The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  The mahout’s report was right and when we turn the last corner the tigress is lying beside the track. There are people here too, many of them in their jeeps, all mesmerised, all quiet. In the heat of the late afternoon we wait for her to do something as the smells of the forest intensify, coming forward and lingering in pockets of warm air. There is a burst of honey, then the intense scent of jasmine from a tamarind tree. The urgent smell of urine mixed with musk is replaced by spices and green hints of germination, then by something corrupt. Digpal says it is fallen leaves rotting in a streambed, rather than the corpse it seems to be. Gradually the temperature falls from roast to bake and then simmer, until the air feels exactly as warm as my skin. It’s a delicious feeling, like being cradled by a warm sea, and it is fittingly dreamlike for being here, beside this tiger.

  She stands. Something is moving through the trees, something I can’t make out. I start the camera and focus on her face, framed by tall grasses. She is staring intently. Her eyes are a frosty green and they are absolutely still, as if she’s taking aim down the length of her nose. Still I cannot see what she has seen. Slowly she takes a step. A fallen branch is blocking her way and by clearing it she will surely make a noise, attracting attention. She gathers her haunches and springs without looking down, without even altering her gaze, and lands in complete silence, as if it were nothing. My reactions are no match for hers but to follow her when she goes I will have to focus and swing the camera in an instant. The tension is immense. I cannot move and nor can she. No monkey or peacock calls.

  Muscles bunch under her stripes and she’s going! A huge leap and I pan and she’s still in frame, still in focus, moving silently and astonishingly fast, in huge bounds away from me and into the forest: the very image of grace and power. I lose her quickly among the trees but I know the shot has worked and I can unwind and smile at Digpal, who is grinning back wildly. Three chital erupt from the grass beside us, where they’ve been hiding the whole time, and I jump a mile. Rigid with fear, they bark after the tigress, spit flying, stamping their feet.

  She returns, this time without prey, knowing that she has been seen and twitching her tail as though she doesn’t care. Her cubs are on the other side of the track. To reach them she will have to cross directly in front of the massed jeeps. The people in them are not silent any more and I feel an urge to turn the camera round, to record what this tigress sees: the ranks of jeeps three deep and six or seven wide, the fifty people watching her through their fifty unblinking lenses, the blaze of flashguns reflected in her wide eyes. It’s not that sort of film, I say to myself, half-heartedly. I’m here to film glossy shots of her natural behaviour. They will complement a smooth narration about how a tigress living in a pristine forest struggles to outwit her prey – but I want to shout, ‘Look! This is what she sees every day.’

  She crosses the track and I film her anyway, as she summons her courage, bares her teeth and snarls, facing them down like a harassed celebrity in the limelight. I know the shot will never be used and, of course, I’m part of this paparazzi: my filming will encourage more people to come.

  Perhaps all this attention is the price of being rare and beautiful – the price of fame. Like the sign said in the airport, it’s another of India’s unavoidable inconveniences, to be regretted.

  Perhaps also, for the tiger, it’s the price of survival.

  AN UPDATE ON BANDHAVGARH’S TIGERS

  Bandhavgarh is closed to visitors from July to October. During that time a forest watchman was killed, close to where we had filmed the tiger family. He was alone, so the account of what happened was pieced together from where his bicycle was found, abandoned on the track, and from his partially-eaten body, some distance away in the jungle. The park authorities concluded that he had probably been killed by one of the cubs, which had followed him into the trees. Both cubs were darted and moved to a park in the city of Bhopal, where they now live in captivity. Their mother stayed in the reserve. She has not been seen since 2013 but her daughter took over her patch and has raised several cubs there. Like many of Bandhavgarh’s young tigers, some of them have been killed by adult males.

  There have been some changes since I filmed there in 2008. Some parts of the park have been permanently closed to tourists and the number of jeeps in the core areas has been greatly reduced, to minimise disturbance. As a result there is less work for the park guides, whose income has fallen. Last year the Forest Department removed two or three villages adjacent to the reserve. Ramjas’s village may be demolished any day.

