Madonna on the road....... - 22nd of March 2010
Its one of those questions always asked by people who don’t know Sumatra - ’Do you often see tigers ?’ And so, with very slightly forced smile one has to explain, yet again, that, unlike those frightful poseurs in India, Sumatran tigers are shy and rarely seen.
You do of course, occasionally get lucky. Usually as a shape in the undergrowth making a noise like a clucking hen (interested) or, more ominously, a three note chuckling cough ( as in ‘’what da **** are you doing there?’’)
Normally however it is other people who see wild tigers and usually the people who see wild Sumatran tigers are the ones who don’t want to. When this happens in farmland we call it ‘Conflict’ Even then, when the tiger team is called in to try and mitigate, we usually don’t actually get to see the tiger and have to piece together the situation from interviews and footmarks and other signs until the basic facts can be established and a response made.
The ‘New Road’ conflict started like that last year after Jambi provincial government built a nice new road (because the old road kept being hit by landslides caused by deforestation) through long-abandoned farmland and fragment forest in the far south of Kerinci district. The farmland had been abandoned by farmers in the mid-late nineties because it was – until The New Road - pretty inaccessible. It had not, it transpired, been abandoned by Sumatran tigers and as farmers began to move back into the area to reopen farms, they found they had large striped neighbours.
Initial calls to the TPCUs were from farmers spooked by tiger pugmarks and the occasional glimpse of the resident male. But from October last year, the reports became much more pressing and, increasingly, frequent. Farmers and people using the road at night started reporting ‘lots’ of tigers. Big tigers. Little tigers. Families of tigers. Tigers crossing roads, tigers sitting outside the puncture repair stall at Bedeng Duabelas. They weren’t popping into pak Sal’s one-stop coffee/ weedkiller/dodgy petrol shop for a pack of ciggies or asking the bloke with the huge satellite dish at the broken road crossroads if they could watch Animal Planet but it began to look like this was merely a matter of time.
By the end of last month we knew there was an adult resident male, shy and retiring type this one. There was also Madonna, an adult female (we knew this because, with practice, you can differentiate gender from the shape of the fore pugmarks) who was, like her namesake, neither shy nor retiring. There was also one or more cubs though how many was a matter of some (heated) discussion among TPCU rangers. Needless to say, none of the team had actually seen these tigers.
So back to Kerinci to discuss the problem with the national park and draw up plans to catch and relocate Madonna and her cub(?s) to somewhere safer if permission given. The fun started at the roadside eaterie close to the New Road. We thought we were going to have supper and a well-deserved break after 2.5 hours on a fairly iffy road. Instead we found ourselves being briefed by a succession of people, some hyperventilating, about three tigers sitting at the side of the New Road.
Thirty minutes later just after that big landslide where the contractor seems to have had technical issues and that nasty bit around the dodgy Bridge where you get stuck in the mud, if you get it wrong, we could not help but notice, dark as it was, that there were three tigers sitting at the side of the road.
Intense discussions. Hmm. Ok. Hoooooot at them to scare them away. Hmm. No good. Note to myself. Get on Internet and find a car horn that doesn’t sound like an anaemic sheep. Ahaha!! A convoy of four petrol tankers. We stop them. Line them up. Get them to blast their huge klaxons. Cubs wince at horrible noise (so do we) and one actually moves off into the undergrowth. Mum goes into Madonna-does-not-like- this and Madonna-is-a-Star and will-deal-with-you mode, taking a step forward not back. Tail swishing. Hmmm. Ok darling if you feel like that….
We decide to ‘guard’ the approach to these immovable tigers to reduce potential for incidents one would judge not conducive to public support for tiger conservation. One jeep on one side of the Nasty Muddy Bit, to the left of the tigers, one on the hill above them on the right. A car drives past us heading for Sungaipenuh. Jambi number plates. Townies’ car. Car goes into Nasty Muddy Spot just past Dodgy Bridge and about 10m from where three tigers are watching proceedings with interest.. Car gets stuck. Driver starts to get out to inspect. OhmyGod. We flash headlights. Sound dead sheep car horn. Two jeeps swoop down on the townies from left and right.
Driver and his chum (definitely townies) are now completely out of the car and advancing to front. Passenger seems to be planning to have a pee. Driver inspecting car embedded in mud. We try to get them back in car without mentioning the T word but fail. So Eko tells them to ‘please get back in your car now, there are three tigers watching you – look, over there’. Wow. That works!
No tow rope. Damn. Hijack a passing post office van which does and we tow the townies out of Nasty Muddy Bit and send them on their way. Next four hours are spent escorting motorcyclists past our three immovable tigers and making sure no more cars get stuck and that no damned fool gets out of car/truck/pick up at Nasty Muddy Bit to have a pee. At 0200h, the tigers are still there but there is next to no traffic anymore. We leave Madonna and her acolytes to their own devices. I think they had an enjoyable evening.
Now to try and figure out how to catch and relocate them to somewhere safer, albeit, probably less entertaining.
DJM March 2010
