Showstopper!

[Bhargava Srivari]

Thanks to that morning's amazing experience with a Leopard and having known a little bit of this particular individual's movement patterns, I set off into the jungle for the afternoon safari with high hopes. Right after we entered the forest, I suggested we drive to the area I hoped the Leopard would have moved to and as I expected there was predator movement in the area indicated by strong calls of alarm from Spotted deer. However, we failed to catch even a glimpse of the cat. We decided to leave the place and come back after a while. It was after over a hour that we found ourselves back on the same road when dear friend and photographer Praveen Siddannavar whispered "Leopard". There he was, on the road, scent marking his territory. We halted at quite a distance away as we didn't intend to startle him by going too close. He walked toward us, drank water from a small puddle of water that was left behind on the road as a memory of previous night's downpour, and then again walked straight to us.

The sighting is what I called "team work"- me having a strong intuition that this area was the place to be that evening, Chandrashekar Kalyanasundaram and Ram Shankar being the first ones to hear the warning calls thereby helping confirm the presence of a predator in the area and then Praveen Siddannnavar being the guy to spot it when we came back on that road later on. One has great sightings, but this one was special in the fact that it was great even from the photography perspective. The Leopard was bold enough to stay put on his path and allowed us to witness all types of territory marking- spray marking, clawing trees and digging up the earth, images of which I will try to share soon.

Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF 300 f/2.8 L IS II USM + 1.4x extender III | f/4, ISO 1600, 1/320 sec, EC -1/3, evaluative metering | Kabini, Karnataka | October 2013.