  Elsewhere in India, such as Karnataka in the south, efforts are being made to connect isolated pockets of forests with vegetated corridors, so the tigers can move more easily between them. With the skin and body parts of a single tiger fetching upwards of $50,000 it’s not surprising that poaching is still rife and there is no doubt that tigers are in desperate trouble, but even with all their problems they are luckier than many endangered animals because we have at least protected some of the places they live, despite the human cost. This has happened partly because so many of us admire these charismatic cats.

  Habitat loss is the largest threat to the diversity of life on Earth but raising money to prevent it is tough, so conservation organisations often use attractive mammals as their cheerleaders. Protecting such ‘flagship species’ as tigers and giant pandas also protects their homes, along with all the other plants and animals living there, but what if you are a less appealing animal, which doesn’t share a tiger’s forest?

  Each year the Indian government spends about half of its conservation funds on protecting tigers, so it has much less money to allocate to each of the 131 other Indian animals that share the tiger’s ‘critically endangered’ status; the last stage before extinction. The Jerdon’s courser, a shy nocturnal bird, may be down to as few as fifty individuals, yet no one rattles collecting tins in the street for them. Globally there are around 20,000 endangered species but fewer than 100 garner most of the attention and tigers are at the top of this list: more money has been spent on their conservation than on any other animal, around $47 million a year. To some extent it seems to be paying off.

  In 2015 the government of India announced that by using new survey techniques, such as automatic camera traps, researchers had counted about 2,200 tigers in the country (the range is actually from 1,945 to 2,491), which is up from about 1,400 (between 1,165 and 1,657) in 2006. One state in which their numbers have increased is Madhya Pradesh, which includes the reserve at Bandhavgarh. Besides the improved survey methods this increase is put down to anti-poaching efforts and changes such as those I saw at Bandhavgarh, aimed at protecting as much tiger habitat as possible, including the crucial corridors between undisturbed core areas.

  There is still a long way to go – worldwide there are now fewer than 5 per cent of the wild tigers that were alive a century ago and they are no longer found in half the countries where they used to live.

  Our inclination to protect the animals we like best means that different countries have their own priorities, for instance one of the world’s rarest birds, the Siberian crane, is given special protection in China, where it is a symbol of luck.

  – FIVE –

  A LUCKY FEATHER

  I’m almost warm in my sleeping bag, with a duvet, an electric blanket and two layers of clothes, but it’s twenty to five and time to get up. When you are filming wildlife there’s a simple rule: it’s Get Close, and I have been hoping to get close to some of the many birds that spend the winter here, at Poyang Lake, near China’s Yangtze River. Siberian cranes are its crown jewels but they are very rare and they have been elusive so far.

  I have an assistant called Echo who is already waking the man who runs the research station where we’re staying. She says he’s a staunch communist. Privately we call him Uncle Jo. Although he is probably no older than me, he has the crinkled face of a kindly grandfather. He is bird-like and eccentric, gesticulating and jumping to emphasise every point. The research station doub
les as one of several guardhouses for the reserve but security is not tight: the keys to the front doors have gone missing and they are left open all night, even in November. Yesterday we ate in a grimy white-tiled room with several policemen. It was so cold that the fridge had been turned off and used instead for storing crockery. Dinner was dog stew. I ate vegetables while Echo looked at the dirty walls. She pointed out two signs above the kitchen door.

  ‘That one says: Now wash your hands,’ she said.

  ‘Does the other one say: Kitchen?’

  ‘No, it says: Be lucky!’

  Luck really matters in China. There is even a horoscope on the wall of the corridor where I wait my turn to negotiate the noisome toilet. Today, it says, is a bad day for going places, for working outside and being with animals.

