On a rainy June morning, Nashik-based accountancy coach Anand Bora received a call from the forest department in the region. Bora, an avid wildlife photographer, is often tipped off by forest officials when they are about to set out on a rescue operation. “Monkeys, foxes, wolves, black buck — I’ve shot many, many rescues,” says Bora.
This time the call was about a leopard that had fallen into a well in Bubli village in Nashik district, not an uncommon occurrence in these parts, where percolation tanks dot the landscape. A resident had noticed the leopard swimming frantically to stay afloat in the well the previous evening. They alerted the sarpanch, who called the forest department. By the time the rescue team arrived the next morning, the leopard was visibly exhausted. “I thought the animal would not survive,” says Bora.
Plan B to the rescue
A plan of action had to be chalked out very quickly. Except, the rescue team that had rushed to the spot had no equipment with them — no cage, no net. They needed a Plan B. They turned to the villagers for help. “The first thing needed was a sturdy perch so the leopard wouldn’t drown,” says Bora. A resident brought a large tyre, which was lowered into the well. “The leopard climbed onto it instantly.”
Getting the big cat out of the well was going to be more complicated. This was when range forest officer Sunil Wadekar made a curious request to the gathering of villagers: he asked them to lend him a charpai . A wood-and-jute cot was produced, upturned, ropes fastened to its legs and lowered into the water. The animal scrambled on to it as if on cue. The team, including Wadekar and wildlife vet Sanjay Gaikwad, pulled the ropes up. “I remember the leopard growling at us. But we were confident that it wouldn’t attack. It was clearly tired,” recalls Wadekar. The cat had likely been struggling in the well for a good 30 hours, swimming in circles, he adds.
Bora remembers the moment the cat was lifted up after a day-long rescue operation. “The leopard looked up at us… it seemed to know what was going on.” And that was when the photographer clicked a dramatic shot that won an award at the Sanctuary Wildlife Photography Awards 2017 last week. Titled ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place’ the picture, taken five years ago, shows the leopard sitting on its haunches on an inverted cot, pondering the well’s walls as forest officials and Bubli residents pull it up from the muddy water.
Within seconds of it being lifted out, the leopard leapt onto the ground and vanished into the forest, Bora recollects. “It could have attacked people, but it didn’t. I think it helped that the crowd of 150 people that had gathered was asked to keep a safe distance.”
Wadekar believes that Bubli residents are accustomed to co-existing with wildlife, which is why there are fewer incidents of conflict here, unlike, say, in parts of Mumbai. “They helped us with whatever was locally available so we could pull the leopard out,” says Wadekar.
He adds that he has rescued no less than 137 leopards in the Nashik forest circle since 2004, often using a charpai . “It makes a stable platform, it is light, it is quite a convenient tool during leopard rescues.” Cots have indeed often aided leopard rescues in the past: in 2011 in Nashik, in May 2015 in Kothapur village in Pune district, and in July this year, in Panchmahal district, Gujarat.
Wildlife in wells
The phenomenon of wild animals falling into wells — whether hyenas, leopards or jungle cats — is being increasingly reported from areas where river-fed percolation wells are common, explains Vidya Athreya, a wildlife biologist with Wildlife Conservation Society-India. “We recommended an action plan — even a simple bamboo and chain-link fence could help prevent such accidents,” she says.
While Bora won in the ‘Conservation Photography’ category, Biplab Hazra won Santuary’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award for his picture that captured the explosive human-elephant conflict in West Bengal’s Bankura district. Titled ‘Hell is Here’ it shows a mob hurling flaming tar balls at an adult elephant and calf as the duo crosses a road. “It is interesting how a human-wildlife interface can either escalate into a violent conflict as in the case of the elephants facing fire, or can be dealt with in a way that the animal is benefited and the people are not hurt, as in Nashik,” says Parvish Pandya, associate professor of zoology at Mumbai’s Bhavan’s College and consultant editor and jury member at Sanctuary Asia .
In the ‘Art in Nature’ category, the winning shot was of a patch of the Chivla beach in Maharashtra where “a starfish collaborates with pea crabs and sea shells to create a fleeting masterpiece that will soon be washed away by the tide.”
Photographer Abhishek Nandkishor Neelam Satam noticed the stunningly intricate patterns etched in sand by these little sea creatures while he was on a survey for the National Institute of Oceanography.
