Mr Singh is the son of the late Raja Harmahendra Singh of Dada Siba in Himachal Pradesh and his maternal great grandfather was the late Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala. Naturally, hunting was a part of the royal lifestyle. And Mr Singh grew up as a hunter and is well-known in the hills around Mussoorie for having shot the many cattle-lifting and man-eating leopards in the area. Initially, influenced by famous Colonel ANW Powell, a contemporary of Jim Corbett, he hunted tigers and other big cats in the wild. But when hunting was put to an end by the-then prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1969, it set him thinking. Then a near fatal accident in 1970 while hunting convinced him to stop shooting with the gun and shoot with a camera instead.

Mr Singh was appointed as an honorary warden of Corbett National Park in 1982 when at gunpoint he arrested the entire top brass of the district administration and police poaching in the park. In the mid-1980s, he was also appointed as a member on the Indian Board for Wildlife, and the Steering Committee of Project Tiger and is its longest serving member Mr Singh says, "My attention then was turned to the expansion of the Project Tiger Reserves, national parks and sanctuaries throughout the country, and translocation of rhinos from Assam to Dudhwa in Uttar Pradesh and other such projects which were subsequently carried out." What is not known is that Mr Singh had the support of the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and a few like minded bureaucrats who visited Corbett often with Mr Singh.

The Corbett Tiger Reserve too was increased from a mere 520 sq km to its present 1,319 sq km with the addition of the Sonanadhi Sanctuary and buffer areas. "The idea being," says Mr Singh, "to establish a corridor for the migrating elephants right up to Nepal."

Mr Singh says his greatest satisfaction is the addition of Benog, a small sanctuary in Mussoorie, which he had fought for and which had been his childhood hunting ground. "At present, I spend most of my time patrolling the Corbett Tiger Reserve, organising sting operations, to nab tiger and elephant poachers, consolidate Corbett with the helps of NGOs through contributions of boats, vehicles, communication equipment and gear for patrolling." His wife, Dawn, attends to the school she started at Dhikala and concentrates on the injured, ill and staff welfare.

In spite of the enormity of the task involved, which prompts him to call himself fondly as `junglee', Mr Singh derives pleasure from his hobby of photography. "I am on a quest to record on film the life of an Albino cheetal stag, which I found as a baby and have been following for over the last three years," he says.