  Our problems started during our first meeting in town with the director of the reserve, a sharp-suited businessman who seemed to think that keeping our camera tapes would be a fair exchange for allowing us to film. As Echo already had permission from the main office in Beijing, this seemed a bad bargain, so we negotiated a compromise: the director would send his deputy with us, to show us the best areas for birds, and we’d copy the rushes for him later on. He looked sceptical but agreed. A cook came too and, for reasons I could not fathom, we travelled in a police car. I shared my footwell in the back with a sack. It soon started to twitch. There was a scrawny chicken inside, belonging to the cook.

  ‘Echo, is this going to be our dinner?’

  ‘No, the cook says it is too thin and a holiday on a bird reserve will do it good.’

  Few things in China are as they seem.

  When the deputy director takes us out to look for cranes he too is wearing a suit and his choice of lakeshore has more to do with not getting mud on his highly polished shoes than whether it is good for birds. He stands with his arms folded, waiting impatiently for me to film something, but the lake is enormous and this part seems almost empty. I walk as far as I can from the DD, who is now pacing to and fro, pointedly looking at his watch, and crouch beside the tripod at the water’s edge. Crickets zither in the wet plants and far away an oriental stork clatters its bill in alarm, sounding like an outboard motor. High in the sky, lines of white dots are moving towards the far shore, twisting like ribbons. They are tundra swans, arriving from the north. Parents reassure their youngsters with high whoops and they call back, excited to be flying with their families and not yet six months old. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I imagine them asking. The swans steer clear of our upright human shapes, lower their feet and set their wings to spiral down in the distance.

  Birds are right to be wary of people: we invented the gun after all, as well as the camera, but their calls are not shy and they travel to us across the water. My friend Chris Watson, who is a wildlife sound recordist, has taught me to think of bird calls not as noises (a word that he says means something unwanted) but rather as sounds, which are always interesting.

  From the far distance comes the continuous murmur of thousands of geese, their calls merging, except for occasional sharp clamours of argument, of fallings out and makings up, of bravado and answering boasts. Their flock is even further away than the swans: just a dappled band of grey on the horizon. It would be worth filming them taking off so I listen for a non-sound, the hushed warning that the flock might rise, but they murmur on, their voices rising and falling.

  A plaintive sound carries on the wind and I turn, thinking someone is calling my name, but the three Chinese people are still distant figures. Our driver, Jun, is collecting plants. The DD is on his phone, ignoring Echo, who is trying to make sound recordings. She gives up and tries instead to identify the birds, using the book she’s eagerly carried to the shore. She has never spent much time looking at birds and it has been a revelation for her to discover that she likes them. There are few birdwatchers in China but as people become better off they are gradually showing more interest in natural history. Even so, when I asked Echo earlier what most Chinese think of birds she said, ‘Tasty!’

  The call comes again: it’s a water buffalo calf, wanting its mother. There is a series of distant thumps: thunder perhaps, or a gun, and the goose chatter stops immediately, creating an extra-silent silence. My hand is poised above the camera button and for a long moment I know that the thought in the mind of every goose is, Should we fly? The tundra swans on the lake are not alarmed and the geese soon relax and pick up their murmuring where they’d left off. From even further away come faint creaks, like the rusty hinges of a gate being swung to and fro: they are the calls of Siberian cranes. Although we wait all day the cranes do not show themselves, the geese do not fly and I film nothing at all.

  After a week of being taken to lakes where the only birds are distant specks, Echo concludes that the deputy director might be leading us astray. Perhaps his boss did not believe we would give him copies of our tapes. She suggests that we sneak away by bus and join the old-style communist, Uncle Jo, who has a real love for the birds he studies.

  There are no birds calling as we creep down to the lakeshore in the darkness, which is just as we’d hoped. Uncle Jo says that a big flock of tundra swans and a few cranes have spent the last few days here. There should be time to set up the hide in the dark before they stir, but first there’s a river to cross and no sign of the boatman. Echo and Uncle Jo hurry off to yell at his house across the water, while I wait anxiously with the camera and my folded-up hide, listening to the wind in the trees, shivering and feeling rather far from home. There are splashes in the river: water voles maybe, or fish. Two pheasants fly over in a whirr of wings.

