WWF on the Ground in Nepal - The experience

On an assignment in the midst of exceptional biodiversity

Suklaphanta Wildlife Reserve in Nepal is home to the world's largest population of swamp deer, with close to 2,500 individuals. Shining like bronze statues in the morning sun, a thousand of them are standing in a large circle around me.

The open landscape is like an African savannah, with only the wildebeest having suddenly turned tall and gregarious. Or like the open fells of Finnish Lapland, with innumerable reindeer peacefully travelling in the open fells.

Wherever you live in an open terrain, the best way to hide from predators is to hide yourself in a large enough group of your kin. Besides, 1,000 pairs of eyes see more than one.

Leaving the deer to continue their morning grazing, we drive the jeep back into the jungle. There you have a possibility of spotting different creatures, as I had seen days earlier.

Meet the tiger
The largest cat in the world, in spite of its size, is notoriously difficult to see. The striped giant is so elusive that people can spend months working in conservation areas, some of which have tiger population densities among the highest in the world, without seeing anything but pugmarks. The latter, though, are abundant: they tend to appear in the middle of night in places where you are sure you didn't hear anything while sleeping in the nearby hut.

Those who are lucky can occasionally see an orange, striped thing briefly appear hundreds of metres away. Before coming to Nepal, I was secretly hoping for this, but at the same time I felt it might be too much to expect.

One evening, I was travelling through the Chitwan National Park sitting at the open back of a jeep together with Shubash Lohani and Purna Kunwar, both from WWF Nepal. The sun was setting after a great day: we had seen a wide variety of wildlife, including several rhinos as well as a sloth bear mother with her cub.

While happily chatting with them in the diminishing evening light, I removed the tele lens of my camera and replaced it with the normal lens that does not require as much light. All of a sudden, the driver stopped the jeep in the middle of the road. Shubash's and Purna's voice was hoarse with excitement, as they whispered: "Tiger!"

As quickly as I could, I switched the tele lens back to my camera, looked up from the camera in my lap, and started eagerly gazing though the horizon. Now, where is this distant orange thing that is bound to disappear in seconds?

"No no, right here", my companions whispered. Feeling like in a surrealistic dream, I looked to the direction they were pointing while holding their breath. A tiger was sitting right by our jeep.

The huge male tiger sat peacefully in the roadside grass, glancing at us drowsily. Forgetting to breathe, I pointed my tele lens towards the magical face. Half of his face was visible, as an orange and black blur, and the camera kept telling me with a blinking signal that the light was way too dim for taking any kind of photograph with the tele lens.

Sitting just two-metres away!
And the reason why his magnificent creature looked so blurred when seen through the camera was that the shortest possible focusing distance of the tele lens was three metres... and the tiger happened to be at a distance of two!

Had the tiger been hungry, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to take a little leap for an evening snack. The 3 of us were sitting in the open jeep like on a tray, and there was even a selection of ethnic dishes for him to pick from: would he like Finnish or Nepalese food tonight? The Finnish meal happened to be the one sitting nearest to him.

But the expression on the tiger's face was relaxed and uninterested. He was not studying us like items on a menu, with the piercing look and tense ears of a preying tiger, but rather glancing at us like at a boring TV program. While I was desperately switching camera lenses again, to re-attach the lens that works with dim light and short distances, the tiger got up, turned around and walked away, disappearing in the vegetation in seconds.

The fact that his huge, muscular body - nearly 3 metres that must have weighed about 200 kilograms - moved absolutely silently through vegetation only added to the unrealistic feeling of the moment. All of us were so excited and in a celebratory mood that even though we had been carefully keeping quiet and avoiding sudden movements, we had forgotten to actually be afraid of the potential risk involved.