As I was getting ready for the early morning safari, I on a hunch checked the date time on my camera. My Z50 showed 1/1/2029 0:0:21H . Its been so long that the date time had reset on my camera. I checked my phone and dialed in the correct time. Mental note, all previous pics would have to be “time shifted” in Exiftool. More about that in the tech tips at the end.
Felt kinda rusty the camera and its dials. I was still time shifting myself to Pench mode. “Oh Pencho” ! 😉 0515H and our vehicle was ready to take us to the Khursapar gate. This gate has a funny rule where they lock your mobiles in a box for the duration of the safari. Seems some incident of gypsys blocking a tiger went viral. Hence to save the forest department’s ass, such a daft rule. Truly “daft punk”! Frankly I couldn’t care less. I was super glad to be finally in a forest. And I had my cameras ofcourse.
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Much as I wanted to get away from “Bandra” ( Bandra is a party suburb in Mumbai ) , we first went to check out Bandra lake.
Beautiful serene on a chilly winter morning but, totally calm and not a bird in sight. Standard instructions to the guide & driver was birds are priority over a tiger but that would be hard to implement given their predilection to chase a tiger sighting. I think the reason so many of us go searching for only the tiger and, the guides and drivers have fun doing it day in and day out is because it brings out our deeply embedded hunter instinct in us. Something primordial in a man. Not seen women doing that though.
Usripar lake was beautiful with its white lotus and some birds were finally visible here.
As , the pull to go looking for a tiger was too strong, we meandered on various routes trying spot the cat. The guide pointed out this tree called Bhira, which has a mosquito repellant bark.
The evening safari ride was again Kursapar. Didn’t spot much. Strangely not many birds too. Migration delayed because of the extended monsoon ? Maybe so.
The second day morning we changed our gate to Turia. I had been to Turia way back in 2008. Here we didn’t have to lock up our phones. Turia has more flat area than Khursapar. Overall I thought also better managed as a park. We got route one, the old Pyorthadi route. Nothing much of interest but the ride was peaceful and pleasant. The Alikatta breakfast area was a nice change.
There is a permanent Indian roller that you can see there. Pretty bold a bird too.
Turia area is interesting, in the sense that it has a lot of rocks in between the forest. Trees are sprouting between rocks splitting and wrapping over them. Rama and Amar the driver and guide had super co-ord going on between them. There was a chance of a leopard on “S mode” but no luck and we missed the Pardeo tigress by a minute. Not a worry any of that but, saw a glorious Paradise Flycatcher, the state bird of the Madhya Pradesh (MP) state.
Three rides and not much in terms of birds and certainly no cat. And I didn’t mind it one bit. The evening ride, M had a hunch we will see some action. As we entered the gate the guide poined to us a “horny bill”. M and I suppressed our giggles and tried to maintain a straight face. The guide was a sincere nice chap warping English words around his Hindi. Kinda real cute we thought. And twenty five minutes into the ride, right in front, on route one, we saw our first cat, a leopard. This guy was just off the track and was looking to cross and we were the only gypsy around. Bold guy, came on to the track turned towards us and walked a bit before turning off into the undergrowth on the other side. A magnificent young chap.
As we meandered around route one, we saw a few jeeps standing still and watching a clump of trees. Initially I couldn’t make out much but then picked out a leopard resting on the branch on a tree. Really low light but the Nikon D5 is a champ of the dark and pulled out some really nice frames. So score two on just one evening ride. M’s hunch was indeed bang on, is that the huntress waking up ? !
Mogadishu ( Mogarkasa ) and the Blackie
The next morning I was able to switch my gate to Mogadishu err I mean Mogarkasa ! M for some reason kept calling it Mogarkasa as Mogadishu. And every time she said that, my mind went “Black Hawk Down”. Mogarkasa is almost some 36Km from Turia gate. So its a very long ride just to get to the gate !
Mogarkasa area is a small portion of the park with a bigish lake. It had raind a few days ago so the forst was lush green and the tracks still damp. We saw a few wild dogs up close and the pugmarks of a huge tiger. The search for the blackie yielded no luck. Blackie seems keeps crossing in that area. We did hear calls for a longish while most likely that tiger pug marks that we had seen earlier. While we were waiting I managed to try out my 500mm Reflex Nikkor an old, manual,1980’s mirror lens. Great in good light but if anything lesser, I struggled to “make focus”. In contrast, these new autofocus lenses seem magical to use, snapping into focus at the push of a button ! That area had a bit birding and, a flameback woodpecker gave us great views.
On the left the 50-25mm and on the right the Mirror lens. The colour rendering is so muted on the Mirror lens!
