"Tigers Between Empires"
Mar. 9th, 2026 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeJonathan C. Slaght
The Amur tiger’s fortunes changed for the worse in the second half of the nineteenth century, when two accords were signed between Russia and China, first the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and then the Convention of Peking in 1860. These agreements were unequal—Russia gained everything and China nothing—and wedged a political border in the center of the Amur tiger’s range. Everything north of the Amur River and east of the Ussuri River became Russia, including what are today Primorye Province, the Jewish Autonomous Region, some of Khabarovskiy Province, and most of Amur Province. <> In the immediate aftermath of the treaties, both the Chinese and Russian empires poured settlers into the Amur region, the Russians eager to consolidate gains on their side and the Chinese anxious to stave off any further territorial losses on theirs.
By 1898, only an estimated eight hundred Amur tigers remained in Russia. Within four decades the tiger population had fallen to no more than thirty—and maybe only twenty, a 96 percent decline.
The Amur is the only tiger subspecies that showed a positive population trend in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, tigers were once again being killed in large numbers
* the Siberian Tiger Project evolved across three decades, becoming the longest-running tiger research project anywhere in the world.
AMUR TIGERS, popularly called Siberian tigers, are paradoxes of grace and violence. These lithe, elegant creatures regard their surroundings with the dispassionate air of royalty. They are also predators, evolved to slip unnoticed across the landscape; to insert themselves like puzzle pieces among rises, rocks, shadows, and trees;
* Throughout most of the twentieth century, scientists largely investigated Amur tigers in the colder months of the year, when the creatures left pugmarks, or tracks, in the snow. Researchers could follow these imprints to glean insights into tiger life and behavior,
In Leopold’s consequential work A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949... when he shot a wolf in 1912: _We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.
despite the invitation, the tiger forests of eastern Russia remained behind the Iron Curtain. <> At about the same time, President Richard Nixon’s official visit to Beijing in 1972 precipitated a thaw in relations between the United States and China, and led to a period of cultural and scientific exchanges. This offered Maurice another opportunity. He joined an American delegation of academics who spent six weeks at Harbin University
The province of Primorye dangles from the jaw of eastern Russia like an eyetooth, long and sharp.. This is the equivalent of the length of the Washington and Oregon coasts in North America, or the distance from Norway south almost to Rome in Europe.
The Russian also told of the intrepid researchers who studied the Amur tigers, men almost as wild as the predators themselves, who sacrificed comfort and safety to advance our scientific understanding of this endangered species.
* global advances in VHF radiotelemetry, which allowed for remote tracking and had been accessible to Western scientists since the 1960s, had not yet reached the Soviet Union.
Vladivostok was a dull city with a colorful past, tucked into a secluded bay once ruled by the Balhae, Jurchen, Ming, and Qing empires for a thousand years before the Russians arrived.
shouldn’t be found here: kiwis, apricot, yew, and ginseng grew alongside birch, pine, and oak. This section of northeast Asia had escaped glaciation during the Pleistocene, and as a result served as a refugium for plant and animal assemblages found together nowhere else on earth, a blend of subtropical and boreal species swirled in a temperate forest. Peter Matthiessen would later visit Maurice in Primorye to research his book Tigers in the Snow.
The cougar researcher had long mistrusted how biologists steeped in the study of ungulates approached wildlife management; he felt that too many of them viewed predators as enemies. Maurice contended that they cared only about population sizes, assessing bag limits for hunting season, or collecting metrics relevant to an anonymous herd. Carnivore scientists, in contrast, needed to focus on behavior and the individual.
Russia’s famous October Revolution took place in much of the world’s November, and Russian Orthodox Christmas happens when the rest of the world is in January. So while Dale’s calendar might have read January 7, pre-revolution Julian acolytes considered it December 24.
The broad, snowy tree-lined avenues were patrolled by sluggish vehicles of antiquated Soviet design: boxy Lada and Zhiguli sedans, and city buses that looked like giant, colorful breadboxes. The city was like a disorganized museum where all the historical exhibits had been jumbled together.
* As the plane continued east, the snow gradually disappeared and the land abruptly gave way to sea: a resolute void that stretched to the horizon. It seemed that whatever ancient gods had designed this place gave the Sikhote-Alin their all, then ran out of steam.
