News Archive

(February 16, 2010)   -   Winter is a season which divides people into different categories. Most people fall into two categories: either those who despise the cold and look for excuses to stay in warm spaces while wishing for summer’s quick return, or those who find joy in the cold season, participate in various winter sports, yet still dream of summer’s warmth.  But there is a third, small group of people, for whom winter is the most active and favorable time to work, a time when many exciting things h...

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(February 16, 2010)   -   On February 9th 2010, the head of Primorsky Krai’s Hunting Control Department notified us of a tiger sighted on a hunting lease near Alekseevka, a village of the Nadezhdinsky district in Primorski Krai. The animal was behaving oddly - most wild tigers, when confronted with people, will either run away, or if cornered, exhibit aggression. But this animal neither ran away or towards people, as if people long ago failed to interest him. As a WCS employee with extensive capture experience, I w...

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(February 12, 2010)   -   Dear friends! Please find below an overview of new articles that have been recently added to our website. You can find the following materials in menu “Publications”: “Good Bye Olga” - about life and fate of the first radiocollared Amur (Siberian) tiger, which have been studied by the staff of Siberian Tiger Project (WCS/SABZ) for 13 years; “Striped Victim” - article from “Zolotoy Rog” newspaper about tigress hit by a vehicle on the road from Raz...

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(February 09, 2010)   -   In November 2009, our staff completed the joint WCS/SABZ Siberian Tiger Project fall capture season in the Sikhote-Alin Reserve. A very important method of studying the tiger population is radiotelemetry, i.e. radiotracking of tigers fitted with radiocollars. This method has been used at the Sikhote-Alin Reserve for a long time, and has provided us with practical conservation results for this rare predator. Tigers with radiocollars are special because they give us necessary information, bas...

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(November 18, 2009)   -   The wild population of tigers, estimated at 100,000 tigers around 1900, has declined to as few as 3,000 individuals today, with four of the eight originally designated tiger subspecies having become extinct in the wild. While numbers plummeted almost everywhere else in the vast range of tigers in Asia, the Russian population showed a remarkable opposite trend. At the start of the 1940’s the Amur tiger had been almost hunted to extinction in Russia with as few as 30 animals remaining. At this cri...

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(October 16, 2009)   -   The Siberian Tiger Monitoring Program has released results indicating that Siberian tiger numbers are falling in the Russian Far East, primarily due to poaching and habitat degradation. The results can hopefully be used to improve conditions for tigers in Russia. Official estimates of Siberian tiger numbers in Russia come from full range surveys conducted only once every 10 years. The last such survey, conducted in 2005, revealed that 428-502 tigers resided in Russia. Yearly monitoring prog...

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(August 03, 2009)   -   For the first time ever, tiger numbers in the Russian Far East were estimated using remote cameras set in the forest to “capture” tigers automatically on film. Because the stripes of each tiger are unique, it is possible to differentiate and count tigers based on photographic evidence. Camera-trapping studies conducted in Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Zapovednik (SABZ) from 2006 to 2008 provided the basis for providing the most statistically robust estimates of tiger densities eve...

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(August 02, 2009)   -   We often hear the statistics of how many tigers are lost to poachers each year. But what the statistics don’t tell us is the story behind each event, the life that each tiger lived up to that tragic moment when a poacher ended its life. Nor do we hear of the impact of that loss on those people who live close to and care most about these magnificent animals.  In 2001, Svetlana Soutyrina came to the village of Terney (base for the Siberian Tiger Project) from Siberia, and was insta...

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(July 24, 2009)   -   This past winter the village of Terney made international news as the “epicenter” of record snowfalls. Nearly 2 meters of snow fell in a span of three days, paralyzing and isolating Terney and nearby villages for days and weeks. Not surprisingly, the deep snows were catastrophic for many wildlife species as well. Our long-term research project on tigers – The Siberian Tiger Project - is supposed to go on, rain, snow, or shine. But as you can imagine, when se...

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(June 05, 2009)   -   From May 25th through 31st, 2009, Chinese and international specialists gathered in Changchun City (capital of Jilin Province) to plan for a future in northern China that includes tigers. Such a meeting would have seemed absurd 150 years ago, when Siberian tigers were abundant and considered a pest in the forests of northern China – what was then known as Manchuria. (Click on article title to read more.)

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