Patience is a virtue for Sandesh Kadur, who lenses the "intrepid characters" in National Geographic Wild Cats of India
“Cats can be absolutely playful and they can be absolutely lazy,” says.celebrated wildlife photographer and documentarian
Vancouver Civic Theatres presents National Geographic Live presentation of Wild Cats of India October 24 at the Orpheum
A WATCHED POT never boils, but it’s got nothing on a sleeping cat.
Sandesh Kadur once spent an entire day in a subzero Himalayan canyon waiting for a snow leopard to just open its eyes and do something.
“From early in the morning and until late in the evening, it slept the entire day and barely moved its tail,” he tells Stir in a call from Santa Monica. “And there we are freezing our fingernails off waiting for it to please wake up. But cats are cats! They may have molded themselves into our homes and into our hearts but they’re still the same as they were. Cats can be absolutely playful and they can be absolutely lazy.”
One of the world’s most celebrated wildlife photographers and documentarians—he bagged a BAFTA award in 2017 for his work on Animal Planet II—Kadur has taken a break from the South Asian wilderness for a North American tour and his first ever visit to Vancouver, bringing the live National Geographic presentation of his three-part docuseries Wild Cats of India to the Orpheum on October 24. There, presumably, he’ll get to fulfill his wish of observing “some of the mammals” native to the Pacific Northwest.
“Yes,” he laughs. “Looking forward to it! The documentaries we make for National Geographic, the BBC, Netflix, whomever, they reach a very wide audience, but this kind of engagement on stage, where you’re there, live and in person, it connects with people in a more intrinsic and deeper way. And it gives further exposure to your work because you can dive deeper into the challenges. That’s what people like to see, the challenges and the failures of getting the shot. I think people connect with those stories sometimes even more than with the documentary itself.”
It’s incredibly rigorous work with a mindboggling time investment and consistently unpredictable results.
“You can wait for months sometimes to capture one shot,” Kadur casually notes. “I show people that I can be sitting for 40 days, staring at a rock, waiting for that rock to come to life.” Kadur is referring here to a sequence included in Wild Cats of India, filmed in the barren Ladakh region where he manages to track down a chunky, flat-eared feline called the Pallas’s cat. (He calls it “Garfield’s cousin”.) Once Kadur has his lens trained on the creature—it looks like a rock, blending into the inhospitable landscape—the rare and precious Pallas’s cat starts bounding about like a fat little idiot. It’s a wonderful sight. Like he says: cats are cats.
“That’s the other part,” Kadur continues. “People know a lot about mostly the big cats—tigers, lions, leopards, cheetahs—but very few people know about the small cats, and that’s where the real stories are. If you thought getting a big cat was tough enough, try finding a small cat in a wilderness. So that’s my second episode for Wild Cats of India, ‘Masters of Disguise’. You’ll see species that you’ve never heard about, species like the smallest cat in the world, the Rusty-spotted cat. These are the intrepid characters I bring to the show.”
Kadur’s connection to the cat world is especially deep. His life’s work literally emerged from the inky blackness of a jungle night when the teenaged Kadur stationed himself in a tree, hoping to see a big cat in the wild. Gradually a leopard passed right beneath his feet.
“In full moonlight,” he recalls. “One of the most magical sightings I ever had. I didn’t start my career as a photographer, I started as a birdwatcher, and with binoculars in hand I used to observe bird life. And that really taught me a lot of patience and how to spot species quickly. If you just start with photography, your view becomes very myopic—you’re just looking through the viewfinder, but you’ve got to be able to catch movement out of the corner of your eye, you’ve got to be able to move your lens quickly in that direction. So getting into birdwatching, getting into observing animals, paying attention to their behaviour, from very early on these were foundational to what I do now as a professional wildlife camera person in the field.”
In addition to all that, 30-plus years of observation has provided Kadur a vital lesson about the personality of all felines, big or small, in the mountainous Eastern Ghats of India or under your own Lower Mainland roof. You can spend all day and night filming the landscape, he says, “while waiting for your hero to show up. But our heroes never show up on time. They have too much attitude.”
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