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Nature S44E13 Legendary Tigers of India
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00:17First magical moment when I saw a tiger in Ranthambore,
00:20it was absolutely mesmerizing.
00:25It's a moment where you lose yourself somewhere within yourself.
00:34This is the best place in the world to see wild tigers.
00:41For centuries, India's rulers battled over Ranthambore fort.
00:47Today, it's home to a family with an extraordinary story.
01:16It is about what you don't know is going to happen.
01:20And that's the great joy of Ranthambore.
02:26What happened next shocked us.
03:26In the jungles of northwestern India, there is a magical fort called Ranthambore.
03:38It has stood for more than a thousand years.
03:47There are three lakes a few hundred feet from each other, and it's full of wildlife.
04:06Something happening every minute.
04:18More wild tigers live in India than anywhere else on earth.
04:24And this was one of their most important strongholds.
04:32And when a tiger walks through the lakes, the sound, the magic, the explosion of activity.
04:47So yes, the lakes, a place to die for.
04:58But in 1976, when I first came to Ranthambore, it wasn't known for tigers.
05:07Back then, no one really knew anything about wild tigers.
05:11My self included.
05:14I'm Valmik Thapar.
05:16I'd grown up a city boy.
05:19I was very busy in Delhi making documentary films.
05:23My first marriage was collapsing.
05:28And one afternoon, I just walked out of my house, leaving everything behind, and caught a train to Ranthambore.
05:41I went on a whim to escape the city.
05:49It took me nearly a day to meet for the director of the park.
05:54And he looked me up and down and said, what do you want?
05:57I said, I want to go to the forest.
05:59He said, but nobody goes to this forest.
06:01It's an unknown area.
06:04When I was passing the old gate, as you went past the gate and you crossed the rise of a
06:11hill,
06:11there in the distance was Ranthambore Fort looking at you.
06:16And it grabbed me.
06:18And that moment changed my life.
06:23I wasn't a scientist or a naturalist, an activist or a conservationist.
06:29I was simply a filmmaker who fell in love with the beauty of this place and with its tigers.
06:40For the next half century, I've had the great privilege of being amongst them.
06:49All tiger life revolves around the female and across the decades, five tigresses became like family.
06:59Now, for the first time, I'm able to piece together the story of their matriarchal clan and tell you how
07:06these five revealed the secret life of tigers.
07:13None are closer to my heart than my first Ranthambore tiger, Padmini.
07:22She lived through some very dark times.
07:36Not that long ago, people estimated that there were 100,000 tigers in India.
07:43When Europeans and their guns arrived in the 18th century, a massacre began.
07:53It makes me sick to think of the Maharajas, the queens and kings who flushed out tigers and hammered them
08:00with their guns.
08:02I mean, one of our Maharajas, just one single man, killed 1,300 tigers and boasts about it.
08:16The kings, the rulers, the emperors, the rich, they all had tiger skins in their house.
08:22I mean, even the Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Elizabeth had gone to Ranthambore and shot tigers there.
08:34In the early 1970s, the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi banned tiger hunting.
08:43A census had revealed that there were just 1,800 wild tigers left in India.
08:56And she set up Project Tiger.
09:01It was a wildlife conservation program with one aim, to protect India's remaining tigers.
09:12In this land where the tiger roams, it is not only an animal, but a symbol.
09:21For thousands of years, India has had a culture that goddesses ride a tiger to defeat evil.
09:33The tiger is sacred, the guardian of the forest.
09:41In 1973, we set aside nine areas of the country for tigers.
09:49The old fort of Ranthambore, with its lakes and forests, was the smallest of these special tiger reserves.
10:00And then began a long, difficult task, rehoming the many people and cattle that lived within the boundaries.
10:10Such sacrifices were made for the tiger.
10:16Now, in the heart of Ranthambore, it was thought that just twelve, maybe thirteen tigers remained.
10:26And they only ever came out at night.
10:51I didn't think I had a hope of seeing one.
10:55But I went out anyway, with some of the park guards and a searchlight to try.
11:09Anywhere and everywhere, I just couldn't find tigers.
11:16The director of the park, Fatih Singh Rathor, had slowly become my tiger guru.
11:21He knew every inch of this tiger reserve.
11:24Huge, twirling moustache.
11:28Very tough, with a great sense of humour.
11:38And one day, we drove too close to the water.
11:45So we were floating in the shallow water of a lake.
11:51A head appeared.
11:54It was my first Ranthambore tiger.
12:00We called her Padmani.
12:07I was twenty-three and I'd never felt such a connection to any living thing before.