Back then, unscrupulous entrepreneurs had taken advantage of the political uncertainty to cut down the forests around Terney as quickly as they could. They logged vast tracts of enormous and valuable Korean pine, a species that grows forty-five meters tall, lives up to seven hundred years, and is prized as a source of lumber for everything from bridges to furniture. It is also a species essential to the survival of the ecosystem: without Korean pine there would be no Amur tigers. The pine nuts from this tree feed badgers, bears, deer, and wild boar.
Tigers, he said, were canid connoisseurs, something that Russians had discovered almost as soon as they’d arrived in the region more than a century before... Perhaps dogs made easy targets: they were loud, clumsy in the snow, and often cocky, approaching tigers with baying bravado. Or perhaps domestic dogs reminded tigers of wolves, age-old nemeses and despised competitors for prey.
On a clear day, Dale would pause on the beach to listen to the slushy waves washing over the smooth pebbles and watch the sun pull itself from the East Sea. The entirety of the landscape would slowly come into focus in this soft, warm light, the sun reflecting off the wet bodies of harbor seals resting on the rocks on the northern edge of the bay.
Russia’s long history of nature protection dated to the end of the seventeenth century, when Peter the Great purposely set aside tracts of forest, sustainably managed to ensure sufficient supply of timber to build his empire’s ships.
* His treks though the Blagodatnoe valley and in the surrounding hills were a meditative, introspective process—a slow courtship between person and place... in times of stress he’d remember the stillness of the bay, the soft sound of water pulling pebbles to and fro in the tide.
Amur tigers and their habitat were protected to the south from human encroachment by a dense barrier of interlocking trees. Called the Willow Palisade, this was a seven-hundred-kilometer-long double wall, planted in northeast China in the middle of the seventeenth century by the Qing dynasty to demarcate the southern extent of their homeland... Willow saplings were planted along each of the rises, with the branches of one tree tied to those of its neighbor so that they would grow together in a thick braid.
the Shengjing imperial hunting reserves, a vast tract of wooded hills set aside for exclusive use by the emperor, his family, and the empire’s soldiers. Nearly ninety thousand square kilometers of northeast China, an area larger than all of contemporary Primorye, was set aside for warriors to pursue game and demonstrate skills before their ruler.
Trappers: Their strategy was to follow tracks of tiger families in the snow—a mother with young cubs. They would scrutinize tracks to see where the cubs were walking. Older and therefore more menacing cubs wandered alongside their mother, while smaller cubs stepped directly in their mother’s footprints... Trappers would ignore the mother and follow the cubs, running the exhausted young creatures down, pinning them with forked sticks, binding them with shackles, and then shuttling them to markets for sale.
while the average distance male tigers moved in twenty-four was about seven kilometers, they could travel as far as forty-two kilometers a day if they wanted.
* People can live their entire lives in tiger country and never see one; those who do, remember. These animals evoke awe, respect, fear—anything but apathy. Russian villagers, when recounting their own tiger experiences, tell stories full of color, motion, and smell. It’s as though the body understands the weight of the moment and absorbs as much sensory information as possible before the experience ends.
In contrast to a tiger’s summer coat, which is short and pops crisply with orange and black, its winter pelage is longer, shaggier, and duller, an adaptation to colder temperatures and a concession to the soft palette of a winter landscape. This animal had leaned into its hardships and converted them to strengths.
A carousel of anxiety nagged him in the darkness. Had they set the snares correctly? Would they finally catch a tiger? How would a trapped tiger fare in the deep freeze? How should the team approach the site?
Dale pictured it in his mind and frowned: this was the most exposed of the snares, farthest from the trees and anchored to a gangly alder. In one sense this was good, as Howard would have a clear line of sight to dart it with his tranquilizer gun. But it was also the snare Dale had set with the longest lead. Too much slack in the line could be dangerous for everyone: if the tiger tried to escape or charge at the researchers, it would have plenty of space to get a running start.
* While both systems used the tranquilizer ketamine, the differences in how they delivered the drug were subtle but important. First, Telinject relied on air pressure to propel the dart, while Palmer used gunpowder. Gunpowder’s weakness was humidity, resulting in misfires, while air pressure could be low in the extreme cold, leading to insufficient propulsion. <> The needles used in each system also differed. Whereas the Palmer needles had fishhook-like barbs near the tip to keep the dart secured under the skin after impact, Telinject needles were simply thicker in the middle, which allowed them to stay in place but did not tear the skin upon extraction.
