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Tigers - National Museum of Natural History

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In Russia's Far East, an orphaned female tiger is the test case in an experimental effort to save one of the most endangered animals on earth

Smithsonian Magazine |

From its origins in Russia's remote Primorsky Province, the Krounovka River wends northeast, passing through ridges red with willow trees and barren stretches of grassland, before finally joining a larger river known as the Razdolnaya. By modern standards, the river valley is all but unpopulated, save the odd logging outpost, but in the winter months the region fills with amateur sportsmen who come to stalk the abundant sika deer and the freshwater trout.

On a frigid afternoon in February 2012, a pair of hunters working the Krounovka were halted by an unusual sight: a 4-month-old Amur tiger cub, lying on her side in a drift of snow. A typical Amur, hearing the sound of human footsteps, will either roar in an attempt to scare off the interlopers or melt away entirely. This cat was different. Her eyes were glazed and distant, her breathing shallow. The hunters tossed a blanket over her head and carted her into a nearby town, to the home of Andrey Oryol, a local wildlife inspector.

Oryol immediately recognized the severity of the situation. The cat, who was eventually given the name Zolushka-Cinderella, in English-had clearly not eaten in days, and the tip of her tail was black with frostbite. Oryol made an enclosure for her in his wood-line d banya, or steam bath, and fed her a steady diet of meat, eggs and warm milk. After a few days, her vitals had stabilized; after two weeks, she was back up on all four paws, pacing restlessly. Heartened, Oryol reached out to Dale Miquelle, an American scientist based in Primorsky, and asked him to come at once.

"My first thought was that the mother had probably been poached, and that the poachers couldn't find or had no use for the cubs," Miquelle recalled recently. "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."

Among tiger specialists, a close-knit group, Miquelle, the director of the Russia Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, an American nonprofit, 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. 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.

Miquelle arrived at Oryol's house shortly after lunch, along with Sasha Rybin, a WCS colleague. Oryol showed them into the banya. Immediately, Zolushka began to snarl. Adolescent tigers, despite their relatively small stature-Zolushka was about the size of a golden retriever-are dangerous animals, with sharp claws and teeth and a frightening growl that's almost like an adult's. "It can really knock you back," Miquelle told me. He used a stick to distract her while Rybin jabbed her with a dart containing Zoletil, a tranquilizer. Once she had collapsed, they lifted her out of her enclosure and placed her on a nearby table, where a pair of local veterinarians performed surgery to amputate the necrotic tip of her tail. Bandaged and sedated, Zolushka was moved to the Center for the Rehabilitation and Reintroduction of Tigers and other Rare Animals, 50 miles to the south in Alekseevka.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

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The Amur tiger -also known as the Siberian-is, along with the Bengal, the biggest in the tiger family. Amurs are ocher and russet, with a pink nose, amber eyes and thick black stripes that band their bodies in patterns as unique as any fingerprint. An adult male Amur can measure as long as 11 feet and weigh 450 pounds; the average female is closer to 260. On the kill, an Amur will load its powerful back haunches and slam forward like the hammer of a revolver. To watch a tiger bring down a deer is to see its weight and bulk vanish.

The Amur probably traces its lineage to an ur-species of Panthera tigris, which enters the fossil record about two million years ago. Over the ensuing millennia, nine distinct subspecies of tigers emerged, including the Bengal and the Amur. Each was an apex predator-the pinnacle of its region's food chain. Unlike the bear, a formidable predator who feasts on both flora and fauna, the tiger is purely carnivorous, with a preference for ungulates such as deer and wild pigs; it will starve before consuming a plant.

In the not-so-distant past, tigers roamed the shorelines of Bali, the jungles of Indonesia and the lowlands of China. But deforestation, poaching and the ever-widening footprint of man have all taken their toll, and today it is estimated that 93 percent of the ranges once occupied by tigers have been eradicated. There are few wild tigers remaining in China and none in Bali, nor in Korea, where medieval portraits showed a sinuous creature with a noble bearing and a nakedly hungry, open-mouthed leer-an indication of the mixture of dread and admiration humans have long felt for the beast. At the turn of the 20th century, it was estimated that there were 100,000 tigers roaming the wild. Now, according to the World Wildlife Fund, the number is probably much closer to 3,200.

In a way, the area comprised of Primorsky and neighboring Khabarovsk Province can be said to be the tiger's last fully wild range. As opposed to India, where tiger preserves are hemmed in on all sides by the thrum of civilization, the Far East is empty and conspicuously frontier-like -a bastion of hunters, loggers, fishermen and miners. Just two million people live in Primorsky Province, on a landmass of nearly 64,000 square miles (about the size of Wisconsin), and much of the population is centered in and around Vladivostok-literally "the ruler of the east"-a grim port city that serves as the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the home base of WCS Russia.

This past autumn, I flew to Vladivostok to meet with Dale Miquelle, who had agreed to show me around his ward, which extends from the southern lip of Primorsky to the easternmost reaches of Siberia, where the mixed coniferous and deciduous forest, the natural habitat of the Amur, comes to an end. ("I go as far as tigers go," Miquelle is fond of saying.)

At 7 on a dark morning in late October, a forest green Toyota HiLux squealed to a stop in front of my hotel, and Miquelle piled out. 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.

