Big cats – two for the price of one! Phil Benstead in Central India 10/11/2009

In the New Year, Greentours ran its first trip to Central India, Phil Benstead reports:

“The Central India trip was designed with the mammal enthusiast in mind and delivered in spades in 2009. We started the trip in Gujarat at the Little Rann of Kutch and quickly got to grips with wild ass, a frequently encountered species during our stay in this area. The mix of desert habitats and wetlands provided some great birding too with sightings of McQueen’s bustard and Sykes’ nightjar being particularly appreciated.

Next on the agenda was our rendezvous with Asiatic lion at Gir. These proved to be reasonably easy to locate in 2009 and we had some great encounters. Incredibly on being shown the first male, we were ushered out of the jeep and allowed to approach on foot within 20 metres for photographs. Not something I would ever do in Africa! It got even more surreal the next day when our driver dragged a jacket along the ground to coax out a young cub for photographs. It responded like a domestic cat and came in beautifully.

Our last site in Gujarat is the famous grassland site at Velavadar, here we encountered large herds of the beautiful blackbuck and enjoyed the dusk arrival of the roosting harriers. Although up to 3000 arrive at the height of the northern winter, by February numbers were down to about 150, still an enormous roost by UK standards though.

An overnight train journey (a rite of passage for the serious India buff) saw us in Madhya Pradesh for the second half of the tour. Here we spent six full days driving into and around the glorious Kanha National Park. The easy highlight here was our two encounters (both from elephants) of tiger. One, a female was rather annoyed at our presence, she had just killed a wild boar for her cubs and her fury at us and the elephants was palpable. We were a little unlucky not to find our own tiger here, but hopefully that will be remedied in 2010. Kanha was also great for a variety of other groups, the dragonflies being particularly interesting and the birding being superb.

In summary a great trip for wildlife, some great locations and the food (especially in Gujarat) was superb.”