FINALLY A LEOPARD SIGHTING AFTER 4 YEARS

I made a quick trip to mudumalai hoping to see a big cat with my friend Avinash( software engineer and mountaineer and nature lover) and ' the snake catcher' arun kumar. we found the jeep and started to mudumalai from banglore. Reaching mudumalai by 7 PM in the evening we were driving to our friend John's place at masinagudi.
It start to drizzling. we could hear only the sound of water droplets and the cool gentle wind was blowing silently. it was very pleasant. as we moved further we could see a spotted animal near the tree. " leopard....leopard" was my call and avinash came to a screaching halt. we searched for the leopard in that place and we should see it neat the tree. it should be a 1 1/2 year old leopard cub. i couldn believe my eyes. i am not always lucky with big cats or even lesser cats. visiting BR hills( one of the highest densities of leopard population) sround 15 times i could spot the leopard. This is my first sighting of a leopard in four years. unfortunately i packed my 200-400 as it was late in the night. i managed to get a record shot with my 70-200. though its not a good picture the sight is always amazing.



the cub was watching the jeep light for nearly 3 minutes and another cub was calling up the hill. alarm call echoed across mudumalai wildlife sanctuary as the elusive and charming big cat was on prowl. a sambhar deer was very close to us. it was very disturbed and scared. the deer was surrounded by 2 cubs and its mother and the jeep on the other side. it just couldn move anywhere. we were expecting the leopard some forest guards came and make a big fuss for parking the vehicle off the road. finally we had to leave.
we marked the place where we spotted it so that we can search the next day morning. the whole night i was dreaming about my first leopard sighting and was hoping to see it in day light to make some good pictures. as usual i was unlucky the next day. It was raning the whole morning and i couldn take my camera out. on my way back i stayed in mysore for a day to do some bird photography in the lakes of mysore with my friend Mr.Kulashekara. i will write about the superb lake and the birds in the next post.


cheers,

ram

current mood: happy :)