Bengal Tiger - Siddhi

I have always loved animals and in my life I have had a succession of wishes that have been fulfilled in magical ways. My desire to see: mountain goats was fulfilled in August 1996 when my brother-in-law, Dave Kenison, and I walked into a herd of mountain goats on Mt. Timpanogos outside Provo, Utah (April 20, 2009); moose was fulfilled in August 1996 when my brother, Matt, and I encountered bull, cow and calf moose on a backpacking trip in Henry's Basin of the Uinta Mountains in Utah (June 16, 2009); gila monster was fulfilled in March 2008 when with my ward scout troop in Alamo Canyon in Organ Pipe Cactus NM in Arizona (June 7, 2009); alligator was fulfilled in June 2004 on a family vacation in several places in Louisiana (October 25, 2009); macaw was fulfilled in February 2009 when Judy and I and my law partners visited Tambota NR in Peru (June 21, 2021); rutting bighorn sheep was fulfilled October 2016 when my son, Sam, and I encountered head-banging bighorn sheep near the Columbia River and Rocky Reach Dam in Washington state (October 18, 2016);  grizzly bear was fulfilled in July 2016 when my wife, Judy, and I encountered two grizzly bears on a bus ride in Denali NP in Alaska (August 17, 2016); caribou was fulfilled on the same bus ride in Denali NP (August 19, 2016); brown bear was fulfilled in July 2016 when Judy and I encountered a mother brown bear and two cubs after a flight on a float plane to Chichagof Island in southeastern Alaska (August 21, 2016); black bear was fulfilled in July 2016 when Judy and I encountered multiple black bears, including one with cubs, after a flight on a float plane to Anan Creek across from Wrangell Island in southeastern Alaska (September 4, 2016); to visit the wonderful animal kingdom of Africa (and see a plethora of African animals) was fulfilled in May 2014 when Judy, my law partners and I visited Africa for safaris in Kenya and Tanzania (Souvenir Chronicles June 18, 2014), and in particular to see an elephant (July 24, 2014), a lion (July 9, 2014), a cheetah (August 14, 2014), a leopard (August 28, 2014), a giraffe (August 11, 2014), a rhino (September 13, 2014), a hippo (July 6, 2014), a zebra (August 24, 2014), a crocodile (July 11, 2014), an ostrich (June 30, 2014) and a secretarybird (June 24, 2014); toucan was fulfilled in June 2022 when I visited Milpe Bird Sanctuary outside Mindo, Ecuador (May 24, 2022); to visit the Darwin animal oddities of the Galapagos Islands was fulfilled in March 2022 (November 13, 2022), and in particular to see the marine iguana (April 15, 2022) and Galapagos tortoise (April 14, 2022); to visit the remote and frozen landscape of Greenland was fulfilled in June 2019 when Judy and I visited Ilulissat and Kangerlussuaq with my law partners (July 9, 2019 and Souvenir Chronicles July 2, 2019); to visit the exotic animal islands of Sumatra (August 7, 2023) and Borneo (September 5, 2023) and in particular to see orangutans, was fulfilled in July 2023 when Judy and I saw Sumatran orangutans (August 20, 2023) and Bornean orangutans (August 26, 2023); and komodo dragons was fulfilled in July 2023 when Judy and I visited the Indonesian Islands of Rinca (July 27, 2023) and Komodo (July 30, 2023). 

One wish, really a dream, has been to see a tiger. Visiting India seemed like a pipe dream as a little boy, much more so than even Africa. However, in December 2024, after much planning, we visited India and included five days in Kaziranga NP which included six game drives. I did a lot of research on where to see tigers in India. Kaziranga had the highest density of tigers per square kilometer in the world (118 within the boundary) and also offered lots of other wildlife at the same time, including the world's largest population of one-horned rhinos and wild water buffalo and the highest density of Indian elephants per kilometer. It was an Important Bird Area and 594 species of birds have been seen there. It was all of that. I loved Kaziranga, but unfortunately did not see a tiger, although we came up on a vehicle in front of us that had just seen one cross the road in front of them. In applying for an e-Visa to India I spent a little more money to get a five year Visa, instead of a 30 day Visa, just in case we needed to go back to see a tiger.  

Much to Judy's chagrin, we needed the five year Visa as I started planning another trip to India for November 2025 with the main purpose of seeing a tiger. While we finished the remainder of our first trip to India I asked our guides about best places to see a tiger. After getting back home I did more internet research and I finally settled on Ranthambore NP.  My initial plan was to do seven game drives, but I started to get a little pushback from some others in our group and scaled it back to five, believing  from what I'd read that we should be able to see a tiger with that many game drives. 

