SIBERIAN TIGER CONSERVATION: POACHERS, NGOs, REINTRODUCTION TO THE WILD

ENDANGERED SIBERIAN TIGERS

where Siberian Tigers have been seen in Eastern Russia and China

As of 2022, about 756 Siberian tigers including 200 cubs were estimated to inhabit the Russian Far East. As of 2014, about 35 individuals were estimated to range in the international border area between Russia and China. In 2005, there were 331–393 adult and subadult Siberian tigers in south-west Primorye Province in the Russian Far East. The population had been stable there for more than a decade because of intensive conservation efforts, but partial surveys conducted after 2005 indicate that the Russian tiger population was declining. An initial census held in 2015 indicated that the Siberian tiger population had increased to 480–540 individuals in the Russian Far East, including 100 cubs. This was followed up by a more detailed census which revealed there was a total population of 562 wild Siberian tigers in Russia. [Source: Wikipedia]

In the 1990s, things looked grim for Siberian tigers. Between 1992 and 1994, approximately one hundred tigers — roughly one quarter of the country's wild population — were killed. Most of them ended up in China. Some estimates were higher. According to Time magazine, during the winter of 1993 between 80 and 96 tigers (more than one quarter of the population), were poached, and nearly as many were killed in the winter of 1994. In “The Amur Tiger”, Yury Dunishenko and Alexander Kulikov wrote: The modern and probably the last population peak for the Amur tiger in the wild took place at the end of the 1980’s. Since that time, their numbers have declined dramatically, mostly because of a general decline in prey numbers. A string of winters with heavy snow and shortages of food inflicted heavy damage on the wild boar population. Deer and elk numbers have also declined. Deprived of the opportunity to move along boar trails, tigers hit the road. This occurred at a time when hunting and poaching hit a peak.[Source: “The Amur Tiger” by Yury Dunishenko and Alexander Kulikov, The Wildlife Foundation, 1999 ~~, Eugene Linden, Time magazine, March 28, 1994]

"The reasons for the tiger’s disappearance are the same the world over changes in habitat, decrease in prey, poaching, rash behavior, a rush to make short-term profit and a lack of adequate information and understanding of the animal’s needs. Problems suffered by Siberian tigers include "inbreeding, or the degradation of living organisms as a result of repeated breeding among close relatives. The offspring of such relatives are not, as a rule, biologically viable. We humans are to blame for much of the problem. Tigers live near villages because our waste management on their outskirts leaves much to be desired; all the trash winds up on the edge of town. This is easy pickings for the sick, for the old, for young tigers who are left without a mother. Unguarded dogs wander the dumps. This attracts predators that gradually lose all fear of people. Matthew Shaer wrote in Smithsonian magazine: “ But as old threats are addressed, new ones arise. Some scientists are concerned about the arrival of canine distemper disease in tigers, a development that scientists still do not fully understand. [Source: Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2015]

Siberian tigers have a good chance of survival because they embrace a single population in a single habitant that is more or less continuous in its range. No other tiger is blessed with a vast and mostly roadless area of forested mountains, very thinly populated by human beings. Poaching rates of Siberian tigers appear to have dropped off since 1995 after a conservation strategy was worked out and Moscow provided funding. Local officials have blocked the construction of logging roads that would disrupt the tiger's habitat. Naturalist Dale Miquelle told National Geographic, "yes, there's a lot of logging. Yes, there's too much hunting of ungulates. But there is still a big stretch of more or less intact forest. Human pressure is low—and not likely to rise. If the Russians can extract timber at a sustainable rate, if hunters can be persuaded to remove prey at a rate that allows tigers as well as themselves to eat, if the need or desire to poach tigers can be eliminated, tigers will survive in Russia for the foreseeable future."

Siberian Tigers and Poachers

Large number of tigers have been killed by poachers especially in the early 1990s and mid 2000s. Many are believed to have been killed to supply bones and other parts for the Chinese medicine trade. Some may have been killed by Chinese hunters who come across the border into southern Russia. Most are taken by Russian hunters working on a contact basis with Chinese buyers. The hunters were getting paid around $25,000 per tiger crcass in the 1990s, several times what most Russians were making an entire year . Dale Miquelle, an American scientist based in Primorsky, told Smithsonian magazine: "Mothers are a lot more vulnerable to poaching than other tigers, because they’ll try to stand their ground—a mother doesn’t want to abandon her cubs, and she might not have time to get them together to escape. So she ends up getting shot.”

