Domestic buffaloes can more than just threaten leopards by closing ranks, as narrated in these columns two Sundays ago. They can cause bodily harm, if the leopard does not exercise discretion. In Africa, wild Cape buffaloes, renowned as ‘black death’, have turned the tables on lions and wealthy American hunters.
The Union environment minister released two captive-bred bustards into the Desert National Park, Jaisalmer. Thumbing through notes on natural history archived in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), Vol. “A herd of domestic buffaloes had been driven into a stone kraal for the night when a fairly small but full-grown male panther (leopard) jumped onto the bank and stampeded the herd. There was a deep gore under the left shoulder and another in the neck,” wrote Power. Shikari extraordinaire The Indian bullfrog is an understated predator. In these columns I have narrated incidents of bullfrogs predating on snakes, including the venomous Russell’s viper. T. The hunters tethered a goat close to the mangled remains of an old lady killed by the man-eater. But what’s in a number? The British Raj not only looted treasures such as the Kohinoor but also plundered precious biodiversity. Hence, Col. Robert Mansfield, who commanded the Poona Irregular Horse, was reckoned an ace hunter.
52, I came across evidence of the domestic buffalo’s lethal aggression. JM Power’s note of January 2, 1954, recounted an incident from the Curzon Estate in the Nilgiris. Gay, then District Judge of Ratnagiri (Maharashtra), penned an account of an audacious ambush by the bullfrog targeting a feared avian hunter (December 24, 1953; BNHS Journal, Vol. 52) The incident took place at the garden’s water storage tank in a delightful old, rambling sandstone bungalow occupied by Gay. Maharaja Jey Singh of Alwar (1882–1937) was infamous for wild tales that his legacy has never quite lived down. Singh may not have shot as many tigers and leopards as the Maharaja of Surguja, Ramanuj Saran Singh Deo (1,150 tigers and 2,000 leopards), but the Alwar royal was rumoured to use children as bait, priding himself on being such a good shot with a Westley Richards rifle that he would down the tiger before it got to the terrorised human bait! Imperial bloodlust Conservation of the Great Indian bustard marked a new chapter on October 3, 2026. The species is critically endangered and around 150 specimens survive today, more threatened than any Indian Gyps vulture ever was. So common and widespread was the bird once—wrote Sir Walter Elliot in ‘Notes on the Indian bustard’ (Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1880)—that Mansfield alone shot 1,000 bustards between 1809 and 1833. Mansfield’s humongous bag is the epitaph on a bloody memorial of the bustard’s near-extinction to 150, two centuries later. [email protected]
The panther then retreated to a position on an open, grassy slope below the kraal where in the haste of the moment he let himself be surrounded by the herd and was attacked by a big herd bull…and evidently died as a result of that encounter. The wary bustard was a prized shikar due to its table delicacy and for presenting such a complex stalk that some British hunters went without a single bustard to brag about.
“Shikaris sometimes rub very hot raw chillies on a goat’s mouth to make it bleat and attract the leopard; or attach a fish hook with a line to the goat’s ear to pull it when it goes quiet”! wrote Elgood.
In his extravagant volume, ‘The Maharaja of Jodhpur’s Guns’, Robert Elgood lists a novelty of sorts in the context of Raj Kumar Devi Singhji hunting a man-eating leopard with 11 kills. “One afternoon, as I studied case papers, my daughter came running with a bedraggled white-throated kingfisher in her hands. She had heard frantic splashing in the tank and found the kingfisher all but drowned, tightly clasped by the bullfrog from behind. Evidently, the bullfrog had leapt onto the kingfisher’s back exactly as it dived, and had gripped it around its wings, a real wrestler’s hold!” wrote Gay. The Gays also banished the bullfrog from the garden. Unfairly! The attack left the Gays wondering: had the bullfrog managed to ingest the kingfisher, how would it have dealt with the bird’s long, hard, pointed bill inside its gut? At royal mercy In the old days, hunters would deploy livestock as tethered baits while sitting on a machan above or in a nearby hideout on the ground. Trickery in various guises was resorted to in order to keep the bait as noisy as possible to lure big cats.
The kingfisher lived to tell the tale after the “rescue” from the bullfrog’s clutches.
