India: Kanha NP – Tigress & Cub
Seeing a tiger in the wild is absolute luck, and seeing a tiger cub is an almost certain impossibility. And yet, I got lucky again – a tigress female with her sole 5-month old cub has recently made a kill and so was confined to a certain area where the deer carcass was. She would patrol the area around, probably annoyed with all the safari jeeps, while the cub would remain in the bush. The tiger cubs are very skittish until the age of 8-9 months and afraid of pretty much everything. In over six hours of watching these two, I probably got less then 30 seconds of the little baby tiger darting across the road toward his mother 3 times: she would leisurely cross the road in between all the vehicles, stop and call on the cub, and then he would jump across the road in 2-3 elegant leaps. And one more interesting fact – this tigress is the daughter of the T-27 female I saw on the very first drive in Kanha – which means I saw three generation of tigers!
