Rare Video of Russian Amur Tiger and Cubs Hints at Progress in Poaching Fight

The Wildlife Conservation Society is working on many fronts to conserve wildlife and critical habitat. In recent weeks, developments have been grim, particularly the murder of two forest guardians working with the group in Cambodia. That gives extra value to small signs of success, including fresh camera trap video from Russia’s far east showing a female Amur tiger and three grown cubs exploring an overgrown logging road.

Photo
Amur tiger tracks along a road in Primorye, Russia, near an important wildlife preserve.Credit Jonathan Slaght/ WCS.org

The imagery was captured in the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve, a vast haven for tigers, their prey and other wildlife. The reserve is largely secure from wildlife traffickers but surrounding buffer zones have been hit by poachers frequenting old roads at night and using spotlights to pick out tigers or other targets, according to Jonathan C. Slaght of the conservation society’s Russia program.

“We are working with a logging company with roads in the reserve’s buffer zone,” he said in an email. “All roads into the reserve are already blocked. By working outside the reserve we are extending the ‘core protection’ that a reserve provides. Note that the vast, vast majority of tiger habitat in Russia is not in protected areas.”

Click here for a July report from the group on this effort.

You can explore past Dot Earth coverage of tiger conservation efforts around the world here.

Earlier this year, Quartz published an excellent piece by Steve Mollman on Russia’s efforts to cut poaching in the region. Here’s a snippet showing how much the situation has improved:

Amur tigers are continuing their comeback in Russia’s Far East, home to 95 percent of the global population.

According to a new census, they now number as many as 540—including about a hundred cubs—compared to perhaps as few as 420 a decade ago. In the 1940s, the species nearly went extinct with numbers dropping below 40.

It hasn’t hurt that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has been a strong supporter of tiger conservation, traveling to the region to help release Amur tigers in 2014.