The Rise and Fall of the Emerald Tigers: Ten Years of Research in Panna National Park

Abstract

This is a very unusual book. It is a nature book that is actually about nature. Most nature books are about the author's soul, turbulent childhood, and tortured relationships—about his or her hope of redemption by leaving the ad agency for a hut in the woods, by looking at ponds, and by noting, more or less inaccurately, that eagles are free. But Chundawat has written instead about tigers.Scientifically, his book is a triumph. It is far and away the most complete account of tiger ecology and conservation to be found between two covers. But it deserves to be read much more widely than that unappetizing description suggests. For, better than anything else I know, it demonstrates the poetry of its many graphs, charts, and statistical analyses. This is not science for science's sake, or academic preferment's sake, but for the tigers’ sake, and for love's sake. It is an inquiry into the accessibility of otherness, framed as an inquiry into the accessibility of a particular striped, slinking, snarling, beleaguered otherness in a sweltering, malarious forest on the northern edge of the Vindhyan mountains, where the hills drop down to the Gangetic plain.Chundawat worked there from 1996, when there were no more than fifteen tigers in the reserve. He pioneered radio-collar and elephant-back tracking of tigers and a suite of conservation measures that took the needs of the human inhabitants sensitively into account. The results were spectacular: the tiger population rose to thirty-five in five years. And then it all went wrong. Politics, accountants, and human egos marched into the reserve, and the poachers were hot on their heels. By 2009 there were no tigers left. Chundawat tells us a lot about tigers: he tells us a lot about ourselves too, and it is not flattering.In 2014 it was estimated that there were around 2,200 tigers in the whole of India—close to the number shot each year when sport-hunting by pith-helmeted Englishmen was at its peak. There is not much slack in that system. If tigers are to survive—if anything, including humans, is to survive–Chundawat's uncomfortable lessons about the sort of creatures we are need to be part of a compulsory curriculum, alongside the exhilarating and intimate science so splendidly on display in this book.