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Yawning Tiger, India, 1997

Tigers, like this female in India's Bandhavgarh National Park, spend hot days in a languorous laze, storing energy for nights of hunting. Over the last hundred years, hunting and forest destruction have reduced tiger populations from hundreds of thousands of animals to perhaps fewer than 2,500. Today Bandhavgarh claims to maintain the highest density of tigers in the country.

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Making Room for Tigers," December 1997, National Geographic magazine)

Photograph by Michael Nichols