Arzu Kurana left her job as a lawyer to travel around India and explore the diverse habitats of tigers.
She traveled all over India for 203 days and visited all 56 tiger reserves in the country, and believes she is the first to do so.
"We know that tigers can live in different terrains, and seeing it firsthand is a completely different experience," says 30-year-old Arzu.
Photographing wildlife and plants was initially a hobby for her, but now the lawyer from New Delhi, the capital of India, spends more time in the jungle than in the courtroom.
- Swimming with polar bears - a photographer who made a "crazy dream" come true
- In photos: Will the symbols of Africa survive man
- There's hope for tigers - 'amazing comeback' of endangered species
Love for photography
As a child, Arzu was fascinated by photography and when she was 15 years old, she convinced her father to buy her a camera.
During her studies, she attended her first wildlife and plant photography workshop.
She first saw a tiger in the wild on a family vacation in southern India about 12 years ago.
"It was a pretty exciting moment," she recalls.
"A tigress came and walked around our SUV."
"And then she marked territory here and there in the grass and around the trees."
Arzu believed that even those who closely study ways to protect tigers have only been to a dozen of India's most popular tiger reserves and may not know about the lesser-known areas where these big wild cats live.
That's why she decided to personally visit all the tiger habitats in India.
Arzu was accompanied by a guide, a tiger expert, and a video editor.
She regularly posted videos on social media and was able to finance the trip herself.
The road to some of the lesser-known tiger reserves is quite bad, and only basic accommodation is available, so Argu sometimes had to camp.
She knew that nutrition could also be a problem.
Being a vegetarian, her choices were quite limited in northeast India, and she sometimes had to rely on packages of home-cooked meals sent to her from New Delhi.
Watch the video: When you dedicate your life to photographing killer whales
More tigers
Tigers live on almost a fifth of India's territory, but protected areas make up less than three percent of the country's area, or about 82.000 square kilometers.
Despite this, the number of tigers is constantly increasing.
After authorities stepped up efforts to protect tigers, the population rose from a historic low of 1.411 in 2006 to around 3.600 in 2023.
However, it takes a bit of luck to see a tiger.
Arzu only managed to see about 30 individuals during the entire trip.
"In one reserve, forest department officials told me that even if God came and told them he had seen a tiger, they wouldn't believe him."
"On paper it's a tiger reserve, but there are no tigers," she says.
Five of India's tiger reserves have no tigers, and seven have only one, according to a recent report published in an English-language Indian daily. The Times of India.
When she traveled from central to southern India, Arzu didn't see a single tiger for about six weeks.
Some forests in southern India are located in hilly terrain and have dense undergrowth that helps tigers to remain invisible.
Rare behaviors
However, when she saw the tigers, she was able to see some of their rare behaviors.
At the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India, Arzu saw a six-year-old tigress courting a three-year-old male.
He says that among tigers, females very rarely take the initiative.
In the same forest, she also saw a tigress growling and aggressively resisting a male who wanted to mate with her.
She also witnessed a tender moment in the Todabi reserve in the state of Maharashtra in western India, where she saw a tiger with very small cubs.
Forest rangers told Arz that there was a tigress who had recently given birth to cubs, and she and her team set out to find her.
Just before sunset, her colleague heard the monkeys warning each other of danger, and that's when a close encounter occurred.
"We saw a tigress carrying a cub in her mouth."
"A tigress known as Katrina spotted me and suddenly dropped her cub to the ground, which trotted along the path very sweetly after her," she says.
"Usually, tigers don't bring their cubs out before they are three months old because it's very unsafe," Arzu explains.
"That moment was very, very interesting, because the tiger cub was on the defensive the whole time."
"He was scared, and at the same time he was thinking about what to do, and you can actually read those expressions."
Cannibals
Interactions between humans and tigers can also end tragically.
According to data from the Government of India, tigers killed 2019 people from 2023 to 349.
Officials either euthanize and relocate man-eating individuals or even kill them.
Sometimes locals try to poison and kill an animal that is causing them problems.
While on a boat in the mangrove forest of the Ganges and Brahmaputra delta, Arzu learned how people cope with tiger attacks.
"In the Sundarbans mangrove forest, I heard about man-eating tigers, but the locals accepted that humans were part of the tigers' food chain."
Tigers are known to roar, growl, groan, hiss, and pant, but they are usually silent while hunting.
Arzu thinks tigers may be attacking people because of the unique ecosystem in the area.
"The terrain is difficult. Tigers are not very heavy, they are short and small because there is less food available."
"The ground is also muddy and slushy, so the tigers can't run or jump."
Arzu is also concerned about deforestation, road construction within forest areas, human activity, discarded plastic, livestock, and stray dogs.
"The number of tigers is increasing, but the forest area is decreasing," says Arzu.
Tigers are territorial animals and need a variety of prey to maintain their population.
In some places, tiger numbers are now unsustainable.
"In places that can support the survival of 40 to 50 tigers, there are now 80 individuals."
"Either they will kill each other in combat or they will be killed by villagers when they leave the buffer zones."
Arzu would like the local community to benefit more from tourism, as she believes that local participation in protecting tigers is crucial for their future.
She is now preparing exhibitions of photographs of tigers, as well as other rare mammals and birds that she captured during a trip that lasted from October 2023 to April 2024.
The Indian government has recently taken steps to create another tiger reserve in central India, and Arzu plans to visit that too.
He wants it to continue to be a bridge between people and nature.
"I'll come here, I'll stay, I'll take pictures, and then I'll show them how beautiful things are in the forest," she says.
Watch a video about the return of tigers in Nepal
BBC is in Serbian from now on and on YouTube, follow us HERE.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram i Viber. If you have a topic suggestion for us, please contact bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