Ranthambore has ten zones and the best zones for seeing tigers are zones 1 through 5. You can't choose the zones you want to visit in Ranthambore and you can't choose your guide or vehicle, something I really don't like and didn't understand when we planned our trip through Audley. You  submit a request by August and then get assigned to zone, guide and vehicle by the park. You can get a six passenger jeep or a canter which holds twenty passengers. Because there were six of us, we were able to "buy" the whole jeep for ourselves and not be randomly assigned to a vehicle. I looked at what it would cost to have just two passengers in a jeep and it was prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, we got assigned zones one, two, four and five (twice), all good tiger zones. 

We did zone 3 our first morning, a Thursday (we had zone 2, but it was closed because of road damage and all zone 2's got assigned to zone 3 which had lots of safari traffic), and zone 5 in the afternoon. No tigers. We had zone 5 Friday morning and saw no tigers. We were all pretty discouraged by this time. We had come with high hopes and the hope was fading. So four of our group decided to skip the afternoon safari and visit Ranthambore Fort instead. I was determined to give maximum effort in my tiger quest and did the afternoon safari with my brother-in-law, Stan, in zone 1. Our guide mentioned that summer is the best time to see tigers in Ranthambore because it gets so hot (over 100, 110 degrees) that the water sources dry up and the tigers are forced to go to the water. I recalled our two travel planners at Audley who had both seen tigers at Ranthambore and described it being extremely hot and sweating profusely, and had an aha moment. We were there when the climate was perfect for us, but not for seeing tigers. We spent an hour or an hour and a half just sitting in the jeep, waiting. Deer were barking warning calls and we were on high alert for a tiger. It got very boring and I was wishing to see lots of birds, which were nothing like in Kaziranga. However, we finally saw a tiger at the end of our drive, a story for another day. Stan and I had lots of time to talk to our guide and we learned that he'd been guiding in Ranthambore since 1994. He said he'd seen it all. I had previously determined he did not know what he was talking about, but he gained credibility when I learned how long he'd been doing it and after we saw the tiger. 

Saturday morning, our final game drive, we had our full contingent of six. We were back in zone 5, which we'd visited previously, and was my favorite of the zones we'd visited. Lots of water and beautiful scenery. We got quite close to the end of the zone when our guide received indications from other drivers of deer barking warning signs. Unlike the long delay we experienced the day before, we pretty quickly ran into a road packed with vehicles and within minutes passengers in vehicles ahead of us were excitedly pointing to a tiger. Hope in our vehicle surged and our guide starting jibbering loudly and quickly in Hindi when the tiger appeared to us, walking across a river bed. 

The tiger disappeared into tall grass and our driver sped ahead, passing other vehicles and stopping at a spot where he figured the tiger would reappear. It did, but we got unclear views. 

We sped ahead, passing more vehicles, crossing a ravine and bouncing around like we were in a bounce house. The driver was possessed. We saw the tiger again and I was trying to get more photos when the driver sped off the road, up and over a berm, going over rocks and the berm again, in between vehicles and positioned us beautifully for the tiger as it emerged right next to us for the best view we had of the tiger. I was unhappy with the driver, but have to admit he did a masterful job positioning us for our best photos. 

We sped ahead again and got our last glimpse of the tiger as it disappeared into the trees. 

There was more to this story, but things were so fast and frantic, and my edit of photos discarded many that I deemed not worth keeping. So there were more moves of the vehicle than I describe, but my edits and discarding of not-so-good photos, impacted the story time line for me.  

The mood in the vehicle was excited and joyous. The best was saved for the last. We headed for the exit with little care about what else we were seeing along the way. Judy was happy because it meant we did not have to come back to India to see a tiger. 

We learned that we had seen Siddhi, a nine year old tiger who normally resides in zones 3 and 4, the best tiger zones, which means she is the most dominant tiger in Ranthambore. She has two nine month old cubs, which we did not see. A third cub was killed by her sister and Siddhi and her sister had a terrible territorial fight. Siddhi's sister was moved to another national park. 

There are other unfulfilled wishes on my bucket list: mountain lion (I've seen one brief view in Redlands), jaguar, polar bear, musk ox, wolf (I've seen one brief view in Minnesota), wolverine, gorilla, chimpanzee, anaconda, cobra, walrus, snow leopard, Arctic penguin, capybara, platypus and kangaroo, among others that did not come to mind when I thought about my wish list, which is not written down, just swimming around in my head. 