Miquelle describes his work at WCS Russia as both research and conservation-"with the research making the conservation possible," he says. He 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, he has established an unrivaled library of data on his subject, from the size of the territory a male Amur might mark for his own (averaging nearly 500 square miles) to its preferred prey (red deer and wild boar top the list). That information has allowed Miquelle to advise the government on what areas 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 told me. "You can't go at it blind, you know?"

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.

At the outskirts of Vladivostok, crumbling old housing complexes gave way to tall copses of Korean pine, and soon we were barreling across the surface of a great, gray plain. To pass the time, Miquelle talked to me about history. In the 1940s, he explained, it was believed that there were as few as 20 Amur tigers left in the Far East. But communism, which had been ruinous for many Russian people, was actually good for Russia's big cats. During the Soviet era, the borders were tightened, and it became difficult for poachers to get the animals into China, the primary market for tiger pelts and parts. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the borders opened again, and perhaps more calamitously, inflation set in. "You had families whose entire savings was now worth zilch," said Miquelle, whose wife, Marina, is a native of Primorsky. "People had to rely on their resources, and here, tigers were one of the resources. There was a massive spike in tiger poaching."

By the mid-1990s, it seemed possible that the Amur tiger would soon be extinct. Back then, 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. A 1996 census of the Far East's Amur population, using traditional snow-tracking methods and the expertise of area hunters and rangers, concluded that there were somewhere between 330 and 371 tigers in the region, and maybe 100 cubs. In 2005, Miquelle and his team led a second census, which put the count at between 331 and 393 adults and 97 to 109 cubs. Miquelle believes the numbers may have dipped slightly in the few years afterwards, but he is confident that heightened conservation efforts, a more energetic defense of protected lands and improved law enforcement have now stabilized the population. A census planned for this winter should help clarify the numbers.

But stabilization is different from growth, which is what makes the Zolushka experiment so intriguing. For conservationists in Russia, it is not just the cauterizing of a wound but a way forward-the nursing back to healthy life of a sick body.

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Smithsonian Magazine | From its origins in Russia's remote Primorsky Province, the Krounovka River wends northeast, passing through ridges red with willow trees and barren stretches of grassland, before finally joining a larger river known as the Razdolnaya.

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After a century of decline, tiger numbers are on the rise. About 4,500 tigers remain in the wild, but much more work is needed to protect this species that’s still vulnerable to extinction.

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Russian biologists have long studied Siberian tigers like caveman.

By tracking paw prints in the snow, made by the largest species in the feline family. Siberian tigers can weigh 800 pounds, once spanning the Sea of Okhotsk to the Yellow Sea.

By 1993, numbers have dwindled down to 400 in the wild.

Poaching Siberian cats fetches $10,000, whose fur provides elegant fashion and bones pulverized for healing tonic. The creators of National Geographic's Saving Siberian Tigers stumbled on four infant, four month old cubs. The mother was radio collared, until her trace simply disappeared.

The United States-Russian joint research group found the collar, led by Maurice Hornocker and Howard B. Quigley.

It was discarded by poachers.

By fate or chance, the four cubs had been discovered near the collar. They lay stacked upon each other, later placed inside a refuge cage for safe keeping.

Hornocker and Quigley's American led group, had teamed with Russian wildlife officials. By securing grants from the National Geographic Society, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, National Wildlife Federation, and most ironic, the Exxon Corporation; to join skillsets in tranquilizing + radiotelemetry methods with standard tracking.

Work began by February 1992.

Siberian tigers consume wild boar, elk.

How far tigers traveled was unknown.

The researches studied how much "meat" tigers consumed, majority of collared tracking done inside Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve. The 1,314 square-mile sanction housed 20 Siberian tigers, at time of writing.

The Primorskiy Kray forest (most spellings use Primorsky Krai, the author prefers Primorskiy Kray) is greater than the Amazon, in expanse. Siberian taiga country has slowly been pockmarked with moonscape, scarred by logging roads leading to clear-cuts.

The taiga holds one quarter of the world's forest, which has been readily used in a post-communist landscape. Spruce, fur, and pine- the combination which produces taiga's ecosystem; are commodities shipped out to foreign corporations. Private contractors had removed ten million acres annually.

Omaha, Nebraska's Henry Doorly Zoo, is the destination for the cubs.

Today, the estimated 400-500 remain constant.

It's a short piece, but it concludes well;

Nadezhda, "hope" in Russian, we named the surviving female cub, uneasily surveying her new snow covered home in the Omaha zoo. Her sisters Vera ("faith") and Lyubov ("love") had perished, but the surviving male, named Khuntami- f Visitors delight in close-up views of the cubs. or the landmark in the Sikhote-Alin Reserve, w ill be by Nadezhda's side.

National Geographic July 1993.

Written by Howard B. Quigley. Photographs by Maurice G. Hornocker.

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National Geographic July 1993: Siberian Tigers

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Russian biologists have long studied Siberian tigers like caveman. By tracking paw prints in the snow, made by the largest species in the feline family. Siberian tigers can weigh 800 pounds, once spanning the Sea of Okhotsk to the Yellow Sea. By 1993, numbers have dwindled down to 400 in the wild.

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