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INTO THE SAL
- Avanish Dureha
- Jul 30
- 9 min read
Leopards, Trees, and the Shivalik Light — Rajaji National Park (Mohand),Uttarakhand · April OM System OM-1 Mark II · OM-5 · 150–600mm · 75–300mm
A complete series on the geometry, behavior, and photography of the Indian Leopard across three radically different landscapes.
You are reading the second installment of a three-part investigation. In Part 1, we explored the harmonious “partnership model” of Jawai, where leopards bask openly on sun-warmed granite.
The Series Arc:
Part 1: Where Stone Meets Spotted (Jawai) – [ Link to Article 1]
Part 2: Into the Sal (Rajaji, Uttarakhand) – Today’s journey into the wild, unscripted heart of the Shivalik hills.
Part 3: The Leopards of My City (Jhalana, Jaipur) – Our upcoming finale on urban integration and conservation.
In this second chapter: We trade the painterly boulders of Rajasthan for the brutal, beautiful Sal forests of Rajaji. Here, the leopards owe the photographer nothing. Success is measured in seconds, and photography becomes a game of listening to the forest’s alarm calls rather than waiting for a habituated cat.
The Leopard That Doesn’t Need Your Attention
Rajaji National Park doesn’t care about your wildlife photography bucket list. The sal forest in the Mohand range does not arrange itself for good light. The leopards here are mostly not named, not mapped, not patiently waiting on a boulder at 6:15am because a naturalist has learned their routine. They are wild in the most uncompromising sense of the word, and after Jawai’s painterly grandeur and Jhalana’s reliable urban leopards, that wildness hit me like cold water.
I went in April, just before the park’s summer management period. April at Rajaji means one thing above everything else: heat, and the water scarcity that follows from it. By mid-April, the Shivalik streams are reduced to pools, and those pools concentrate every animal in the landscape in ways that make April one of the best months for sightings, despite the climbing temperatures.
We did three safaris across two days. What we got in return was remarkable: eight separate leopard sightings, a density of encounters that I did not expect, and that I suspect I will not easily replicate. The water draws them. In the heat of April, even the most secretive leopard must drink, and when the watering points are few, the photographer who is patient at the right pool will be rewarded.
I brought both bodies for this one. The OM-1 Mark II with the 150–600mm. The OM-5 with the 75–300mm. As it turned out, each had moments where it was exactly the right choice.
Eight Sightings: What the Forest Gave Us
Let me document what those eight encounters actually looked like, because the variety matters as much as the count.
In the Trees — Resting and Combat
What the sal forest does to leopard photography is something that doesn’t get written about enough. Sal trees (Shorea robusta) are tall and straight-trunked, developing high, spreading canopies. In April, when the trees are dropping their old leaves before new growth, the canopy is open enough that light penetrates in long shafts, and the trunks and main branches are clearly visible. A leopard in a sal tree in April light is a composition waiting to happen.
We had three tree sightings across the two days, and they were radically different from each other.
The first was a sub-adult male in an open sal near a seasonal stream, watching langurs in the trees opposite with an expression of pure calculation. He was there for perhaps fifteen minutes before dropping silently and disappearing into the undergrowth, young enough to still be curious, old enough to know when to move on. The OM-1 at 600mm pulled the detail of his face cleanly out of the dappled canopy light.
Figure 2 OM-1, OM 150-600, F/160, ISO 400, 178mm, f/7.1
The second was the most prolonged: a female resting about eight metres up, one leg draped over a branch in that boneless, liquid way that leopards have when they are completely at ease. She showed no interest in leaving. We watched her for close to thirty minutes; she watched us with the settled authority of an animal that has decided the jeep is beneath her consideration. The OM-5 at 75mm let me frame her in her tree with trunk, branch, and filtered light included, a very different image from the same cat at 600mm.
The third tree sighting was the one that will stay with me longest: two leopards, in the same sal tree, in open conflict. We heard the encounter before we saw it — a deep, sawing cough, then the crash of weight moving through branches. By the time we had the vehicle positioned and cameras raised, the fight was already under way: swiping paws, that startling open-mouthed snarl, the tree’s upper branches shaking with the violence of it. It lasted perhaps ninety seconds. Then one animal, the smaller of the two, dropped from a low branch and was gone. The other settled back onto the branch it had defended, panting, tail switching.
I have never photographed anything quite like it. The frames from those ninety seconds are the most technically imperfect and emotionally true photographs I have made of leopards.
At the Water — Drinking and Quenching Thirst
Two of our sightings were at waterholes, and they were the encounters I had most hoped for. There is nothing quite like a leopard at water. The animal that is all power and secrecy in the forest becomes, at a pool, something almost vulnerable, crouched low, committed to the act, every reflex momentarily surrendered to thirst.
The first was a female at a narrow stream pool in the late morning, well after the light had hardened but before the heat had driven most animals to shade. She came in from the sal trees to the right of our position, paused at the bank for perhaps thirty seconds, reading the air, scanning the tree line on the opposite side and then dropped her head to drink. She stayed at the water for almost ten minutes. I had 200 frames. Perhaps twenty of them are what I had hoped for.
The second waterhole sighting came on our final safari, in the quieter golden hour of the afternoon. A large female, less cautious than the first, came straight to the water without hesitation, the confidence of an animal that has seen no threat at this pool and expects none. She drank deeply, unhurried. The light was extraordinary: low and copper-warm, laying flat across the water surface and catching the detail in her coat in a way that the midday sun simply does not permit.
