The Tiger Safari: Day 8 with Agra extension

On the final day of this wonderful safari, we kept the habit of waking up with the sun, and made straight for the Taj Mahal. The cameras were put to work early, as the lack of crowds and heat, coupled with the fantastic sunrise, made for some wonderful images. Our private guide showed us around the complex, letting us in on all the history of the area. After breakfast, we made our way across to Agra’s Red Fort, which is connected to the Taj Mahal through history, but has quite a unique history of its own. The fort was built in red sandstone, and has a lot of detail carved into it, making for many interesting compositions and images.

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The Tiger Safari: Day 7 with Agra extension

After all the tiger fun of the last few days, we tried something a little different before heading off to Agra to see the magnificent Taj Mahal. We climbed up to the 2000-year-old fort overlooking the reserve. This turned out to be a great idea, because the views were spectacular. The ruins themselves were equally impressive, and gave our cameras a new challenge. We arrived in Agra in time to enjoy a wonderful view from our hotel of the Taj Mahal as the sun was setting.

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The Tiger Safari: Day 6

This was the last day we had to search for the magnificent tigers, and it did not disappoint; we spent our last 3 hours of the Tiger Safari photographing a female tiger and her 2 cubs! They were slowly moving around in the shade of some pretty impressive trees, giving us loads of great opportunities to photograph them. The already amazing sighting was finished off by the more adventurous of the 2 cubs catching an unlucky monitor lizard. The poor reptile was flung around like a plaything, as the cub tried to figure it all out. I am not sure if the lizard survived the ordeal, but the cub soon lost interest, and went back to join his mother. The mother eventually decided that it was time to move on, so she called the youngsters and off they went. What an end to another year of wonderful tiger viewing and photography!

Major sightings of the day:

Female tiger and 2 cubs
Jungle cat
Many different bird species

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The Tiger Safari: Day 5

Tigers, leopards, jungle cats and hyenas! What a day! We started off by finding a large male tiger right at the gate. He was relaxed, and gave us a good look at our first large male tiger of the safari. We spent most of the morning with him, and our patience was rewarded with some good photographic opportunities. As luck would have it, we found the same male tiger in the afternoon, in a different section of the reserve, but he was being less obliging and slept through the heat of the day under a tree quite some distance away. The real action started at the end of the day however, when we spotted a leopard walking along one of the cliffs. We managed a solid half an hour with the leopard, and got some good images of a difficult species to photograph in India. A second leopard was seen not long afterwards, sitting on the boundary wall of the reserve. It was a little more nervous than the first leopard, and moved off quite quickly. On the way back to camp though, we still had 4 striped hyenas and 2 jungle cats appear in front of our cameras!

Major sightings of the day:

2 sightings of a male tiger
2 sightings of leopards
Golden jackal
4 striped hyenas
2 sightings of jungle cats

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The Tiger Safari: Day 4

After all the luck we have had with the tigers, we thought we would see if we could find some of the other inhabitants of the reserve. We tried a completely new section of the reserve, with the goal of finding leopards and sloth bears. We came very close, and we had strong audio of leopards mating in the bushes near us, but unfortunately the happy couple didn’t show themselves. We did however add a new species of mammal to our already full list, one of only 2 antelopes found in the reserve, the Indian gazelle.

Major sightings of the day: