Tiger Sanctuary is Tourist Delight

RANTHAMBHORE NATIONAL PARK, India Nov. 30, 2007 — -- "Come! Quickly! A tiger is calling!"

Seconds after guesthouse owner Usha Singh Rathore sounds the alarm, her guests gleefully abandon their Indian Sauvignon Blanc and garlic-studded naan to cluster around the dwindling remains of a nearby bonfire. Peering into the darkness, they're rewarded with a guttural, spine-tingling roar: an unseen queen of the jungle, looking for a potential king.

"That was close," says Usha's husband, Goverdhan, pointing toward a brushy area only two football fields away.

And a good omen, as well.

The tigress' come-hither command is the first the couple has heard in two years of living on the fringes of Ranthambhore, about 300 miles southeast of New Delhi in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Once a private hunting ground for maharajahs, this 155-square-mile enclave is the country's most famous and visited tiger preserve — and a key battleground in a desperate and complicated fight to save India's national symbol from extinction.

When Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book in 1894, a century after William Blake's evocative ode, as many as 50,000 Bengal tigers roamed Indian forests, stalked by elephant-riding marksmen who retired to opulent lodges once they'd bagged their big cats.

India, still home to nearly half of the world's wild tigers (estimated at fewer than 5,000), banned their hunting in 1970. But the country's ballooning human population (now 1.1 billion) and corresponding pressure on native habitat, coupled with governmental corruption and poachers responding to an illegal demand for tiger pelts and body parts in China and Southeast Asia, have sent the animal's ranks plummeting.

Worldwide, tiger numbers have declined by 95% over the past 100 years — and according to preliminary results in a new study by the government-run Wildlife Institute of India, fewer than 1,500 remain here. Most are confined to national reserves such as Ranthambhore and central India's Bandhavgarh and Kanha (inspiration for TheJungle Book), but that doesn't ensure their safety: Only a handful of the country's 28 reserves still shelter sustainable breeding populations, and the animals disappeared entirely from Rajasthan's popular Sariska reserve after a poaching scandal in 2004.