During the winters of 1992, 1993 and 1994, dozens of tigers were trapped and shot and their bones, organs and skins sold in China. At this time the amount of money available for conservation sharply decreased and logging, mining and road construction to bring in foreign currency increased. The collapse of the Soviet Union made it easier for poachers to smuggle tiger parts into China and Southeast. There were also people collecting pine nuts, ginseng and musk deer in the forests where the tigers lived. In 1998, there was big uproar over the fact that the governor of Russia's Far East gave the Belorussian president a Siberian tiger pelt as a gift when he visited Vladivostok. In 2004 a tiger poaching ring led by Russian police colonel was broken up.

John Vaillant wrote in “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival”: “One of the many negative effects of perestroika and the reopening of the border between Russia and China has been a surge in tiger poaching. As the economy disintegrated and unemployment spread throughout the 1990s, professional poachers, businessmen, and ordinary citizens alike began taking advantage of the forest's wealth in all its forms. The tigers, because they are so rare and so valuable, have been particularly hard hit: their organs, blood, and bone are much sought after for use in traditional Chinese medicine. Some believe the tiger's whiskers will make them bulletproof and that its powdered bones will soothe their aches and pains. Others believe its penis will make them virile, and there are many — from Tokyo to Moscow — who will pay thousands of dollars for a tiger's skin. [Source: John Vaillant. “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival” (Knopf, 2010) |=|]

Dunishenko and Kulikov wrote: "A modest article, written by a wildlife manager in Vyazemskii Raion and entitled “How Much is a Tiger Worth?” was published in the newspaper Tikhookeanskaya Zvezda. The author calls for a massive tiger hunt. The article cites fantastic prices, all in “bucks,” and asserts that the tiger’s sexual organs are worth their weight in gold. We have an inkling that this in fact is useless “gold” still sits around in freezers somewhere in abundant quantity, awaiting the purported buyers. Such is the consequence of an irresponsible, mongering newspaper article and the embarrassing, “professional” bacchanalia of a local author and wildlife manager. "In any case, the hunt for the tiger took on a new intensity. Snares, traps and poison were employed. Patrols were set up along forest roads. And for quite a while, contraband dealers from China were indeed buying up the product. But judging by the fact that none of the hunters got very rich from their efforts, the prices hardly seem worth the risk. [Source: “The Amur Tiger” by Yury Dunishenko and Alexander Kulikov, The Wildlife Foundation, 1999 ~~]

Efforts to Protect Siberian Tigers

Efforts to protect Siberian tigers have included increasing the amount land in reserves, strengthening anti-poaching squads, and giving stiff sentences to convicted poachers. The key to their survival is making sure they have enough natural prey to hunt. The Siberian Tiger Project was set up in January 1992 in the Ussuri region at Terney, a fishing port about 350 mile northeast of Vladivostok. It was rung by Russian authorities and Dr. Maurice Hornocker and Dr. Howard Quigley of the Hornocke Wildlife Institute and University of Idaho. In 1995, the Russian Prime Minister Chernomydrin issued a decree to protect the Siberian tiger.

As of 2005, there were eight anti-poaching teams operating in area where the Siberia tiger is found. The members were given $5,000 a year, a good salary by Russian standards, are supplied with jeeps, gasoline, fuel and tracking dogs. Wildlife departments often had no money to patrol the tiger's habitat and officials were susceptible to bribes. The fine for killing a tiger was a million rubles but people who didn't pay the fine were not sent to jail.

Dunishenko and Kulikov wrote: "We need to admit that it’s impossible to post an inspector behind every hunter. Tiger conservation will be effective only when everyone recognizes that a live tiger is more valuable than a dead one. When this happens, the road to reckless adventures will be blocked once and for all. A good hunter can easily spot a snare set in his territory. He can read road tracks better than any criminologist. But for the time being, we cannot take for granted that every hunter will voluntarily contribute his share to tiger conservation; we’ll have to pay for the strict control ourselves. [Source: “The Amur Tiger” by Yury Dunishenko and Alexander Kulikov, The Wildlife Foundation, 1999 ~~]

It is also important to develop a plan for sustainable natural resource use in the mountain forests of the Sikhote-Alin...In Khabarovskii Krai, we are talking about the middle portion of the Khor River watershed and its tributaries. These particular waterways form ecological corridors along which the entire tiger population is connected as a whole. Questions of employment and increases in the standard of living of people living in forest villages must be given special attention. Local value-added production facilities, gathering of non-timber forest products, bee-keeping and safe forms of ecotourism are proposed as alternatives to timber harvest. If we are to get serious about this, then the start-up capital, the equipment and technologies could be obtained in the form of investments into the region. The rest will depend upon the people living on the land.

