Jim Corbett: The Man-Eater Hunter Who Fought to Save the Tiger

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Jim Corbett killed big cats that had taken hundreds of human lives, and he is also remembered as a founding figure of wildlife conservation with a tiger subspecies named for him. Born in 1875 in Nainital, India, the eighth of nine children of a postmaster who died young, he grew up roaming the jungles near the family's winter home at Kaladhungi. He moved from a catapult to a pellet bow to a muzzle loading shotgun by age eight, and learned to read alarm calls and pug marks from villagers. As an Anglo-Indian he lived among local people, spoke their languages, and respected their beliefs.

This episode follows that boy through 22 years running river transport at Mokameh Ghat, a labor corps on the Western Front, and the hunts that made him famous, beginning in 1907 with the Champawat tigress. It also traces his turn from rifle to camera. Years of tracking taught him that man-eaters were usually injured animals and that the real danger to India's wildlife was vanishing habitat. He filmed tigers with a noisy hand-cranked camera, pressed the government to create India's first national park, and wrote Man-Eaters of Kumaon from a sickbed in 1943.

• The Champawat tigress killed 200 people in Nepal and another 200 in India before Corbett used a beat of nearly 300 men to drive her toward his rifle.
• Of the 500 Kumaon men he personally led to France in World War I, only one died, in part because he built them a brick building with heated bathhouses and drying rooms.
• He hunted the leopard of Rudraprayag for ten weeks in 1925 and killed it on his last night in the region.
• In 1952 at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya he guarded Princess Elizabeth on the night her father died, and wrote in the log book that she went up a princess and came down a queen.
• His first national park was later renamed Jim Corbett National Park, and in 1968 the Indochinese tiger was given the scientific name Panthera tigris corbetti.