These two sightings alone would have made the trip. The eight sightings simply meant we carried the memory of them home without the anxiety of wondering whether we’d seen enough.
Road Crossings and Forest Encounters
The remaining three sightings were the kind that Rajaji specialises in: encounters shaped entirely by alarm calls and positioning, resolved in seconds.
A large male crossing a forest road in the first light of the second morning. The langur alarm calls had started about ten minutes earlier, to our right. My naturalist positioned the vehicle at a bend in the road where the sight line was clear. We waited. The leopard emerged from the sal forest, crossed the road in perhaps four seconds, fluid, unhurried, absolutely supreme, doing its job, and disappeared into the teak on the other side.
The other two road sightings were shorter still: tail-end glimpses of animals already transitioning from road to forest, caught at the margin of the possible. I don’t count those as failures. The forest offered them. The forest took them back.
Reading the Forest — Alarm Calls and What They Mean
My naturalist at Mohand had been working this range for many years. On our first drive, he told me something I’ve thought about since: ‘In Rajaji, you don’t look for the leopard. You listen for the forest telling you something has changed.’
He meant alarm calls. The langur’s sharp, staccato bark, utterly different from its relaxed chatter, is the most reliable signal. Spotted deer (chital) have their own alarm call, a high, carrying bark. When both are going off in the same direction, you move toward that direction, find a road junction or a forest edge or a waterhole approach, and you wait.
In three safaris at Rajaji, alarm calls led us to five of our eight sightings. The other three were pure chance — a leopard on a road at dawn that we almost drove past, the fighting pair whose sound we heard before we saw them, and the female at the waterhole who arrived while we were simply sitting still in the right place at the right time.
On tree sightings: When you find a leopard in a sal tree at Rajaji, position your vehicle to put the main branch at a slight angle to the camera — not directly below (you get ceiling-fan compositions), and not side-on at distance. The ideal is a position where you can see the cat’s face and include the architectural lines of the branch and trunk. Vehicle positioning in the first sixty seconds determines everything that follows.
Two Bodies, Two Lenses — How the Division Actually Worked
I want to be honest about how the dual-system approach played out at Rajaji, because it was different from what I expected going in.
The OM-1 with the 150–600mm was my primary body for the entire trip — road crossings, waterhole approaches, any situation where distance was uncertain or action was likely. The 150–600mm at its long end gave me effective reach when a leopard materialised at 150 metres in forest shadow, and the Pro Capture system on the OM-1 is simply in a different league from what the OM-5 can do.
The OM-5 with the 75–300mm found its specific moments. The longer tree sightings were two of them. At a distance of roughly eighteen metres from the tree base, 150mm on the OM-1 was tight I was cropping out the sal trunk and the architectural context that made the image interesting. The OM-5 at 75mm (150mm equivalent) let me frame the cat in its tree, with trunk, branch, filtered light, and a suggestion of the canopy above.
The OM-5 also worked well at the dawn waterhole sessions, where animals were coming in close and the 75–300mm’s relatively wider maximum aperture at the short end (f/4.8 at 75mm) was a meaningful advantage in the low pre-dawn light.
April in Sal Forest: The Light Challenge
Sal forest in April creates a lighting environment that is beautiful and brutal in equal measure. Long shafts of early morning sun penetrate the canopy at steep angles, creating extreme brightness in the pools of light and deep shadow everywhere else. A leopard crossing from shade to light — which is exactly what they do on a forest road — can shift five stops of exposure in two steps.
My approach: Auto ISO with a ceiling of ISO 6400, minimum shutter of 1/800s, and aperture at f/6.3 (wide open) in forest shade. When we positioned at a known open patch a road junction, a dry stream bed, a waterhole clearing I’d manually assess and often close down to f/8 for the brighter conditions.
Settings at Rajaji:
Forest road, pre-dawn / deep shade: Auto ISO to 6400, 1/800s minimum, f/6.3, C-AF+TR Animal Detection
Open waterhole / clearing: ISO 800–1600, 1/1600s, f/8, Centre-weighted
Sal tree sighting (OM-1, 150–600mm): ISO 1600, 1/1000s, f/7.1, medium AF zone
Sal tree sighting (OM-5, 75–300mm): ISO 800, 1/640s, f/5.6, C-AF, environmental comp
What Rajaji Demands of a Photographer
There’s a particular kind of patience that Rajaji asks for — different from Jawai’s sunrise vigil on a granite boulder, different from Jhalana’s structured half-day safaris. Rajaji asks you to stay alert for hours when nothing is happening, because the moments when something happens are completely unpredictable and completely unrepeatable.
Three safaris across two days gave us eight leopard encounters. I will not pretend that is normal. The April water concentration helped. The experience and instinct of our safari driver helped more. But some part of it was simply the forest being generous on that particular weekend, and there is nothing a photographer can do to manufacture that except show up and be ready.
I noticed something about myself on this trip: I became a better passenger. I started watching the forest the way my driver did; not scanning for leopards specifically, but watching the dynamics of the place. Which direction the langurs were looking. Where the barking deer had retreated to. Whether the forest had gone quiet in a particular section. This is how you find leopards in Rajaji.
The cameras are the easy part. The OM-1 and OM-5 are ready for whatever the forest offers. The question is whether you are.
Avanish Dureha
OM System Ambassador | Wildlife & Street Photographer
dureha.substack.com · durehaography.com · @apdureha
Instagram- Avanish_dureha
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