What the Alarm Call Knows
The forest tells you where the tiger is. You have to stop talking long enough to hear it.
Sal forest is a bad place to see anything. Straight grey trunks, dense understorey, and light that arrives in vertical shafts and blows out every highlight. In three hundred hours in Kanha I have seen a tiger before I have heard one perhaps four times.
The forest, however, is extremely loud about predators. Chital give a sharp single bark, repeated, and — critically — oriented. They face the thing they are frightened of. A line of deer all pointing the same way is a bearing you can walk. Langur alarm from the canopy and can see further, so they call earlier and with more confidence. Peafowl are unreliable and will scream at a falling branch.
Learning this is not romantic. It is closer to learning to read an instrument panel. Which species, how many repetitions, how long the gaps, whether the calls are moving. Moving alarm means a walking predator. Static, insistent alarm from several species at once usually means a kill, or a cat lying up somewhere visible to them and not to you.
A chital's alarm is not a warning to you. You are simply permitted to overhear it.
The discipline that follows is harder than the knowledge: you have to shut the engine off and wait, often for an hour, in a place where nothing appears to be happening, while other vehicles drive past you towards a rumour.
Most of the time you are wrong. The cat moves the other way, or was never there. But the alternative — driving loops and hoping — has a worse hit rate and it teaches you nothing. Every hour spent listening to a forest that did not deliver still improves your reading of the next one.
There is an ethical dimension too, and it is not incidental. Reading alarm calls means you position yourself at a distance and let the animal come through its own landscape on its own line. The alternative methods — crowding, blocking, driving ahead to intercept — produce faster photographs and worse ones, and they cost the animal something. The slow method is also the respectful one. That is a convenient alignment, and I have stopped being suspicious of it.
Written in the field for CaevraSpace. If you would like to republish or license this piece, get in touch.