12:16How sad that these few photos are the only record of my times with her.
12:24But she deserves her place in this history.
12:29She went on to have five cubs.
12:32Four survived.
12:37And it was the beginning of Ranthambore's clan of tigers.
12:42She led that clan.
12:44She was like the godmother of all the tigers I've known in Ranthambore.
12:50And she was the mother of my next tiger.
12:53The one who brought me the most joy.
12:57Noon.
12:58The beginning of Ranthambore's golden age.
13:08In the 1980s, Ranthambore was a place transformed.
13:19Tigers shed their nocturnal cloak.
13:22They suddenly had no fear of man.
13:28And the visibility, the low savannah grasslands here,
13:33meant you could see tigers and watch their behaviour like nowhere else on earth.
13:39Noon was my favourite.
13:41She was called Noon because she was really active at Noon.
13:46Noon was a delight.
13:48She was absolutely the opposite of Padmani.
13:52She was the new generation of tigers that had grown without the fear of man.
14:05I watched Noon drive away other females, fight them over prey, force out her sister.
14:20I began to understand that the few square kilometres around the lakes were her territory.
14:30She had claimed the richest tiger turf, one teeming with prey.
14:35And now the hunters and people were gone.
14:38It was a tiger paradise.
14:40Pure magic.
14:45It was around this time that I bought some land on the edge of Ranthambore.
14:52More and more, this is where I wanted to be.
14:56Alongside the tigers, learning more about their lives.
15:04Ah, wow!
15:08This is Noon's mate, a big male called Genghis.
15:17One day, back in 1983, he had appeared suddenly by the lakes.
15:23From where?
15:24We don't know.
15:25No one was monitoring the tigers in those days.
15:32What we did know was that males move around much more than females.
15:37As adults, they leave their family.
15:41They seek out new, big territories that give them access to several females and lots of prey.
15:49Areas like the lakes.
15:56I remember a day, a few months after he arrived.
16:04Sambar deer had congregated in huge numbers to feast on succulent water plants.
16:14But deer weren't the only animals in the water.
16:21They are about 120 crocodiles in the lakes.
16:37It's one of the only places in the world where Sambar deer face both predators.
16:44We thought tigers only hunted them on land.
16:48But then, we saw Genghis make that extraordinary kill.
17:13And a few things.
17:15That is the best memories.
17:15You're alive.
17:18That is the best memories.
17:19The rest, Noah, is a hunter over here.
17:19In his home, he will say that.
17:19He's a hunter over here.
17:19The world was 100% later.
17:19He's a hunter over here.
17:20He's a hunter over here.
17:21He's a hunter over here.
17:35I couldn't believe that I was seeing an enormous tiger rushing into the water, killing a Sambal.
17:45And we were lucky.
17:53This was the time to record for the world what Ranthambur was giving because so far the world had no
17:59real wild pictures of tigers.
18:03And Ranthambur's tiger population was growing.
18:08There were 13 tigers when I first arrived. Now we thought there were 45.
18:17They were the best days of my life.
18:21Days I thought would never end.
18:30I thought I would have another season with Genghis.
18:33I didn't know, but that was the last time I saw Genghis in my life.
18:53When it happened, it was like a nightmare.
19:00Sometime in 1991, I was with Fatih Singh, my tiger guru.
19:05And we were wondering what happened to a few of the tigers that we were watching.
19:10We could no longer find them.
19:13And Fatih Singh felt that they were missing and maybe they could have been poached.
19:19And I said, no, not possible.
19:21Who would poach these incredibly beautiful animals?
19:32But then began our year of horror.
19:36Poachers started to be caught with skins.
19:50It knocked Fatih Singh and me out.
19:53We just couldn't believe that this was a possibility.
20:00The price of bones is soaring as tiger numbers plummet.
20:04India's tigers are being murdered so the Chinese can turn their bones into folk cures for fevers and rheumatism.
20:14I think the population all over India is going down.
20:18I think the primary reason for this is poaching and the bone trade to meet the Chinese demand for medicinal
20:23derivatives.
20:24I think the tiger faces probable extinction in the next decade.
20:31Fatih Singh had no time for poachers.
20:33If he found a poacher, he'd charge after him, take him to jail.
20:36He believed that that was the only way Ranthambar would survive.
20:39And he was beaten up himself.
20:41He nearly died.
20:42His driver jumped on his body to save him and took the beating.
20:49This is a letter my tiger guru Fatih Singh wrote at that time.
20:54It is a massacre.
20:56When the police chief showed me the skin, I could not control myself.
21:01Tears were rolling down my cheeks.
21:07It's heartbreaking.
21:09And sometimes I feel guilty that I taught them to have faith in human beings.
21:15All the tigers were shot at point-blank range.
21:20Just innocently looking at the man with the gun.
21:27I think both Fatih and I felt that over the years we'd worked very hard with the tigers.
21:34They'd lost their fear of man.
21:37And they treated the poachers in the friendliest of ways.
21:41And they lost their lives.
21:48Because by now we had learned to identify individuals by their stripes, we could say with certainty that 30 tigers,
21:57tigers that we knew, were gone.
22:03Around the lakes, just 15 terrified tigers remained.
22:08And I was determined to do all I could to keep them alive.
22:15I entered the arena of government.
22:20Sat on endless committees.
22:22I started a charity with local people.
22:25I wrote books.
22:26In the last years, I made a TV series.
22:28I'm Valmi Thapa.
22:31It was the most time I'd spent away from Radambore.
22:37But then my next lake, Tigris, drew me back in.
22:52Of all the tigers, she's the one who would teach me the most about the tiger's life.
23:02We called her Machli, which means fish, because she had marks like fish bones on her cheek.
23:15She was born during the crisis, and for the first two years of her life, she had stayed
23:23with her mother, as all tiger cubs do.
23:41Now, Machli was nearing adulthood.
23:44I guess soon she would need a territory of her own.
23:48But when and how would she carve one out?
23:53Tigers communicate with each other silently.
23:56They leave their scent in their territories.
24:00This can attract conflict or repel conflict.
24:05And through this process of territorial marking, they talk to each other.
24:16Fateh and I watched the pair closely, certain their time together was coming to an end.
24:23The lakes were rich with prey, but there was only enough for one resident tigress.
24:32Would her mother force Machli out?
24:45The bond Machli once shared with her mother was gone and replaced with aggression.
25:09This time, Machli was the one to back down.
25:32At the edge of the lakes is my favorite place, Rajabhad, the ruined garden of the kings.
25:42Now tigers hold court here.
25:49I suspected Machli would soon try to overthrow her mother, so she could rule these ruins.
26:01Her mother, too, sniff out the threat.
26:16To me, Machli seemed a little afraid.
26:22But she stood her ground.
26:47I wasn't sure who'd won the confrontation.
26:50But shortly after this, Machli's mother left.
26:56Maybe it was the threat of constant conflict.
26:59Maybe she sacrificed her territory for her daughter.
27:03Either way, Machli now ruled here.
27:13Later that year, Fateh and I realized that a new male had arrived at the lakes.
27:22He soon picked up Machli's scent.
27:27He called him Bumbu Ram.
27:32And gradually he got closer to Machli, leaving markers of his own.
27:48Then, one day, Machli approached him.
27:54He was aged six or seven, and in his prime.
28:09It wasn't long before Machli decided she was ready to mate.
28:35The ferocity of tiger mating always impresses me.
29:03I was excited by the thought of a new generation.
29:06It was like a new dawn.
29:09The dark days of hunting and poaching had long gone, I thought.
29:14This was the chance for the clan to truly thrive.
29:19It was a very happy time for me.
29:22I'd met my wife, Sanjana, and had a son, Hamir, named after one of Ranthambore's greatest rulers.
29:30And soon, Machli herself had a litter, two cubs.
29:43This is family life amongst the tiger.
29:46This is the beauty of Ranthambore.
29:50They're both male cubs.
29:53And she's really looking after them at the moment.
29:59Oh, wow.
29:59Look at them.
30:01Learning the ways of the mother.
30:13It was an absolute delight watching these boys grow up.
30:20And then one day, we heard rumors that trouble was headed their way.
30:26Their father had vanished, and a new male was patrolling the area.
30:31We called him Nick.
30:41Without the protection of their father, Machli's family were in danger.
30:49I'm really worried about these two cubs because they are young male cubs.
30:54There could be a new resident male in the area.
30:57So the tigress has to be really careful.
31:00She's got to keep them well protected.
31:03She has to defend them and chase away any male intruder.
31:08In fact, she's bound to fight the male so that he keeps her distance from the cubs.
31:19Nick was a huge male in his prime.
31:25I shuddered to think what he could do to the cubs.
31:33He could easily kill them in order to mate with Machli and father a litter of his own.
31:49A few days later, I found Machli being pursued by Nick.
32:12He was definitely interested in Métis.
32:15He was definitely interested in Métis.
32:16He was definitely interested in Métis.
32:36would she give him?