Russian Government and Siberian Tiger Conservation

In 2010, Russia launched a national strategy to protect Siberian tigers. Matthew Shaer wrote in Smithsonian magazine: “It has helped that the Russian government, under Vladimir Putin, has turned its attention to the plight of the Amur. In 2010 Putin presided over an international tiger summit, in St. Petersburg, where 13 countries pledged to double the world’s tiger population by 2022. And in 2013, the Russian president spearheaded the enactment of a strict anti-poaching law that raised the penalty for possession of tiger parts from a minor administrative fine to a criminal offense punishable by a lengthy spell in prison. [Source: Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2015 */]

Before that national and local government roles in helping tigers in Russia were questioned. Dunishenko and Kulikov wrote: "The Russian government has never been much of one to fund tiger conservation. But there are caring people on the planet and they are providing funds to implement specific parts of our tiger program. Some things have already been done to provide some protection. [Source: “The Amur Tiger” by Yury Dunishenko and Alexander Kulikov, The Wildlife Foundation, 1999 ~~]

" A national strategy for conserving the Amur tiger population has been developed and approved, a similarly entitled government proclamation has been issued, and a federal program has been developed, promising sizable funding to ensure implementation of tiger protection measures necessary to protect the tiger. In reality, there is no money for the program, and where it is going to come from is anyone’s guess. This is Russia and it has a government that is not even willing to pay people their hard-earned wages.~~

"We often hear from the foreigners: “Yes, but what has your government budgeted?” One tries to look to the side, embarrassed, mumbling something about the difficult economic times in the country. Although the truth is that just the revenues from the sale of the vodka that despairing people in forest villages drink would be enough to get the work started. That is, if the vodka was not sold on the “sly,” and if the regional government were to earn something from it.~~

"Officially, the government Committee on Ecology is responsible for the fate of the tiger in Russia. But since the Committee does not have police powers, its responsibility remains purely symbolic. The Hunting Inspection Agency deals with the tiger as if they are merely a side project. Sometimes this agency does nab tiger poachers. But hunting organizations are not very interested in having the wild animals that they protect and breed eaten by the tiger. That is why the agency’s guardianship of the tiger in Khabarovskii Krai is rather halfhearted.~~

"Chukenskii and Mataiskii nature reserves, which enjoy Krai level status, have already been created. Work continues to create the first national park in the Russian Far East, in the Anyuskii River watershed, as well as other protected territories. The international community has recognized these efforts. A specific example of this international recognition is inclusion of Khabarovskii Krai into the International Club “Protectors of the Earth.” ~~

"The Far Eastern Branch of the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute for the Study of Wildlife Resources (VNIIOZ) studies the rare predator, that is, when there is funding to do such studies. It is true that since 1997 monitoring work has been going on in the context of the Federal Target Program, but the funds to support this work have derived solely from the local budget and from WWF, and so, unfortunately, there is no assurance that this work will continue. And nevertheless, since 1990, for better or worse, much new, interesting information has been gathered on the Amur tiger, information that makes it possible to seriously correct what has been written to date.~~

Foreign NGOs and Siberian Tiger Conservation

In the late 1990s, the Tiger Trust and the World Wildlife Fund provided vehicles and supplemental pay for Russian wildlife rangers. ExxonMobile’s Save the Tiger program has donated $2.2 million to help protect tigers in Russia. International funding supported field inspector teams in Primorskii Krai. New reserves and zapovedniks were planned. Books and pamphlets were written and published.

Dunishenko and Kulikov wrote: In the 1990s "representatives of the international community met in Khabarovsk in March 1993 to develop a plan. Many of these same people had met previously in India, in Great Britain, in the USA, in Nepal, in Japan. Resulting from these meetings were joint tiger conservation action programs that in rough outline are made up of several components. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has spent almost a million dollars on tiger conservation. The US National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Tiger and Rhino Fund, the Hornocker Wildlife Institute and other international organizations are also providing generous assistance in the name of tiger conservation. Everyone is helping out as best they can, that is, with the exception of the Russian government. [Source: “The Amur Tiger” by Yury Dunishenko and Alexander Kulikov, The Wildlife Foundation, 1999 ~~]

"As a rule, these specialized NGOs, which combine scientific specialists with activists, are free of partisan or business pressures. This approach means that the funds won’t just completely disappear into the vortex of the ever-emaciated government budgets. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and the honorary president of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), came to Khabarovsk in 1997 as volunteer for the “Living Planet” campaign. Important symbols of this campaign are the tiger, the African rhinoceros and the panda.~~

