7:00 hrs we were into Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, TamilNadu. Beautiful l&scapes & lovely narrow roads, we could see the huge Nilgiri Range & by 9:20 hrs, we reached our destination De Rock, Masinagudi.

Our plan was to go for evening safari & after lunch we started towards the ticket counter which was 6-7 kms away from our homestay. On our way, we saw 7-8 cars spotting something & I told Rohit to go ahead & see & to our left we saw an Elephant, could not be picturized as it was way far & lots of bushes & parallel to it was the National Animal of India, The Royal Bengal Tiger, again way far & could only be seen half of it, before it went into the bushes. Probably, a 15 mins earlier it had crossed the road where the cars were halted, as it is rightly said ‘You need to be at the right spot at the right time’, holds true in this case as well, had we been a little earlier or a lot earlier, we would have got it or again missed it respectively.

So we reached the ticket counter & we saw a almost a huge crowd of 100 people, excluding us & to my disappointment, only two canters & the timings were from 2 pm to 6pm & I asked the counter person, “what would be the duration of Safari?”, he replied “ depending on the sighting”. & I knew this was not my type of safari & we got our chance around 18:15 hrs & we only saw deer as everyone in the canter was excited to see the deer & lastly saw an Elephant, which was old, lonely & almost on the verge of natural death. Then we saw the National bird of India, the Peacock & it was beautifully sitting as if a statue was placed there, that made my day. Apart from Spotted Deer, Elephant & Peacock, no other animal was spotted & we returned to the ending point.

We decided to take a trek next morning & moved towards our home stay, when we saw a huge traffic & a female Elephant having supper. Obviously, there was traffic & police had caught two people, who were drunk & had gone near the Elephant & her calf to take the images. Now the worst case would have been, the female Elephant would have trampled them & some cars here & there would have been flung in anger & ruthlessness of the huge animal, which would be a fitting reply for such stupid act of few educated illiterate people. Luckily, police was on time & caught them, saving a lot of trouble, otherwise the Elephants would have even flung our car, though we were not at any fault & I was able to take some images from moving car.The irony was that we saw more animals outside of the safari zone than in the safari and we decided not to go for anymore safari.