32:39Or would she try and fight him off?
32:57At first, it looked like she was keeping away from Nick, so he couldn't get behind her and mount her.
33:07But Nick was really enticed by her scent.
33:27He didn't look like he would give up.
33:52For Muchly, victory.
33:56For Nick, an injury that would make it hard to hunt.
34:02Now he knew the cubs had a mother who would risk it all to protect them.
34:34A few months later...
34:36I saw the most extraordinary moment between a tigress and her cubs.
34:56Muchly suckled them.
35:07Her cubs were almost two years old.
35:10There would have been no milk for them at this age.
35:17Perhaps it was Muchly's way of telling them it was time to say goodbye.
35:45After that, everything changed.
35:50I never saw the family together again.
35:53And the cubs struck out to find territories of their own.
36:11In 2004, I was very busy with a Supreme Court committee.
36:16And we were hearing regularly that there was something going wrong in Siriska.
36:23150 kilometers from the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve.
36:27That poachers were out.
36:30Nobody was sure about it.
36:32The government of the day refused to admit that there was a problem.
36:37Even though the director of the park was crying out for help.
36:42Every tiger in Siriska by September 2004 had been poached and killed.
36:49Siriska had no tigers and then in central India, not so far from Ranthambore, the Panna Tiger Reserve.
36:55All the tigers went extinct there.
36:57So poaching took a massive turn.
37:18When it happened the second time, it was the same Chinese pressure.
37:24It was the illegal trade.
37:27And a new demand for ornamental tiger skins.
37:33It was again trying to keep your tigers safe.
37:37How are you going to do it the second time around?
37:59Scattered thoughts.
38:01June 2005.
38:04The future of the tiger is bleak.
38:09God help us.
38:17The monsoon of that year was a critical moment.
38:21It's a time when the rains lash the forest with incredible force.
38:27Ranthambore completely shuts down.
38:31The roads are washed away.
38:33The perfect cover for poachers to strike.
38:38I had no idea where Machli was or if she was still alive.
38:49I kept busy in Delhi working with the then Prime Minister to create a moment of huge change.
38:56In the end, Project Tiger was scrapped and the National Tiger Conservation Authority was launched.
39:05This time, because of various connections with the Empowered Committee, with the Supreme Court Committee, we declared a red alert
39:13and an emergency in Ranthambore.
39:18200 armed men were sent in to surround the periphery and to flush out any intruder.
39:24And it created a scare.
39:29We knew that there were problems in Ranthambore.
39:31We knew that there were problems in Ranthambore.
39:32Fateh Singh, who had by now retired, said that half the tigers of Ranthambore had been poached.
39:38That there were barely 21 tigers left, terrified tigers who'd experienced a second round of poaching.
39:47I think the lake tigers must have known what was going on because on the edges of their territory there
39:54were vacant areas.
39:55The tigers on the outer areas had vanished and the silence of death hung in the air.
40:06Every tiger on the lakes would have known that.
40:23Luckily, the area around the lakes was the inner sanctum.
40:29It was very difficult for poachers to get to the lake area.
40:38So the lake tigers survived because the area around is fortified.
40:43There are gates and entry points.
40:45There are lots of forest guards.
40:46So the poachers were not going to take a risk in this area.
40:55So the lake tigers kept on producing cubs that would go out and repopulate areas where tigers had been poached.
41:02And that's what happened.
41:03That's what saved Ranthambore.
41:08And that's what saved Machli.
41:12She survived yet another crisis.
41:16And her final litter would grow up and spread out all over Ranthambore and beyond.
41:42When I first went to Ranthambore, it was a tiny patch of 300 square kilometers.
41:48Today, adjacent to it are three tiger reserves, and we have 5,000 square kilometers where tiger populations can go
41:59to, where tigers can migrate to.
42:02That's success.
42:05That required hard work by a bunch of people.
42:13And one of those people is my colleague, Dr. Darminder Khandal.
42:19He has data of 20 years of Ranthambore's tigers.
42:25And that enables us to really look back and work out for the first time exactly how Ranthambore's tigers are
42:33related.
42:35Today, we know that Machli's genes are in 75% of all Ranthambore tigers, including my next tiger, Krishna, one
42:47of Machli's daughters, and a tigress that shook my being.
42:53She ruled the lakes for a while and had four little cubs of her own.
43:02It's very rare to find a tigress with four small cubs.
43:08And there was an incredible afternoon when she took her cubs and walked to the palace den.
43:19To get to the palace den, you have to cross a little bit of water.
43:26And that's where a few big crocodiles lie, waiting to get their chance on anything they're possible.