"A brochure about the “Living Planet” campaign reads as follows:“We stand before a colossal challenge here on the edge of the new millenium. The destructive heritage of the “human footprint” has grown by two thirds in the last three decades, while all over the world forests, wetlands, oceans and coastlines are being degraded as a rate never before observed. The world’s forests are being destroyed more quickly than ever: each year we cut down or burn 17 million hectares, an area four times the size of Switzerland.” By joining the international “Living Planet” campaign, Khabarovskii Krai obliged itself to increase protected territories to ten percent of the total area of the Krai. The Krai needs to expand its system of zapovedniks, national parks and reserves, connecting them with ecological corridors that support animal migration. International donors will provide funds to restore the tiger’s prey, but only if they are convinced that their contributions will do more than to merely ensure that people have more deer and wild boar to shoot. That is it is critical that hunters need effectively manage their own hunting territories." ~~

from People's Daily

Poachers, Rangers and Saving Siberian Tigers

Sometimes poachers include rangers, park officials and other people that are supposed to protect animals rather than kill them. There generally is isn’t very much money to pay such people. Reserves that were well protected and well staffed in the Soviet era had only a fraction of the employees in the 1990s that they once had and they were very poorly paid.

Rangers and naturalists are uncommon and underpaid. In 1997, parks received only 5 percent of the funding they received in the Soviet era. Rangers need money for things like radios and vehicles. Rangers have been murdered and had their cabins burnt down by rangers. In some cases, poachers are equipped with modern weapons while rangers have World War II-vintage rifles. The penalties for poaching are relatively light.

Dunishenko and Kulikov wrote: "The first and most immediate measure for tiger conservation is to find a way to fight poaching. A number of approaches have been suggested: improving the legal aspects of tiger conservation; strengthening customs control and hunting inspection services, including the formation of specially trained, mobile units; determining the responsibilities of those who manage wildlife resources. Programs have also been developed to defend people from the tiger’s actions. These programs often include creation of procedures regulating the removal of tigers that threaten human life; compensation payments for losses caused by tigers; and the identification of locations where the coexistence of humans and tigers is undesirable or unacceptable. As it stands, the outside world realizes that the Russian government is not especially concerned about the tiger; it has enough of a problem trying to feed its hungry masses. [Source: “The Amur Tiger” by Yury Dunishenko and Alexander Kulikov, The Wildlife Foundation, 1999 ~~]

Matthew Shaer wrote in Smithsonian magazine: “Battling poaching in the Far East has always been a difficult proposition: People are poor and often desperate, and the sheer size of the area makes law enforcement difficult. WCS has teamed up with other organizations to educate locals about the importance and fragility of the Amur population. But Miquelle remains under no illusions that he will get through to everyone. “We talk about tragedy in terms of tigers, but you’ve got to think about tragedy in terms of people. Sometimes, poachers are poaching because they’re starving, and they need food for their families.” In the Far East, a dead tiger can go for thousands of dollars. “You’re never going to be able to beat out poaching unless the economy drastically changes,” Miquelle says. “There will always be that temptation.” Yet there has been progress on cracking down on poaching, including the widespread adoption by parks across the Far East of the SMART-based protocol—a computer program, now in use in dozens of countries, that collects and collates data from patrols and poaching busts and allows managers to better evaluate the effectiveness of their teams.[Source: Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2015 */]

Difficulties Protecting Siberian Tiger Habitat

Dunishenko and Kulikov wrote: A key "component of the tiger conservation program is dedicated to habitat protection and to improving natural conditions that will ensure the tiger’s survival. This component incorporates a very broad rang of strategies: there is a need to increase the number of wild ungulates; to create wildlife refuges and reserves; to develop special natural resource use zones. Additionally, an integrated economic development program must be created for the areas that are currently recognized as tiger habitat. [Source: “The Amur Tiger” by Yury Dunishenko and Alexander Kulikov, The Wildlife Foundation, 1999 ~~]