That evening it was Kursapar again. We had a young chap as a driver. We scooted to the end of the route to “chai Patti” and sure enough M spotted a tiger, a huge male. Before our jeep could turn to get a good view, another vehicle with the “Tamil boys” grabbed the clear spot from where we could view and got the money shot. It would have been a classic shot that location. This was the ” ४ mark male” The ४ is the way 4 is written in hindi, its like an 8 without the top. The side of his face has this “४” pattern. The tiger was on the move and the driver reversed and we went driving like a mad Formula 1 driver to another spot “the New Road crossing”. The male was huge and close to us. Given all the chase action and hanging on for dear life onto the gypsy, I forgot to switch to the smaller lens and kept shooting with the 500mm. I ended up with few not too great extreme closeups.
४ Mark Male by Senthil > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELi8ZZVVAAM/
In all the mele and reversing, “our Michael Schumacher”, rammed the gypsy smack into a tree. The bull bar welding broke and so did, I think some road spring but, luckily the gypsy was still able to move. Mad F1 driver is an extreme understatement ! After that our chap was a bit mellowed down and the rest of the safari was at a definitely slower pace. The bird count wasn’t moving much but, the cat count for the trip was now at three.
Another Mirror lens pic a white eyed buzzard
The next day was the last day of the trip. I only wanted birds but, the jungle had other plans. We got a great driver – guide team, Ashish and Kushal Kishore. We spotted a wild boar and waited around watching it .
And good that we did not keep rushing deeper into the trail. A bit later we saw a gypsy waiting at Ali Jhor and low behold the Pardeo tigress’s cub Rockstar emerged and gave us some fabulous shots of the “tiger on the rocks”.
It was still not too warm in the day and Ashish & Kushal decided to go looking for Lakshmi a female tigress. We reached the area and there were a lot of gypsy’s waiting to see where the tigress would emerge. The sun was just starting to come through the leaves and we crossed all the gypsy’s and waited right at the very end. Our guide Kushal heard a call and saw a few deer running, spotted a movement faraway in the grass and asked Ashish to turn around. The other vehicles had not yet spotted anything. They thought this was a false alarm. We turned and slowly crossed most of the gypsys and positioned right where the tigress would cross. A few minutes later everybody saw the tigress walking in and the usual mad scramble to position the vehicles began. We were positioned perfectly and didn’t have to move an inch. That’s the driver & guide experience that sited us at the perfect spot. This time I stuck with my Z50 and the wider 50-250mm lens. No mistakes on this one ! This was one fab fab sighting, thanks to an experienced driver guide pair working in complete sync. Two awesome tiger sightings and what a banger of a morning it was !
That evening we were again at Turia. As we were returning to the gate for our exit we met a gypsy who had seen a mating leopard pair. They had come in late but got lucky, and the only gypsy to see the pair. We scooted to that location to see if we could also spot them. Usually a mating pair would remain in the area and shouldn’t move much. As it was almost time to get out of the park and this pair was in the same route all the vehicles had lined up to see them. Somehow my driver managed to get us into a position to view. After a lot of pointing and direction indication, I finally spotted the pair far away in in grass under a clump of trees. The vehicles noise would have moved the cats a bit further away. The light was dropping and it was time to exit the park but I managed a, not so clear shot of the pair from my D5 with the 500m. The Nikon D5 low light capability rocks. Check Tamil boys – Senthil Kumaran’s Insta (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRXBFoMkis6/ , for this low light mating leopards video.
All in all not much birds but seven cats on this trip, four leopards and three tigers, absolutely WOW ! And oh yes the last evening of the trip, Bread pakoras !
The moral of the trip is –
“Cats are always where the birds are, Go Birding – Get Cats (GBGC) !“
Well thats a true statement as can be 😉
Tech Tips –
EXIFTOOL
Adding Vintage Lens and Change Datetime data to EXIF
I use the command line version of EXIFTOOL > https://exiftool.org/
,
Exiftool commands for adding manual lens data to any EXIF
I used a 500mm Mirror for these shots
exiftool -LensModel=”Reflex-NIKKOR 500mm” -r “G:\TEMP\500mm Mirror”
exiftool -FocalLength=”500mm” -r “G:\TEMP\500mm Mirror”
exiftool -FNumber=8 -r “G:\TEMP\500mm Mirror”
Date shift from 01/01/2019 to 09/11/2025 ( DD/MM/YYYY )
exiftool -AllDates+=”6:10:08 0:0:0″
{*** Delta calculated from 01/01/2019 to 09/11/2025 which is 6 Years:10 Months:08 Days 0 Hours:0 Minutes:0 Seconds ***}
Time shift from 054025 to 164025 ( HHMMSS )
exiftool -AllDates+=”0:0:0 11:0:0″ {* Only shift by +11 Hours*}
How I got the delta time , I had taken a shot on my phone about the same time. That gave me a baseline
You can do both together, the date and the time shift in one command but, if your calculation is off, the date can increase or decrease by one day. So watch out for that.
Pench Connects – Ashu Sahu ( https://www.instagram.com/ashhu_sahu_pench_/ )
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