The Man-Eating Tigers of the Sundarbans
By Joanna Kakissis | October 03, 2009 | Bangladesh
Ross Taylor
The paw print of a Royal Bengal tiger in the Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, in southwestern Bangladesh.
I’m not sure why I expected to see a Royal Bengal tiger slink through the swamp during our recent boat trip through part of Sundarbans National Park. Maybe it's because I saw images of the tiger everywhere -- on brochures, on a faded poster in our hotel's lobby, on oil paintings in the dreary offices of forest officials.
Everyone talks about the tigers, but not many people see them, at least those who live to tell about it. The younger Bengal tigers eat spotted deer and boars, but the older, less agile big cats will attack and eat honey collectors and fishermen navigating tiny canals deep in the forest. There are between 200 and 450 Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans, the highest tiger density in the world. Rumor goes that the tigers have gone a little crazy drinking the area’s increasingly salty water, which is how they developed a taste for human flesh. Crazy? Maybe, but the fact is a Royal Bengal tiger eats a person here every three days. Think about that if you plan to go to tour the Sundarbans for, say, four days.
Sumon and I talked to a few honey collectors who lived in southwestern Bangladesh, and they told a few harrowing stories of seeing a tiger's eyes in the thick jungle and running for their lives. (Later, we each bought a bottle of the honey, which tastes rich and dark.) My friend Morshed -- a journalist, ecopreneur and all-around renaissance man whose ancestral village is in southern Bangladesh -- said he once spotted one so close to him (just a few meters away!) that he froze in wonder. The armed guards that accompanied us through our day-long tour also talked about close encounters with the tigers and pointed out the cats’ paw prints in the Sundarban mud.
I was both thrilled and petrified that I might see one. When we trekked through the mud near an outpost in the Sundarbans, flanked by the two armed guards who were also supposed to protect us against bandits, I imagined that a tiger watching us from deep in the thick green vegetation. This is the largest mangrove forest in the world. It’s wild and humid and full of thick mud that sucked in my Chacos (no, Joanna, we’re not in Colorado anymore.) A few days earlier, two tigers had been spotted drinking from the freshwater pond where we washed off our muddy shoes.
But I didn’t see a tiger, of course. When I got back to my apartment in Dhaka, I had to settle for browsing through the site of the Sundarbans Tiger Project, run by tiger expert Adam Barlow and watching YouTube for portions of a BBC documentary on the cats.
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