"This will be a tough thing to do in Russia. In America it’s easier to resolve such matters: “greens” can use the environmental impact assessment process to demonstrate that a timber harvest will degrade the habitat of an endangered spotted owl. What follows is a lawsuit against the timber industry. While the courts consider the case, all harvest is halted in the habitat of this poor owl. A year, maybe two years pass before the court issues a ruling and reach an agreement on compensation measures. If you were to try to argue in the American fashion here in Russia, then you’d be in for a good laugh. That is why achieving habitat protection will be a long process. For the time being, there isn’t even money to develop certain parts of the tiger program. It is true that United States Agency for International Development has promised to provide some support. And to provide it more quickly than our government could ever dream possible.~~

from potterparkzoo.org

"Of course, protecting tiger habitat on a regional scale is beyond the capacity of individual hunters and nature lovers. Each of them is in a position, however, to put out a single forest fire or to go out to save a stand of trees. It’s not just the timber companies that are creating problems; it’s also the individuals who work in the forests. A guy sitting at the controls of a bulldozer is positioned to fight the power of nature in equal terms! He can grind his way up the channel of a forest stream, turning it into a lifeless current for dozens of years. He rips open a path on a steep slope for a skid trail and, for years to come, rains will wash away trees that had been growing on there for hundreds of years. To make an opening for a lower log deck, he uses his blade to level out a meadow that happens to be a natural salt lick, once and for all depriving local animals a source of mineral supplements that they have used for millennia." ~~

"But this is a rhetorical question. Since time immemorial, every effort has been made to extinguish forest fires in Russia. As soon as a forest sparked, the entire village, young and old, would rush to put it out. That was just thirty or forty years ago. What is happening with us? Who are we now, a bunch of “new Russians” who might at any time can split the scene with our cash, just to pump up the economy of some other country? But most of us are going to have live here on the ash pile on this trashed-out and scalped landscape. This “to hell with it” attitude has really gotten out of control." ~~

Local People and Siberian Tiger Conservation

Dunishenko and Kulikov wrote: "The people of the Russian Far East can provide real and effective help in protecting tiger habitat. Hunting clubs can carry out forage enhancement measures: sowing and planting fodder grains in forest openings, setting up salt licks (but not just with the intention of shooting the animals!), and feeding animals during the deep, spring snows. Farmers can leave small amounts of grain in the fields during harvest. Even individual hunters can try to find ways to compensate these animals for what has been expropriated by humans. Feed, refuges, human impact and climatic conditions all help to determine the number of animals that can be supported in a given area. But the main factor is food. When there is enough food, even heavy snows are not too destructive, just as long as animals are not forced to shift from one spot to another or are mercilessly shot next to the road. [Source: “The Amur Tiger” by Yury Dunishenko and Alexander Kulikov, The Wildlife Foundation, 1999 ~~]

"Organizations are now appearing here in the Russian Far East. The Khabarovsk Wildlife Foundation, organized by a group of scientists in the Krai, has gained international acclaim. Once we were surprised when, visiting a remote community in the US, our introductory remarks about our region were met with the response, “Oh, Khabarovsk, the Wildlife Foundation!” But unlike foreign funds, our Foundation does not have its own funds — the government doesn’t provide us a kopeck of support. The Foundation is a volunteer organization. The situation overseas is a bit different. Governments and individual people concerned for the planet provide money to large international and local foundations that hold competitions to provide yet other funds with modest funding. Upon receipt of a grant, these latter funds then hold competitions to find groups and individuals capable of carrying out programs that are in accordance with the funds’ objectives. The lucky ones who receive grants use the money to carry out their work. This grant making process assures multi-level control of the funds and inappropriate use is practically excluded.~~

"Are we going to save the tiger? If you judge by what is being done right now, there is some basis for optimism. The tiger isn’t going to disappear in a single year, and it might even last a couple of decades, maybe three, but then again, maybe not that long. We could gather a bit more material on the tiger, set up a mathematical model, and predict, with an indifferent machine, exact date when people will catch their last glimpse of the tracks of the last tsar of what, by then, will be (please forgive me for the expression) no longer a wild jungle.~~

"Starting with kindergartens, and the earliest grades and continuing all the way through high school, everything must be done to introduce students must urgently be exposed to these issues. We must try to instill in them a deeper understanding of nature so that those who come after us will be zealous protectors of this place we call planet Earth. This kind of education process has been going on in other civilized countries of the world for a long time. In Russia, environmental education is a great challenge — we still have to teach the teachers. Naturally, you aren’t going to reorganize public education just for the tiger; neither the funds nor the opportunities to do this exist. But much can be accomplished using resources already at hand. Almost every village has a literate biologist or a wildlife manager or a forest engineer. These people have a wealth of useful information that can be shared with both children and adults! There are plans to develop new teaching methodologies and a textbook for teachers. Substantial funds, hundreds of thousands of dollars, are needed for environmental education in Russia.~~

Inspection Tiger

Inspection Tiger is an organization that has been set in Siberian tiger country to protect tigers. John Vaillant wrote in “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival”: "With financial assistance (and pressure) from international conservation agencies, the territorial government created Inspection Tiger in the hope of restoring some semblance of law and order to the forests of Primorye. Armed with guns, cameras, and broad police powers, these teams were charged with intercepting poachers and resolving a steadily increasing number of conflicts between tigers and human beings. [Source: John Vaillant. “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival” (Knopf, 2010)]

