Tigress on a Crocodile, June 2003
During the summer of 2003 there was a terrible draught in Ranthambore. Due to the abject lack of water, there were crocodiles hiding out in the basement of the Rajbag Palace.
On one of my long forays into the jungle, I had observed a tigress kill a Sambhar deer. Before she could return to the kill with her cubs, the crocodiles surrounded it. They barely managed to escape from her and slipped back to the Palace basement before the tigress reached them.
Suddenly the skies opened up and over the next few days many small lakes came alive. On the morning of 30 June, 2003 – the last day before the Park officially closed for the monsoons, we were back at the spot of the previous day’s incident. The tigress was still there with her cubs. When she spotted a huge crocodile by one of the lakes, she quickly moved her cubs to safety and returned to deal with him. The crocodile on the other hand tried to play dead and lay stock-still. Believing it not to be threat to her family, she had turned away when all at once the croc lashed out at her. She stepped back and managed to lessen the blow and grabbed on to it and pulled the beast along for quite awhile. Finally, she mounted him from behind as seen in this shot. As she struggled to flip him onto his soft underbelly, we kept shooting. The battle went on for close to one and a half hours and by the end, the croc was still fighting back even after having nearly 10kg of meat from his neck area torn off.
An hour later, the reptile finally succumbed. The tigress then got her cubs to look at it but none ate even a single morsel of its flesh. The fascinating reason behind this being that it was killed not as a prey but in self-defence.
– M D Parasher |
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