Few years back I was sent to Dibrugarh for my thesis on the Capped Langurs. Flight from Delhi took around 4 hours to reach at the Dibrugargh airport. My guest house was around 40 kms away from the city, and this was going to be my home for the next one month.
My daily routine was to wake up at 7 am, move to the nearby forests and search for the capped Langurs in order to find their habitat and population. I had a team of locals and was given all the required equipment including leach pads, as leaches are very common in this region.
One fine day we started around 11 am in the morning and reached the woods. We were about to start with our work and it started raining heavily as expected, because it was the month of July. I got used to this, so was not worried but we all had to stop with the research work as it was not possible to search for the Langurs in rains.
We all decided to wait under a tree, for the rains to stop. I had 5 people in my team including me and we were talking and laughing quite loudly. All of a sudden Rakesh da (one of the team members) asked us to stop talking. We all got quite shocked and asked him that what is the issue?
He pointed towards a large pit which was not very far from the tree where we all were standing, and whispered stay calm guys it’s a leopard watching us.
Well, I heard that I may encounter the wild animals in the forest while my research but this was too soon! It was a male leopard looking at us and we all were silently looking at him. All my team members were locals, and they had a fair idea of these kind of situations. They asked me not to get excited or click any pictures.
After one hour the rain stopped but the leopard didn’t move from the pit. We decided to stay there until the leopard moves away. After waiting for almost the next one hour the leopard came out of the pit and we could clearly see him. It was a magnificent experience to see this mystical creature in front of us. He gave that one last look to us again and moved away silently.
This made me realize again that mother nature has so many new experiences to provide only if we stay close to her.
Nature on wheels 