“In many ways, Inspection Tiger's mandate resembles that of detectives on a narcotics detail, and so does the risk: the money is big, and the players are often desperate and dangerous individuals. Tigers are similar to drugs in that they are sold by the gram and the kilo, and their value increases according to the refinement of both product and seller. But there are some key differences: tigers can weigh six hundred pounds; they have been hunting large prey, including humans, for two million years; and they have a memory. For these reasons, tigers can be as dangerous to the people trying to protect them as they are to those who would profit from them.

“The territory covered by Yuri Trush's Inspection Tiger unit in the mid-1990s was centered around the Bikin (be-keen) River. You can drive a truck on the Bikin in winter, but in summer it has a languid bayou feel. For many of the valley's jobless inhabitants, the laws imposed by the river and the forest are more relevant than those of the local government. While most residents here poach game simply to survive, there are those among them who are in it for the money.

“In 1997,Inspection Tiger had been in existence for only three years; given the state of the Russian economy in the 1990s, its members were lucky to have jobs, particularly because they were paid in dollars by foreign conservation groups. Four hundred dollars a month was an enviable wage at that time, but a lot was expected in return. Whether they were doing routine checks of hunters' documents in the forest, searching suspect cars en route to the Chinese border, or setting up sting operations, most of the people Inspection Tiger dealt with were armed. As often as not, these encounters took place in remote areas where backup was simply not available, and they never knew what they were going to find."

Dale Miquelle and WCS Russia

The Russia Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, an American nonprofit,Dale Miquelle, an American scientist based in Primorsky, told Smithsonian Magazine that WCS Russia as both research and conservation organization—“with the research making the conservation possible." The group oversees what is generally agreed to be the longest-running field research project on the Amur in history. Using GPS collars and other tracking techniques, it has established an unrivaled library of data on the Amur tiger. The information the group has gathered has helped the Russian government pick areas that need to be better protected, and to help establish new reserves in Russia and China. “The effectiveness of conservation grows proportionally in relation to how much you know about the animal,” Miquelle said. “You can’t go at it blind, you know?” [Source: Matthew Shaer,Smithsonian Magazine, February 2015 */]

Matthew Shaer wrote in Smithsonian magazine: “Miquelle is a gruff, laconic presence—an action man and not a classroom man, who, by his own admission, is much better suited to fieldwork than to interpersonal politics...As animals go, Miquelle is more bear than tiger—broad-shouldered, shambling, with meaty paws and unruly black-and-white hair. Now 60, Miquelle was raised outside of Boston and studied at Yale (he was originally an English major), before moving on to the University of Minnesota for his master’s degree and the University of Idaho, where he received his doctorate in biology in 1985. His specialty was moose. In 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union was dissolved, Miquelle was part of a small delegation of Americans dispatched to the Far East to work with Russian scientists to study the habitats of the dwindling Amur population. The other Americans went home several months later; Miquelle has never left.

"There are only a few scientists alive with his skill for tracking and catching live tigers, and when a big cat is found anywhere in Russia’s Far East, Miquelle and his team are usually the first summoned to lend a hand. That morning he had an itinerary ready for me: a ten-hour drive north to an old mining village called Roshchino, where we would catch a ferry across the Iman River and drive another hour to Udege Legend National Park. There we would trek up into the hills to set up camera traps, invaluable tools for monitoring wild animals: Placed correctly, the combined infrared and photographic lenses stir to life at the first sign of motion or heat and provide imagery and data that might otherwise take months of backbreaking work to obtain. A few cats had been seen in Udege Legend, Miquelle told me, and he wanted to get a grip on their numbers.

In the mid-1990s, Miquelle worked for the Hornocker Wildlife Institute, an organization founded by the scientist Maurice Hornocker that later merged with the WCS. Although Russian field men had already done good work counting and studying the remaining population of Amur tigers, they were limited to working in the winter, when tiger prints were visible in the snow. The Hornocker Wildlife Institute brought radio collars, transmitters and the telemetry experience necessary to track big cats remotely. It was a depressing time: Almost every tiger the group collared seemed to be poached. Sometimes the poachers would cut the collar off the animal with a hunting knife; sometimes they’d blast it with a rifle, to halt the transmission of the radio signal.

