The Bat Cave

Today on 16th Jun 2024 we are going to explore an underground cave at Dindory district of Madhya Pradesh. About 16 years back in 2008, I came here to meet my friend and photograph the beauty of nature in this area. At that time it was a very remote area. We spotted three tendua cubs along with their mother in the jungle. My friend intimated that in 2007 he along with some villagers spotted Tendua inside the cave which we are going to explore today. The cave is under a rain feed waterfalls and is abandoned by villagers . In dry season there remains a huge water for wild animals to drink.We entered through a very narrow crack to enter the cave . We are getting sound of bats. It is a huge colony of bats . The sound of the flapping wings of the bats seems like hundreds of machine guns are firing at a time. Thousands of bats are Flying inside the cave . They are very surprised getting us inside their territory. We spotted a big entrance at about thirty feet depth. The bate are found entering in side through the entrance . We don’t know what is inside . We carefully begins to enter into the deep . At a depth of about 30-35 feet there we got a wide chamber of around 600-700 sq meter with a hight of 02 to 4 feet . The cracks and holes inside are filled with bats and the flour is covered with their poop. There we got some small cracks inside . Unfortunately we don’t have adequate gears and facilities for going in it safely. We got another entrance for going down. This entrance is also very narrow and vertically goes down for about 15 feet , just one person can go in at a time so our guide advised not to go in. We are totally unaware about the conditions underneath. If there is any wild things inside and there is no escape room for it the situation may be dangerous. So we leave the area and come out to the upper surface of the cave . I was taking videos of upper flat surface of the cave then our guide came to show me the crack through which the bats fly one side of the cave to other side without coming out of the cave. From the edge of the crack we saw them fly . Suddenly we sense smell of bats poop which was all around along with strong smell of Tendua from the crack. Our guide intimated that just five minutes back he came here and then he did not recognise the scent. He concluded that there is very strong possibility that Tendua is still inside and we should leave the place earliest.In this exploration we witnessed a big underground cave. May be Initially it was created by water and then a very big flat rock (around 40M X40 M X5M) just comes out from the upper surface as a scale and crashed the rocks under it making caves /channels/ empty spaces/ cracks etc under it . The under ground cave is now home of thousands of bats making a huge colony. There is a very strong possibility that even now wild animals are taking shelter in side the cave - since this place is still away from villages, people generally does not comes in this area, in summer there is plenty of water to drink for animals , cold area to rest and small deep cracks to hide inside the cave. In spite of these facilities there is some thing to be worried about and that is converting wild places into a religious place. For the cave it has already been started. If people starts to visit the cave for religious purpose - it is all end for the wilds living in the cave.

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The video is best viewable on a monitor.