Orange-Crowned Warbler

I saw an orange-crowned warbler on July 28th of this year in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles below the Buckhorn Campground which is on the Pacific Crest Trail near a beautiful stream. I was actually focusing on a dark-eyed junco which was nearby, but because it was behind some small limbs it wasn't focusing well. I noticed the warbler when it flew, but didn't know I had decent photos of it until I got home and was reviewing my photos. 

The orange-crowned warbler has olive-gray upperparts, yellowish underparts with faint streaking and a thin pointed bill. It has a faint line over each eye and a faint broken eye ring. The orange patch on the crown is not usually visible. Females and juveniles are duller than males. Western birds are yellower than eastern birds. They can be distinguished by lack of wing bars, streaking on the underparts, and strong face marking or bright coloring. There are four subspecies, but it is difficult to pinpoint which subspecies we have because ssp. sordida is resident in Southern California and northwestern Mexico and the others all winter in Mexico or Guatemala and could have been passing through. 

Two different subspecies, above and below.

Range from Birds of the World. Light blue is wintering, orange is breeding, yellow is migration and purple is year-round. 

Brown Creeper

Earlier this year I visited a woodpecker preserve in Nevada City, California and a bird I thought I might see there was the brown creeper, a bird I was not familiar with. I think it may have come to my attention because of my son Sam, who asked if I'd seen one before and he'd just been there. On the way back home from Nevada City I drove the Angeles Crest Highway and hiked the Pacific Crest Trail below Buckhorn Camp above a beautiful stream. There I saw a very camouflaged bird creeping along a tree and found out when I got home and looked at my photos that it was a brown creeper. Birds of the World says that its cryptic coloration and high-pitched vocalizations make it difficult to detect, but that it is widely distributed in forests throughout North America. 

The camouflage here is amazing. I could detect the movement, but had a hard time getting the outlines of the bird. 

 

Range from Birds of the World.

There are 13 subspecies and it appears I saw ssp. zelotes which is found in the mountains of southern Oregon, to northern, eastern and southern California. 

Range from Birds of the World. 

American Crocodile

I've seen a number of crocodile species now: (a) Morelet's crocodile in Villahermosa, Mexico (post on March 25, 2018); (b) the Nile crocodile in Masai Mara NR and Buffalo Springs NR in Kenya (post on July 11, 2014) and in the Okavanga Delta of Botswana (post on August 29, 2018); (c) West African crocodile in Kidepo Vallley NP in Uganda (post on December 5, 2025); and (d) the mugger crocodile in Udawalawe NP, Yala NP and Bundala NP in Sri Lanka (post on April 16, 2019). I did a post on the saltwater crocodile I thought I'd seen in Bundala NP in Sri Lanka (post on April 25, 2019), but my iNaturalist posts all eventually got to the point where they indicated they were mugger crocodile. This post on iNaturalist started out with 3 identifications as saltwater crocodile, followed by 8 identifications saying it was a mugger. 

I saw an American crocodile in the Panama Canal in Panama on March 17, 2022. It was at some distance and my photos only really show the head. 

American crocodile range from Wikipedia. Note that Florida is the only place in the U.S. that has them. 

I've seen signs for crocodiles in Florida, but not the crocodile. 

Surprisingly, it is one of the largest species of crocodile, reaching a length of 23 feet (averaging 9 feet, 6 inches to 13 feet, 5 inches) and a weight of 2,200 pounds (averaging about 880 pounds). However, it tends not to be as aggressive as some other species. 

Mountain Chickadee

Chickadees are small North American birds in the family Paridae. Related birds outside of North America are known as tits. The mountain chickadee is the sister (the closest living relative on the evolutionary tree) to the black-capped chickadee (post on November 8, 2022). The mountain chickadee has a black cap which is joined by a black postocular stripe behind white eyebrows. 

This photo of the back of a mountain chickadee shows how the black cap merges with the black ocular stripe and the white eyebrows. 

The black postocular stripe (which looks like it is also pre-ocular), the white eyebrows and the black cap, as well as a black bib. All other North American chickadees have a solid black cap. 

They have a short black bill, a black bib, the back and flanks are gray and they have pale gray underparts. 

The two photos above and this, and the next photo, were all taken near the Chilao visitor center in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles. 

This photo, and the next two photos, were taken below the Buckhorn Campground in the San Gabriel Mountains. 

Illustration from Birds of the World.

Range from Birds of the World.

Note that the range shows them only in the mountains in Southern California but we have them come to our bird feeder in Redlands. See the photos below.