Tigers have laterally compressed bodies, meaning that they are very narrow, an adaptation that minimizes their visibility to stalked prey. A tiger can seem enormous from the side, but when you look directly at it from the front, most of that mass is hidden behind the tiger’s head.
Tagging: Their fingers ached and then lost feeling as they tried to work in the cold. They took turns burying their hands in the dense, warm fur between the cat’s legs as if she were a down sleeping bag.
But Kathy, with her needles and gauges and instruments, was the star. No one had seen an animal get back up and wobble into the forest as Olga had after being brought down by a human. Immobilization of wildlife had never before been done here; everyone recognized her as a true specialist.
the moose of Primorye, members of the Ussuri subspecies that range from there to northeast China and eastern Mongolia, are the smallest moose anywhere in the world. In addition to their diminutive stature, they also differ from other subspecies by the twig-like structure of their antlers—more like a deer’s
Japanese buyers were stockpiling Primorye’s wood—purchasing what they could now at a cheap price, then sinking the logs into the ocean to preserve them for later use or sale, like a long-term investment
Inflation had kneecapped the Russian ruble, and as its value dropped catastrophically, people’s life savings were disappearing. In 1992, inflation reached 2,500 percent:
* ration: This meant that Dale and Zhenya burned more than three-quarters of their gasoline allotment just driving to Plastun and back, leaving fewer than five liters—enough for about thirty-four kilometers of driving—to devote to tiger study. To squeeze as much road as they could from those few liters, Dale would cut the engine at the crests of the mountain passes and coast downhill, that way saving up to three kilometers’ worth of fuel each trip.
potential sites to situate their traps. The first were natural pinch points, or funnels—locations through which a tiger was almost certain to walk because of obstacles in the forest... The second attractive snare sites were scent trees. These were usually obvious markers on the landscape, something notable from a distance, like a large, old-growth tree trunk leaning over the trail. Tigers backed up to these slanting pillars and sprayed their undersides with a fine mist of urine about half a meter to a meter and a half off the ground.
Tigers used scent trees as territorial markers to inform one another of who was around and whether or not a female was in estrus and ready to breed. But tigers weren’t the only ones to examine these scent marks; the trees acted almost like community bulletin boards, letting all animals know the comings and goings of the striped terrors in their lives.
* wild dog species such as wolves or coyotes, which have twice the sensitivity of wild cats. Canid trapping is a much more laborious process: not only do researchers have to hide any obvious signs of the trap itself, but they also sometimes boil all trap components beforehand, including the snares and springs, to eliminate human scent. They even go so far as to lay down special mats to serve as a barrier between their clothes and the ground. Moose, which Dale had considerable experience tranquilizing in Alaska, were on the other end of the difficulty spectrum: to tranquilize a moose, he’d spot one from afar, simply walk to within ten or twenty meters while it eyed him suspiciously, and fire a dart into its side.
The temperate forests north of the Willow Palisade line are the only place in the world where tigers and brown bears coexist; the relationship between them is complicated and the stuff of nightmares. They alternately fight, see one another as prey, or avoid one another entirely.
Igor and his research partner Anatoliy Yudakov had tracked tigers on foot, in the snow, cumulatively walking more than eight thousand kilometers across three years. This was grueling work. Skis would have allowed them to float atop the snow, which was sometimes half a meter deep or more, but they opted instead to slog from tiger track to tiger track. Because their own pace would slow or quicken depending on the tiger’s gait, this allowed the biologists to infer behavior... This led to such nuanced discoveries as “prey detection distances,” or how close potential targets such as deer or boar had to be to a tiger before the predator noticed it.
Deciduous trees, just blushing with spring green, ceded slowly to fir and spruce, spindly and aromatic. These were the southernmost tendrils of the Eurasian boreal, the largest forest in the world, one that began here and stretched six thousand kilometers—ten time zones—west to Scandinavia. This was an intact forest the size of the entire contiguous United States.
