It was towards the end of August when I visited Bandipur National Park. Dusk was creeping in with overcast skies and unfortunately, there were no big cat sightings. After being locked up at home for months due to the pandemic, I was fervently hoping for a sighting, when another safari jeep drew up bearing good news – a leopard had been sighted sleeping on a tree nearby. We quickly sped off to discover a languorous female high up on a tree, clearly enjoying her siesta.

After waiting for an hour and a half, we heard a Malabar Giant Squirrel let out an alarm call. Initially, the leopard did not stir; however, the cheeky squirrel kept calling repeatedly from a neighbouring tree. Rudely awoken, the leopard sauntered over to another branch, and appeared to check on the commotion. The leopard then lazily sat down on a branch facing the tree from which the squirrel called and kept looking upwards. After a while, her head shifted downwards and she was looking at something straight in front of her. That is when I realised that the squirrel had climbed down to the leopard’s eye level. The squirrel was having a field day and it remained there for a while, seemingly teasing the leopard who never shifted her gaze. Suddenly, the leopard started peering down. Even though the squirrel was not visible, I assumed it was climbing down and anticipated that a hunt might ensue.

Cramped in my seat with my daughter (who later helped me maintain my balance while shooting the hunt), photography equipment and kiddie paraphernalia, I managed to manoeuvre into an awkward but conducive angle and change my camera settings in the nick of time. The leopard and squirrel swiftly raced down the tree and were on opposite sides of the trunk where they could not see each other. Deftly peeping through a tree hole, the leopard sighted the squirrel and stealthily crawled around the tree trunk. With chunks of tree bark flying from under her claws, a whirlwind chase erupted around the tree trunk, and finally, the dexterity of the leopard got the better of the squirrel’s wit. The leopard laid her paw down on the squirrel’s leg to capture and carry her prey off to the tree-top and make short work of it. The final hunt lasted less than a second. It was a photographer’s nightmare to shoot this sequence, as both leopard and squirrel were extremely fleet-footed, tearing down around the tree a few times before the squirrel met the jaws of death.

Priyanka Rahut Mitra won the first prize in the Animal Behaviour category at the Nature inFocus Photography Contest, 2021, for this image.