Bear And Tiger

Bears and Tigers

Some 9 kms from Panna town, on the main road to Khajuraho, you will find a narrow cart road forking to the right, follow this road for about three kms and you are at Ballaiaseha – name given to a table-land with steep sides - from where you can see a beautiful valley below. The most interesting feature here is a huge mound of loose boulders at the bottom of the cliff; nature has arranged these boulders in such a fashion,, one over another, that a labyrinth of caves and tunnels are formed beneath making this place a unique home for wild animals. Here - both bears and tigers, who usually keep an eye out for each other, live in apparent harmony. At the moment, I am going to narrate an incident that happened almost 25 years ago. My senior colleague Mr. Pabla was then the director of Panna National park and I had just joined my first charge as DFO in the plantation division. We mostly toured together and in our forays into the jungle - Ballaia seha became a destination that we would never ever bypass. At Ballaia seha, on the edge of the plateau overlooking the valley below, there is a curved parapet of stones, erected long back by the rulers of the Panna, which the kings and their kin used as a vantage point to watch wild animals and shoot them when the animals came to take shelter into the caverns or emerged from it. For Mr. Pabla and I this place became a school of learning the ways of the wild – often we sat for hours looking at the bears and occasionally at the tigers, a variety of birds, monitor lizards and mongooses. Once, Mr. Pabla brought his guests – the MLA of Nagod, his wife and his five year old son. We reached Ballaia seha an hour before dusk and took our perches inside the parapet and with our legs dangling over the cliff and our eyes fixed on the rocks below, we waited. We were lucky for soon two bears emerged from the caverns and moved about. As we were engrossed in our act suddenly the boy standing behind us shrieked, all of us turned around at once and we saw a bear standing on its hind legs just about 2 feet from the boy, towering over him. The mother grabbed the boy and rushed to one corner while we gave frantic shouts to drive the animal away; Mr. Pabla grabbed his camera and ran after the bear. The bear loped for a while and then taking an animal track swiftly trotted down into the valley. Later, we all discussed the reason for the bear to have come up the hill to us and the only plausible explanation which we could offer was that the bear came up the valley on to us attracted by the scent of the strong perfume that Mrs. MLA had worn that day. Now, most of the old shikari conservationists who have weaved yarn after yarn of jungle lore vouch that bear has poor eyesight but keen sense of smell, only one of them – Kenneth Anderson - believed that bears have a poor sense of smell, too. I personally believe, from my experience and the habits of the bear, that it does have a keen sense of smell as for finding food – honey, termites, fruits - it must have an intense sense of smell.

The polar bear are known to locate dead seals from some 16 miles away. Scientists believe that bear’s sense of smell is 2,100 times better than that of human beings. Another assertion that Corbett had made in several of his stories is about tiger having no sense of smell at all, which I find difficult to believe for a top predator must have all its senses enhanced; the very fact that a tiger depends on scent markings for announcing its territory to others and for reproductive reasons, is basis enough to believe that tiger has a reasonably good sense of smell. Recent studies have shown that tiger does have sense of smell - mostly used for the above two reasons, while for finding prey it largely uses its heightened senses of sight and hearing, As for bear scientists have concluded that bear has sight as good as dog. Suhas Kumar 10.4.2009