National Geographic Magazine - UK October 2025

THE FIRST TIME I saw a tiger in the wild was in 2006. It was in India’s Bandhavgarh National Park, and I was staying at a new lodge opened by an African safari company. Ahead of my visit, lodge management had tried to set realistic expectations. Tigers are elusive animals, and there was no promise I’d see one during my time there. But on my second day in the park, one strode out behind our vehicle onto the path, pausing its stride to take the measure of us in a penetrating gaze before heading back into the forest. That sighting (the first of several) felt particularly momentous because tigers were in a perilous position at the time. Their numbers had been steadily declining for decades, hastened by poaching and habitat…

NATURE “It felt like a scene you might see in a documentary about the Serengeti but on a small scale and photographed in a FLOWER FIELD along a busy road in densely populated Holland.” CULTURE “They grew up in this river.Watching them explore WHO THEY ARE and who they will become through movement was a beautiful thing.” WILDLIFE “All around them, there were pups nursing restlessly, wriggling, stretching their limbs and being CURIOUS AND PLAYFUL. This pup seemed safe and calm under its mother’s wings.” OCEANS “I never expected to be tossed around in what felt like a WASHING MACHINE full of crabs.”…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORERS These contributors have received funding from the National Geographic Society, which is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world. Learn more about the Society’s support of Explorers at natgeo.com/impact. Babak Tafreshi, p.112 The Boston-based Explorer visited four continents for this month’s feature pairing his photographs with those made by astronaut Don Pettit from aboard the International Space Station. He is a past winner of the Royal Photographic Society’s Award for Scientific Imaging. Prasenjeet Yadav, p.16 An Explorer since 2014, Yadav spent nearly 14 months reporting and photographing this issue’s story on efforts to preserve genetic diversity in India’s tiger reserves. For his last National Geographic assignment, he captured incredible images of snow leopards in the Indian Himalaya. Marina Koren, p.112 A former Atlantic staff…

IT TOOK 50 DAYS of searching before the jungle revealed its biggest secret to us. Fifty days of jostling along gravel roads in the Similipal Tiger Reserve, in India’s eastern state of Odisha, scanning between trees in the semi-evergreen forest, hoping for a glimpse of an elusive tiger called T12, whose striking appearance has made him a symbol of a population at a perilous crossroads. My partner in the quest, Raghu Purti, a staffer with the regional forest department, had never set eyes on T12. Most of his colleagues had only ever seen the tiger in images from camera traps set up to study animal movements throughout the reserve. But actually laying eyes on Similipal’s tigers lets forest officials look for physical ailments that cameras may not capture—and also provides…

After being decimated by hunting and habitat destruction, India’s tiger population has begun to recover in protected reserves. But in less connected areas like Similipal, sometimes called tiger islands, inbreeding has become an issue. For reserves like Tadoba-Andhari, interconnected habitats and wildlife corridors help diversify the population—and may offer a solution for tiger islands. LANDSCAPE OF THE TIGER Forests provide spaces for tigers to rest and breed, along with ample prey. Although agricultural lands interrupt forest cover, tigers can move across them between reserves. But highways and urban areas remain difficult barriers. In central India there is more genetic variety in tiger populations, lowering the chances of inbreeding.…

IN ONE VIEW, Vanguard 1 is space junk: an antennaed aluminum ball that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev dismissively compared to a grapefruit. The United States launched it in March 1958, and the satellite returned radio signals until May 1964. Defunct since, it’s the oldest human-made object in orbit. But to space historian Matt Bille, that grapefruit is “one of the most precious objects” of the early space age, deserving of a place in the Smithsonian. And scientists, he says, could glean much from it about long-term exposure to space. Bille, along with a few like-minded engineers and historians, made this case at a recent conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, presenting detailed plans for a hypothetical mission to deorbit Vanguard 1 and bring it home. The idea…