Save Tigers Today!

The river was inches from breaching its banks as I launched my kayak into its roiling waters, deep in a remote forest of the Russian Far East.  Oksana, the radio collared Siberian tigress I was searching for, had been located just two weeks earlier. 

The stationary, inactive signal indicated she was dead.  Two hours downstream, I maneuvered my kayak to shore and set out to follow her signal on foot, pushing my way through dense brush and climbing over jumbled piles of logs left by previous floods. 

Within ten minutes the signal was strong and took me back to the riverbank and after carefully picking my way out into the middle of a logjam, I found Oksana’s collar.  A poacher had tied it to a plastic bottle and it had washed up on a log.  The bottle acted as a float, carrying the collar several kilometers downstream away from the scene of the crime. 

I’d seen this too many times over the seven years I had been tracking tigers here with the WCS Siberian Tiger Project and my Russian colleagues - a collar crudely cut from its owner.  Instead of getting easier, each incident was sadder and more difficult to take.  Less than 350 Siberian tigers exist in the wild, and the loss of one individual is devastating.  As I held her collar in my hands, I thought of all the others: Natasha, Nadia, Vita ... their collars hang in my office, a collection of memorials to murdered friends.

However, Oksana’s history was different from that of previous tigers, who had been captured in the wilds of the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve as part of our regular research program there. 

Early in 2001, during an extremely harsh winter, a young Oksana was weak and desperate from starvation after losing two toes in a steel trap. Local villagers found and transported her to the Utes Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. After five months of rehabilitation it was decided to release Oksana and another tigress named Troya back into the wild.

In early July, we anesthetized both tigresses and after giving them a complete medical exam and fitting each with a radio-collar, released them near the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve.  Within a few weeks, Troya moved into an area with high human activity - mostly loggers and poachers - and disappeared.  It was likely that she was shot and her radio-collar destroyed. 

Oksana, however, eventually moved to a remote area about 50 km west of her release site.  The area was far from our usual study site, so we primarily monitored her activities on biweekly flights in an Antonov-2 biplane. From the plane a month later, we sighted her feeding on a wild boar, confirming that she was hunting effectively. 

Oksana fulfilled 3 of the 4 criteria we use to evaluate a tiger’s successful release: survival for the first two months, survival through her first winter, and lack of problems and encounters with people.   She secured her territory and hunted productively.  The fourth criteria and ultimate measure of accomplishment is reproduction, but she was killed before she had time to breed.  Still, we considered the first attempt at releasing a rehabilitated Siberian tiger back into the wild a success.

WCS is committed to tiger conservation and we have a goal - to have a healthy population of 100,000 tigers this century.

In India, where most of the world’s tigers remain, WCS Conservation Zoologist Ullas Karanth has designed innovative camera trapping techniques to accurately assess and monitor tiger populations in three prominent parks.  Using this information, the WCS India team has been successful in consolidating more tiger habitat and standard research and conservation methodologies have been developed to safeguard tigers and their prey throughout Asia.

In Myanmar, after four years of intensive surveys, WCS and the Myanmar Forest Department have identified the last and best areas for tigers.  With leadership from the Director of the WCS Science and Exploration Program, Alan Rabinowitz, the Government of Myanmar will soon establish the largest tiger reserve in the world, totaling 12,000 square kilometers.

In the Russian Far East, for over ten years WCS Conservation Zoologist Dale Miquelle, the Russian Tiger Response Team, and I have tracked tigers using radio telemetry.  One tigress, Olga, has survived for eleven years in the wild, the longest time ever that a tiger has been successfully radio collared and studied.  Data gathered will help us to identify critical habitats and threats to tiger populations.  In 1994 tiger numbers in Russia stood at only 150-200 animals, but due to an increase in protective measures, the population has doubled since then.

In China, a new tiger reserve was recently created along the northern border, as part of a WCS initiative with Russian and Chinese officials on tiger management.  The first picture ever taken of a Siberian tiger in China occurred in February 2003, proving that tigers can now inhabit these territories once again.

At WCS’s flagship Bronx Zoo, our new Tiger Mountain exhibit will open this spring. This interactive, unique tiger exhibit will link our conservation mission abroad with our education programs at home, and will inspire visitors with up close tiger encounters for years to come.

Oksana may be gone, but there is a future for tigers in Asia. We need your help to make WCS’s goal for tiger conservation a reality.  Please help us today, so that my future tiger tracking will find not an empty, broken collar, but a healthy tigress, and her growing cubs.

Sincerely,
John Goodrich
WCS Associate Conservationist

 P.S.  Your donation of $35 or more will help purchase the radio collars and camera traps that are vital to the WCS tiger conservation program.  WCS was recently rated as one of the top ten charities by Charity Navigator, so you can be confident your donation will be used wisely.