After spotting the Sambar Deer, the next 40 minutes went without any sighting, except for the occasional Langur and Spotted Deer. We were now approaching the waterhole near the dam site and one of the tourists in our Jeep starting shouting, “Tiger ! Tiger ! Tiger!”.Our driver and naturalist asked the guest to stay silent and came around and parked the Jeep right on top of the bank of the waterhole. And there he was, the Royal Bengal Tiger, nicknamed ‘Prince of Bandipur’. Given that we were the only vehicle around, he sat there nonchalantly and gave us some amazing poses.
The Prince seemed to have taken a beating since the last time we saw him a few months back. You can read more about that sighting here. You can see his torn lower lip, something that would have happened in a territorial fight with another Tiger (in the above picture). Coming back to this sighting, when two other Jeeps came and joined the party, he was disturbed and got up, shifted his position and started to swim out of the waterhole. Our driver and naturalist quickly moved our Jeep and positioned it perfectly facing the swimming Tiger. It was an incredible sight watching this majestic Tiger swim towards you.
Watching the Tiger emerge from the waterhole with water dripping was a breathtaking sight. He then walked straight towards our Jeep. Looking at the Tiger eyes through the D700 with 600mm lens is not for the faint-hearted and I choose to use that picture as the feature image (first image) of this post.