43:39She carefully negotiated the water carrying the weakest cub in her mouth.
43:45While the others followed her.
43:58The most known of the place in the cave of the palace den, the cat is going to use the
44:02tower.
44:02If you have a peak to the river, you're going to pass it.
44:04The palace is going to be at 40-year-old.
44:06And there's an excellent place to take it with the river, but the palace is going to pass it in.
44:07Here at the palace, you have to cross a little bit of water.
44:08The castle was so cute to see it in the palace.
44:08But they have to be reached out to the castle.
44:08And the castle of the castle with the palace den.
44:09And this is a palace who is on the throne or the palace.
44:09The castle is finished in the palace, and the palace has also assigned to be in the palace.
44:09It's back in the palace.
44:15And there you have to beosed to the castle of the palace.
44:37She lost one of the cubs.
44:58It brought tears to my eyes that day.
45:10One of the cubs that survived still lives around the lakes today.
45:14She was named Arrowhead because she had two pointy eyebrows, like two arrows, on her forehead.
45:24She's family.
45:26She always surprises me, and I see much of her today.
45:35For a while, she ruled the lakes.
45:39But today, this territory is no longer hers, and she should not be here.
45:43Recently, she started behaving in unpredictable ways.
45:49I was startled when I saw, on a camera's viewfinder, Arrowhead arriving at the lakes and finding a way to
46:01attack an enormous soft-shell turtle.
46:27And she not only grabs a turtle in the shallow water, she picks it up…
46:32…and rushes back into the grass and starts to devour it.
46:36Was she, like Genghis all those years before, not afraid of crocodiles in the lakes?
46:43Well, what I saw next made me think that she was not fearless, but desperate.
46:52Arrowhead's back in the lakes.
46:57This time, she chases after a small crocodile.
47:04She charges into the water, misses the baby crocodile, but she doesn't realize she's in a deep place, and there
47:11are bigger crocodiles.
47:15The big crocodiles bounce on her under the water, and I don't know how, she manages to free herself.
47:37And then, a short while later, someone filmed her eating a crocodile.
47:54Suddenly, memories of years ago come flooding back, and I remembered that my nephew Jaisal had filmed this.
48:04Arrowhead's grandmother, Muchli, wrestling and eventually killing a four-meter crocodile.
48:11No one had ever recorded such a thing before or since.
48:18Severe droughts had driven Muchli to behave in this way.
48:22What was driving Arrowhead?
48:31A few days later, we found out she had been pregnant and in desperate need of protein for her milk.
48:43Now, her cubs have been filmed just weeks old.
48:49Ah, they're lovely shots, absolutely lovely.
48:57It's amazing.
48:58This is really valuable, precious footage.
49:02They're barely able to crawl.
49:11Wow.
49:13It's amazing.
49:14This is the secret life of tigers.
49:17Wow.
49:27This is the secret life of tigers.
49:31She no longer rules the lakes.
49:35And she's finding it difficult to survive.
49:39She's desperate because she has very little prey to hunt.
49:45Trespassing into the lake territory as she'd done before is much more risky with such small cubs.
50:07Today, the lakes are ruled by another tigress.
50:10Hrithi.
50:13Hrithi.
50:13She, too, has three cubs.
50:15Three mouths to feed.
50:18She's one of Arrowhead's older daughters from a previous litter.
50:24So now we have mother and daughter with three cubs each in bordering territories.
50:34What will happen?
50:36We have no idea.
50:39Which of them will survive?
50:41Will they meet?
50:43Will they fight?
50:45Will they play?
50:48I can't wait to see this new family drama play out.
50:56Today, 70 tigers live across this landscape instead of the 13 we began with 50 years ago.
51:04And I wonder which of them will become like family.
51:17When I'm asked what have I done with my life, the only answer I can give is this.
51:24That I have been amongst the wild tigers that roam Ranthambore's magnificent lakes and help them to thrive.
51:34And my love for five tigresses in particular has moulded me.
51:40Is that the Counts from Russia who live by one event?
51:41But then also карasius...
51:57Peuing together the story of their matriarchal clan, has been the privilege of my life.
52:13They have been like family to me.
52:20And I can only hope that this story of their secret lives will help others to love them
52:27as I do, and endeavor to fight for their future.
53:12And I will be happy to see you in the next episode.
53:12I'm sorry, but I know you're a part of the story of the story.
53:13I'm sorry, but I'm sorry.
53:13I'm sorry, but I'm sorry.
53:13I'm sorry.
53:19I'm sorry.
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