At around midnight last December, Nikhil Tambekar, a bookshop owner, was driving down National Highway 930 when his headlights caught a pair of glinting eyes in the distance. This stretch, the Chandrapur-Mul road in eastern Maharashtra, has for years been a favourite nightly haunt for Tambekar, who’s also a wildlife photographer.
He has captured tigers and wild dogs, sloth bear and deer as they traverse this road, toscavenge or drink from watering holes nearby or just nap on the smooth tar. Tambekar also uses photography to document a troubling trend in these parts: roadkill. Dozens of wild animals are killed every year by speeding vehicles on this highway, which passes through the eco-sensitive zone around the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve.
Tambekar stopped his car to get a better look. It was a leopard, making its tentative way, amid roaring trucks, to the carcass of a cow. It had two cubs in tow. Tambekar spent the next five hours observing the trio.
“The leopard was clearly very hungry but it was also wary of the vehicles. It would approach the carcass and dash back into the forest every time a car or truck went by. Some of them were speeding at well over 100 km/hr.”
But there was another big, tusked obstacle in its way: a formidable wild boar, bigger than this leopard, had positioned itself by the cow and had begun scavenging on it. It was only at 4 a.m., when the traffic had abated and the boar had left, that the leopard and cubs summoned up the courage to begin their feed.
And this was when Tambekar got the shot of a lifetime: the leopard, a cub by its side, backlit by the headlights of an enormous multi-axle truck lumbering down the other side of the road. “It’s exactly what I was hoping for. The leopard rim-lit, its contours glowing — the kind of shot you generally only get during a sunset.” Last month, this picture won an award at the Nature in Focus Photography Awards 2018.
Feeding spot
As dawn broke, the traffic began to thicken and vehicles veered dangerously close to the hungry cats. Tambekar informed the forest department, and they pushed the carcass into the forest. The leopard and cub feasted on it for the next three days.
In the few weeks that followed, the leopard, emboldened by its bovine treat, often ventured out on to the highway. “In fact, I find that several species of wildlife come regularly to this stretch to feed on cattle and feral dogs knocked down by the traffic,” says Tambekar.
But this feeding spot would soon prove deadly for the leopard. Five months after the award-winning picture was taken, the big cat was hit by a vehicle, fracturing its spine. A video recorded by a passer-by moments after, one widely shared on social media, showed the cat making its way unsteadily back into the woods.
Later, the forest department tranquilised the animal and took it to the Nagpur zoo for treatment, but it didn’t survive. “I knew it was the same leopard from the coat pattern,” says Tambekar.
In the last decade that he has shot on this stretch of road, Tambekar has seen countless wildlife species killed by vehicles. And the incidents have increased with the recent widening of the highway from two to four lanes, bumping up the average speed of traffic. “Sloth bears are among the most common victims. Then there are palm civets and jungle cats, snakes and nocturnal birds like nightjars.”
The cub
According to Shekar Dattatri, wildlife and conservation filmmaker, who is in the process of producing a film on the impact of big roads on wildlife, the Chandrapur-Mul Highway passes through an important corridor for big cats who come out of the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve. It is, therefore, extremely critical to conservation in the region, he says. “Like all highways passing through wildlife habitats, traffic poses a serious threat to wildlife, particularly at night.”
Road ecology, says Dattatri, is now a well established science, and there are many tried and tested ways of mitigating the serious problem of roadkill. “These include strategically located flyovers for vehicles, as well as well-designed animal underpasses and overpasses. However, for any of these measures to work, they have to be implemented with all design parameters in place and with full sincerity of purpose, which is often lacking in India.”
Tambekar meanwhile, recently noticed that one of the leopard’s cubs, now around 15 months old, has become a frequent visitor to the same road. He has a shot of it comfortably asleep on the tiled roof of a small house in the vicinity.
But the photographer is slightly more hopeful for this cat. “Environmentalists have begun protesting against the road widening project here, and hopefully this will bear fruit,” he says.
