Kanha National Park

Kanha is considered by some as the India’s greatest park, an excellent habitat for many mammals and bird species. Kanha National Park was created in 1955. Today it stretches over an area of 940 km² in the two districts Mandla and Balaghat. Together with a surrounding buffer zone of 1009 km² and the neighboring 110 km² Phen Sanctuary it forms the Kanha Tiger Reserve.

The lowland forest is a mixture of sal (shorea robusta) and other mixed forest trees, interspersed with meadows. The highland forests are tropical moist dry deciduous type and of a completely different nature with bamboo on slopes (dendrocalamus strictus). A very good looking Indian ghost tree (kullu) can also be seen in the dense.
Kanha Tiger Reserve abounds in meadows or maidans which are basically open grasslands that have sprung up in fields of abandoned baiga villages, removed to make way for the animals a number of years ago.

There is a large tiger population in the park and one can also find leopards, the sloth bear and Indian wild dog. Very rarely seen are the Indian wolf which live in the far east of the park.

The most abundant prey species for the large predators is the spotted deer or chital, then Sambar (Cervus Unicolor) which constitutes an important prey base of the tiger. Other commonly observed mammals include the common grey langur, wild boar, gaur (wild cow) sambar  and barasingha or swamp deer (this is the hard ground swamp deer (Cervus duvauceli branderi), found only in Kanha, barely 1200 survive in the wild). The chousingha and the nilgai (blue bull), though rare, can also be found in Kanha.

Other larger mammal species of the park are rhesus macaque, golden jackal, bengal fox, smooth-coated otter, honey badger, small indian civet, indian gray mongoose, ruddy mongoose, striped hyena, jungle cat, leopard cat, indian spotted chevrotain, indian pangolin, indian porcupine and indian hare The Indian jungle fowl, which is the ancestor of domestic hens, is common.

There are also 175 varieties of birds in Kanha National Park including Purple Heron (Ardea purpurea) Paddy Bird or Pond Heron (Ardeola grayii), Shikra (Accipiter badius),White-eyed Buzzard (Butastur teesa).

Its impressive size, the size of its tourism zone and its inaccessibility, being some distance from the nearest main cities means less pressure from tourism than some other parks. Besides tiger, the impressive gaur, or ‘wild cattle’, barasingha (swamp deer), sloth bear and leopard are seen, in a beautiful and diverse landscape.