'Let's appreciate what remains of our wilderness'

Sandesh Kadur dropped out of a University of Texas hotel management course over five years ago to join the environment protection movement and began to focus on wildlife photography. Today, he is one of the most recognised names in the field.

His films have been shown on television networks including National Geographic, the BBC, Discovery and Animal Planet. His photographs in the series Greater Adjutant Storks won him many prizes last year.

Though Kadur, whose documentaries are shown at major environmental festivals, still has a base at the UT Brownsville campus, he has been spending most of his time in northeast India. His recent documentary, Kaziranga -- Land of the Rhino and the Tiger, was nominated for a Green Oscar Panda Award at the prestigious Wildscreen Film Festival, held biennially in Bristol, the United Kingdom.

"Any honour like this helps people like me to go ahead with our work," said Kadur, who was born in Chikmagaluru, Karnataka, and has travelled through some of the most beautiful and rugged terrain in India, America and South America.

He said the 20-minute documentary captures unique aspects of tiger behaviour. "At the same time that this documentary was completed," he said, "it was announced that Kaziranga (in Assam) supports the highest density of tigers in the world -- nearly 32 tigers for every 100 square kilometers (38.6 square miles). But this doesn't mean that seeing a tiger here is easy! The dense grassland, combined with the secretive habits so inherent of tigers, makes them nearly invisible. With the use of camera-trap technology and patient waiting in the hide, I was able to document firsthand several tigers coming to feed on a rhino carcass."

Kadur, co-author of the book Sahyadris, also turned his exploration in the western Indian hill range into a much-regarded documentary film, Sahyadris: Mountains of the Monsoon. During his tenure as a fellow at the Gorgas Science Foundation and The University of Texas at Brownsville/ Texas Southmost College, he worked for over five years on subjects ranging from cloud forests and endangered sea turtles in Mexico to rainforests and king cobras in India's Western Ghats.

He is an associate member of the International League of Conservation Photographers, and a member on the board of Filmmakers For Conservation.

He was drawn to wildlife photography more as an awestricken young man before he felt the need to be an activist.

"I want to harness the power of nature education as a catalyst for long-term change," Kadur, who is in his mid thirties, especially referring to his expeditions in northeast India, said, adding, "I want to inspire especially the younger generation to protect and appreciate what remains of our wilderness."

He recently launched Felis Creations, a media and visual arts company based in Bengaluru, to "create content that inspires conservation." Felis, he says, hosts one of the largest collections of photographs relating to biodiversity and culture from the Indian subcontinent and across the globe, with over 20,000 images.