* Bears, however, seem to puzzle over you. Their dark eyes bore into yours as if assessing what kind of person you are and what, exactly, they are going to do with you should they find you lacking. Bears seem to see you in a way that other animals do not; it is a deeply uncomfortable and vulnerable feeling. And an angry bear is vindictive... Dale met the bear’s eyes as he paced angrily and growled like an idling dump truck.
Everything had gone wrong here: the seed of one mistake had fruited many more. They’d trapped a bear, not a tiger; the immobilization process had been drawn out, causing the bear undue stress because their tranquilizer needles hadn’t been long enough to penetrate his thick fat; the collar hadn’t been big enough, so they’d had to improvise, and they moved before the bear was far enough away, the sound causing him to double back and attack them. All these missteps led to the tragedy of a dead bear in the forest.
The U.S. government spent upward of $1 million in an attempt to rescue three gray whales in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea... this was a case where focus on a few individuals benefited the species: the story raised awareness of whales in general. People who had never before cared about whales suddenly did... Moreover, Operation Breakthrough was not just about chipping away literal ice; it also resulted in a thawing of U.S.-Russian relations, as two Soviet icebreakers were instrumental in the rescue attempt. This form of cooperative science was a means of diplomacy, and in some ways this whale rescue paved the way for other bilateral collaborations, such as the Siberian Tiger Project. Focus on a few individuals could indeed have positive outcomes for the species.
As Dale took bearings on Olga’s location, he listened to these newcomers, not knowing the explosive babbling of a Manchurian bush warbler from the nervous clicks of a Daurian redstart. A Latham’s snipe, a stout shorebird with a gaudy courtship display, circled the fields, chattering in the sky then dropping precipitously at high speed, the wind between its tail feathers shrieking like the engines of a dive-bomber.
This was a drag mark, the path a tiger used to pull something large from the site of a kill to a location more suitable for feeding. Cautiously, Dale followed this route to the end as if it were some macabre rainbow. Instead of a pot of gold, he found a half-eaten red deer carcass.
Tigers usually attack from the side or behind, swatting at an ungulate’s hindquarters to slow it down. Then they work their way along the body, using their claws like a climber’s ice ax for traction, to reach then grip the animal’s throat with their jaws. They lock on and drop their weight to bring their target to the ground, strategically keeping their prey’s legs and feet, the sharp parts that can kick and wound, on the far side of their own body. Then killing tends to happen in one of two ways. For animals with slender necks like deer, the kill typically comes in the form of a quick bite to the nape of the neck. A tiger carefully positions its canines along the spine and, as one observer described it, forces them “like a wedge” between vertebrae to sever the spinal cord... the alternative is strangulation. Once on the ground with the large animal, a tiger, using its weight to keep the struggling beast from getting back up, will readjust its grip to clamp its jaws tight to the throat for six minutes or more until the animal simply runs out of oxygen.
If a deer is alone, it is comparatively easy to catch—35 percent of such hunts are successful. But if a deer is in a group, tigers have only an 8 percent track record of success, too many vigilant eyes scanning for that singular threat.
* Dale had trouble negotiating the waves of sensory and emotional stimulation these packages elicited. He continued to feel deep seclusion here, like a sailor shipwrecked in a cultural sea. Care packages were like crates washed ashore, full of his favorite things and tales of lives back home moving on without him. It was bittersweet.
* BEN & JERRY’S CHERRY GARCIA: He looked again at the famous logo inside but suddenly realized, with panic, that of course he could not simply wolf it down: it was −56 degrees Celsius. Even touching the cardboard container would burn his hands, and it would be hours before the ice cream thawed enough for him to safely eat it. <> Dale felt desperate, trapped by the conundrum, like in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.”
On June 22, the day before the permits were to expire and they’d be forced to pull their traps, they caught a tiger.
That Lena was in estrus now, only two months after this tragic event, showed that she’d somehow lost all three cubs of her previous litter. If they were still alive, she would not be ready to breed again for another year or so. This was because tigresses with cubs only reproduce again once their offspring have left to find their own territories
The first American program broadcast in the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union was the soap opera Santa Barbara. Starting on January 2, 1992, and inexplicably with the 217th episode, it aired twice a day and became an absolute cultural sensation.