Reintroducing Siberian Tigers to the Wild

Siberian Tigers have undergone training be reintroduced to the wild and have then been released and have managed to survive. The program began in the 1990s with experiments in which young tigers, who had never seen a real deer, were trained to hunt them by charged a foam deer model scented with deer urine. They also climbed trees to get at the skin of a wild boar.

Matthew Shaer wrote in Smithsonian magazine: “The practice of rehabilitating wild predators to prepare them for release back into the wild is not unheard of. It has been accomplished successfully, for example, with bears, the lynx in North America and, once, in India with Bengal tigers. But it is new enough to remain controversial, and for WCS and the other organizations involved with the Alekseevka Center, the release of Amur tigers represented a tremendous risk. A few years earlier, a wild cat that had been captured and collared by WCS staff killed a fisherman outside the coastal community of Terney, in Primorsky; Miquelle, who lives in the village, told me that the incident turned the town against him and his employees. If one of the rehabilitated cubs became a so-called “conflict tiger,” Miquelle told me, “it could easily set back tiger conservation in the region a hundred years.” [Source: Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2015 */]

"But the upsides of reintroduction were enormous: If left-for-dead orphaned cubs could be rehabilitated to the point of mating with wild tigers, they would not only provide a boost in the local population but, in the aggregate, perhaps reclaim regions that hadn’t seen healthy tiger communities in decades. Beyond that, the hope was to establish a model that scientists in other countries could perhaps one day duplicate." */

“ Beginning in late 2012, five new orphaned cubs were brought to the Alekseevka Center for rehabilitation: three males and two females. Last spring, they were outfitted with GPS collars and reintroduced into the wild. One of the tigers, Kuzya—known as “Putin’s tiger,” because the Russian president was said to have personally sprung the cat from his enclosure—has become famous for swimming across the Amur River into China, where, according to Chinese state media, he gobbled five chickens out of a rural henhouse. The colored lines on the Google Earth display represented the tracks of the five orphans...Two of the male cats proved to be wanderers, ranging hundreds of miles from their drop site across mountain ridges and soggy marshland. The third male and the females staked out an area and remained near it, making shorter trips within the taiga to hunt for prey." */

Training for Reintroducing Siberian Tigers to the Wild

Matthew Shaer wrote in Smithsonian magazine: “Zolushka was the first tiger to arrive at Alekseevka—the test case. In the early months, she was fed primarily meat, dumped into the enclosure through one of the slots in the fencing. In the summer of 2012, a pair of young scientists from Moscow, Petr Sonin and Katerina Blidchenko, traveled to Vladivostok to help inaugurate the next phase in Zolushka’s rehabilitation. Sonin and Blidchenko presented Zolushka initially with rabbits—fast, but ultimately defenseless.

"The next step was wild boar, a thickset animal with formidable tusks and the low-slung center of gravity of a tank. The boar seemed at first to confuse Zolushka. She could catch up to it easily enough, but the kill itself was harder to accomplish. A rabbit was downed with a single snap of the jaws; a boar fought back. “It was like a kid trying to figure out a puzzle,” says Miquelle, who was a periodic visitor to the center in those weeks. “She got it, but it took a little time.” Three boars in, and Zolushka was driving the animals to the ground with grace and skill. She did the same with much larger sika deer, which were pushed through a chute and into the enclosure. She was healthy, she was growing fast, and she could kill as ably as many wild tigers. [Source: Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2015 */]

"Opened months earlier by a coalition that included the Russian Geographical Society and the government-funded group Inspection Tiger, the Alekseevka Center spilled over eight acres thick with brush and vegetation. There was sheeting on all the fences, so that captive tigers wouldn’t be able to see outside, and a series of chutes so that prey could be introduced surreptitiously, a system designed in consultation with Patrick Thomas, an expert from the Bronx Zoo. Meanwhile, a battery of cameras allowed scientists to observe the animals from a control center without disturbing them. “There were two main goals,” Miquelle recalled. “Don’t let the animal get acclimated to humans. And teach her to hunt.”

