Kanha National Park, one of the greatest of Tiger Reserves, is located in the Maikal range, the eastern sector of the Satpura hills of the Central Indian Highlands, covering an area over 940sq km with its sal and bamboo forests, rolling grasslands and meandering streams in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
The park lies 160km southeast of Jabalpur and 270km northeast of the city of Nagpur in Maharashtra. Officially the park is known as Kanha Tiger Reserve. Madhya Pradesh houses the forests immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in his unforgettable classic Jungle Book – the home of Balu, Bagheera and Mowgli.
In 1930, Kanha area was divided into two sanctuaries, Hallon and Banjar with 250 and 300sq km respectively, and both forms the weastern and eastern halves of the reserve. The core of the Kanha Tiger Reserve was created in 1974.
Since a special statute in 1955, a series of stringent conservation program for the protection of the park’s flora and fauna has given Kanha its deserved reputation for being one of the best managed National Parks in Asia which also protects other wildlife animals as well as the life of villagers living inside and around the national park.
The name Kanha may be derived from Kanhar, the local term for the clayey soil in the valley bottoms, or from Kanva, a holy man who once lived there in a forest village.
The flora has identified four principal vegetation types: moist and dry deciduous forest, valley and plateau meadow. The sal tree is the main species in moist deciduous forest with the 27% of the park area.
Kanha is truly the land of Tiger, the primer venue in the world today in which to view free-living tigers, but the fauna also includes: barasingha, bison, gaur, chital, barking deer, black deer, black buck, chousingha, mouse deer, sloth bear, jackal fox, hyena, jungle cat, pea fowl, hare, monkey, mongoose, and leopard.
You can also catch sight of spiky- horned Nilgai, as well as porcupines, pythons, sloth bears, wild boar or the magnificent sambar.
The park is the only habitat of the rare hard ground barasingha or the swamp deer which populate the large open tracts of grass amidst the forests of tea and bamboo. Twenty years ago they were faced with extinction but some desesperate measures save them.
Kanha also supports an exotic and colorful array of birds population which includes storks, teals, pintails, pond herons, egrets, peacock, pea fowl, jungle fowl, spur fowl, partridges, quails, ring doves, spotted parakeets, green pigeons, rock pigeons, cuckoos, papihas, Indian rollers, bee-eater, hoopoes, drongos, warblers, kingfishers, woodpeckers, finches, orioles, owls, and fly catchers.
Kanha has a distinct monsoonal climate. The park is unique in nature, making it difficult to specify any particular time to being the best season.
Kanha has three major seasons: the rainy from mid June to October, the cold from November to February when the winter is the best season of the year and the hot from March to mid June. The park is closed from July to mid-November during monsoon. Kanha national park is more famous for its wildlife; the natural beauty of its landscape is just as fascinating.
The park is open daily all November month. The opening hours are scheduled to accord roughly with the seasonal variations in climate, but these hours are subject to change for example due to heavy rain showers may make park roads temporarily hazardous. The elephant joy rides are the most widely available mode of transport.