  I think of the present Jun gave me yesterday. He was smiling as he held it out: a lovely white feather, longer than my hand. Its size, and finding it here, mean that it may have come from a Siberian crane, which would make it very special. There are fewer than 3,000 of them in the world and they almost all spend the winter at Poyang Lake.

  Echo feels her way back along the dark riverbank to say that the boatman’s wife has answered their shouts. Her husband was drunk last night, she says, but he’ll row us anyway, meaning once she’s booted him out of bed. He arrives after almost an hour, slumped over his oars and looking queasy. By now the sky is already light: he has probably blown our chances of filming anything. It was such a struggle to get here too, crammed into the bus with all the camera gear, then those frigid rooms and the foul toilets. Of course it’s frustrating but wildlife filming is often like this. So much can go wrong and I have no control over most of it: the weather, for instance, or what the birds will do. I can only aim towards what I hope to film and ride out the chaos on the way, trusting to luck: so when we reach the lake I’m not very surprised to find there are no cranes or swans there at all. Instead the first light reveals a flock of thousands of wading birds, godwits, as vocal as a pet shop full of finches. They seem very confiding, so I set up the hide to face them instead. The godwits breed in Russia and they have come here for the winter. That’s where my crane’s feather came from too, by air of course, from the forests and wetlands of Siberia.

  It’s a wonderful thought, isn’t it? Literally full of wonder.

  Something spooks the godwits and they take off, their black and white tails and grey bodies tiling the sky. With their long bills sticking out in front and long legs trailing, they look curiously double-ended – push-me-pull-you birds – but what has made them fly? Three men are coming towards us from a row of tents. I’m sure the birds will leave now but Echo, bless her, splashes away to head them off. She has been worrying about these tents since we arrived because there might be ‘grumpy people’ sleeping in them, but she could do with a tent herself, as a shelter from the biting wind while I’m filming. She has promised to send a text to let me know she’s all right. As I start putting up my hide in six inches of water the godwits return, the latecomers sifting down to land in the gaps, filling the shallows as they did the sky.

  I really like hides. This tough green canvas and my cold hands
are old friends, meeting each other again. Even its familiar smell brings back memories of other places and other films: this hide has been all over the world. I even like the ritual of putting it up: getting everything square and disguising the lens with scrim, then setting my little seat on the spare canvas, so it doesn’t disappear into the mud as soon as I sit down. There are small domestic jobs too: placing chocolate and water near at hand, turning the stool just so, to postpone the toothache feeling in my spine. I will be in here for hours but this is my second home: if I could I would put the kettle on. Contented now, I sit back to wait and think again about that white feather.

  Feathers make good gifts. They are precious in their own right, like the heron’s pointy chest plumes my children loved to wear in their hair, pretending to be Indians, or the startlingly blue one fallen from a jay’s wing, which I found thirty years ago, lying like a jewel in a dark wood. When Jun handed me the crane’s feather he mimed writing and said ‘pencil’, meaning ‘pen’, or at least plume, in French. He was right of course. The end of the shaft, which people would once have carved into a nib, was strong and round. It would have made an excellent pen.

  I have been struggling to pronounce the first part of Jun’s name. It sounds quite like ‘chewing’, which has helped a bit, but it’s not quite how Echo says it. She has been teaching me another sound in Mandarin, a lisping hiss, ‘tsss’, shaped by pointing your tongue behind part-open teeth. She says it means ‘word’. A small bird, a pipit, lifts from the plants beside the hide and makes the sound perfectly. There are many connections like this between natural sounds and the sounds we make ourselves – the words we say – and sitting quietly in a hide seems a good way to notice them. Another bird calls ‘tui-tui-tui’. It’s a wader, passing like a dark arrow, sharp and vital. It has a white chevron, bright on its back, which means it is not a godwit. I know the call and from it I can extract the colour of the bird’s legs. It is a spotted redshank, so of course its shanks are red. ‘Tui’, it calls again – the exact sound of Jun’s name.