Releasing a Reintroduced Siberian Tiger to the Wild

Matthew Shaer wrote in Smithsonian magazine: “In May 2013, a little more than a year after she arrived at the Alekseevka Center, the decision was made: It was time for Zolushka to be set free. In the weeks leading up to her release, the team at the center had considered a range of options for the reintroduction site, but settled on Bastak Zapovednik, in Russia’s remote Jewish Autonomous Region, some 300 miles to the north. “The thinking was that Bastak had plenty of boar and red deer,” Miquelle told me. “But most importantly, this was an area where there were once tigers, and now there weren’t. It was an opportunity to actually recolonize tiger habitat. That’s totally unheard of.” [Source: Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2015 */]

Removing Zolushka from the Alekseevka Center turned out to be much more difficult than getting her in. As a cub, she’d been drugged and carried through the gates; now, as an adult, she had grown comfortable with her surroundings, and at the sound of humans approaching, she’d wade toward the middle of the pen and flatten herself in the undergrowth. It would have been suicidal for the WCS staff to chase after her on foot, so Sasha Rybin, the same fieldworker who had tranquilized Zolushka a year earlier, climbed up into an observation tower and shot her with a Zoletil dart. Zoletil sedates an animal and slows its breathing without halting it altogether, and one of the uncomfortable realities of tranquilizing big predators is that their eyes remain mostly open. Zolushka, now weighing more than 200 pounds, was rolled onto a stretcher and carried to a nearby truck. */

"Fourteen hours later, the vehicle arrived at the release site. The door on Zolushka’s crate was lifted remotely. She sniffed around uneasily and then, her truncated tail extended, she leapt down and waded into the brush. From his home in Terney, Miquelle watched the GPS data for evidence that Zolushka had passed a vital test: her first kill in the wild. At the Alekseevka Center, her prey had been fenced in as certainly as Zolushka herself; here, it could run for miles, and tigers tire easily. Zolushka would have to be patient and cunning. Otherwise, she’d die." */

Set Backs and Success with a Reintroduced Siberian Tiger

Matthew Shaer wrote in Smithsonian magazine: “Five days after her release, Zolushka’s GPS signal went stationary—often an indication that a tiger has brought down prey and is feasting on the carcass. Rangers waited until Zolushka had moved on, and then trekked to the site, where they found the remains of a sizable badger. In the ensuing months Zolushka killed deer and boar; initially, she was disinclined to wander, but soon she was making regular forays far afield, at one point walking a few dozen miles north, to the adjoining province of Khabarovsk. [Source: Matthew Shaer, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2015 */]

"Then, in August, utter calamity: Zolushka’s GPS collar malfunctioned, leaving no surefire way for scientists to track her remotely. “I was really freaked out,” Miquelle told me. “She’d survived the summer, but winter is critical. A cat has to be able to eat and stay warm.” If it can’t, it will often approach villages to search for easier pickings, like cattle or domestic dogs. Humans are put in danger, and the cat, now a “conflict tiger,” is often killed. */

"In September 2013, a month after Zolushka’s collar had stopped transmitting GPS data, the monitoring team was able to use the collar’s radio signal to roughly pin down her location: She was still within the reserve, somewhere near the Bastak River. Last winter, Miquelle traveled to Bastak to find out what had happened to her. Working off the radio signal data, he and a pair of Russian scientists were able to find a set of recent tracks, which met at several points with boar prints. Curiously, there was a set of larger prints, too, with distinctive digital pads: another tiger.

Camera trap images soon proved what Miquelle and others had previously dared only to hope: The second tiger was a healthy male. The male: a thickset cat who had been given the name Zavetny. Zavetny and Zolushka now seemed to be sharing a range, at one point apparently feasting together on the same kill. And on several occasions rangers have found “hump tracks”—evidence that Zavetny and Zolushka, who is now of breeding age, have mated. Whether or not they have produced cubs isn’t yet known. But Miquelle is hopeful that one day very soon, he’ll receive a photo from a camera trap showing Zolushka with a line of cubs trailing behind. It would be a milestone: the first rehabilitated tiger in history to mate and give birth in the wild. Miquelle smiled. “Wouldn’t it be amazing?” he asked. "

Putin’s Tigers

In 2013, three Siberian tigers were freed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in one of the wild animal-themed public relations events favoured by his spin doctors. The tiger cubs had been found starving two years earlier in the Ussuri Taiga forest near the Russia-China border, Russian media reported. They were rehabilitated, taught to hunt, and released back into the wild. The other tigers remain in Amur. Russia adopted a national strategy to protect the endangered Amur tiger in July 2010. Putin has been personally involved in the promotion of conservation efforts. [Source: Ben Quinn and agencies, The Guardian, January 25, 2014]

In 2008, Putin was praised by Russian media for saving a television crew from an attack by a Siberian tiger. The Russian president apparently saved the crew while on a trip to a national park to see how researchers monitor the tigers in the wild. Just as he was arriving with a group of wildlife specialists to see a trapped Amur tiger, it escaped and ran towards a nearby camera crew, the country's main television station said. Mr Putin quickly shot the beast and sedated it

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; National Geographic, Live Science, Natural History magazine, David Attenborough books, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Top Secret Animal Attack Files website and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2025