Following some logic that escaped Dale, Zhenya decided to stake out the goat at a trap site on the other side of the Kuruma River from their cabin. And so, every evening, Dale hoisted the irritable goat onto his shoulders and carried it across the knee-deep river, trying not to lose his balance on the smooth, slippery river stones.
* Dale’s schedule, which was grueling. His attentions were split between two worlds, one on the ground trapping tigers and the other in the air tracking them. .. If both traplines were empty, which to date they had been, he was not further needed. So he’d walk two hours downstream, fording the river repeatedly as the trail wound across it, to reach the Maysa cabin, where he’d parked the Niva. There he’d coax the hatchback to life with the hand crank to jump-start its battery, then drive to the Terney airport. If the stars of weather, airplane availability, and pilot sobriety aligned, he’d get in a Soviet-era Antonov An-2 biplane and rise into the skies above the Sikhote-Alin to collect VHF locations on the tigresses Olga, Lena, and Natasha.
At first, when he was simply fishing for any signal at all, both channels were open. Once a tiger was detected, the idea was to fly at the signal until it started to weaken, meaning they’d passed it. Then, using just one antenna, Dale would motion for the pilot to home in on the signal with ever-tightening spirals, like the slow circling of a drain
A moment later a yellow-throated marten reached the ridge. These are lithe, ferret-like creatures about the size of a dachshund, with sharp faces, pale yellow torsos, and dark tails longer than their bodies. Yekaterina was taken aback: it looked like a furry, vengeful pencil... it is said, they are harder to spot in the forest than tigers.
There was a silent round of open mouths and raised eyebrows as the team tried to process this information. It had taken them nearly a year to catch and collar three tigers, and now, in one day, they had just as many growling in snares.
It was a frantic scene. The team was juggling two striped time bombs that could rise from their stupors at any moment. They worked quickly to fit and attach the collars, and Igor started taking measurements while Dale collected blood and tissue samples. The minutes flew by.
But six tigers? This was proof of concept. Over the course of nearly a year, they’d worked out a capture protocol that focused snaring on game trails, at scent trees, and at kills. As a result, they had collars on two young females, one young male, and three territorial adult females, animals that had slowly started to reveal the intricacies of tiger ecology to them.
The message was clear: this was a landscape full of natural wonders reserved for others, not them, and it resulted in a culture of apathy toward the protected area and its mission. <> Then, in late 1991, the structures that supported this exclusion broke down. It was no longer clear who was in charge and, driven by fuel shortages and inflation, the reserve’s ability to protect itself faltered... the social contract to respect the reserve’s border had expired.
* Then, in a daze, he trudged through the snow, following the Russian’s deep voice to meet him. There, at Zhenya’s feet, he saw fresh tracks. Of tiger cubs. <> The most vulnerable tiger demographic to poaching is, in fact, mothers with cubs. These tigresses have treasures to protect—awkward, naïve, and distractible cats. An adult tiger will often slink off when even the whisper of a threat is breathed, but cubs sometimes can’t get away fast enough in deep snow or are too busy pouncing on each other to notice the danger until it is too late. Mothers stand fast to protect them, putting themselves between their cubs and the threat, and are thus exposed.
Species all over the world, especially endangered ones, are threatened by roads... The impacts of roads on wildlife include not just death by way of vehicle strikes or poachers’ bullets; roads can even alter the genetic composition of a species. For example, in southern Primorye, the road between the cities of Vladivostok and Ussuriysk is such a barrier for tiger movements
There was a bundle of orange just off the road, four cubs huddled against one another uncertainly, the largest no bigger than a cocker spaniel. They were waiting for their mother. Dale gasped at this sight, this scene of unfiltered vulnerability, and his opinion instantly changed. “We have to catch these things,” he thought. “We have to save them.”
Dale finally suggested a game drive in which they’d ring the area they knew the cubs were still in, with everyone in sight of the people on either side of them. Then they’d slowly walk forward, tightening the noose until someone spotted the cubs. This strategy, called shouwei in China, had been used to hunt deer and tigers in the Qing dynasty’s Shengjing imperial hunting reserve.
Khuntami and Lena would become important members of the captive tiger population in North America, infusing much-needed genetic diversity. They were never bred together because they were siblings, but collectively these two tigers produced fifty-four descendants... If there was a silver lining to the poaching of Lena in Russia in 1992, this was it: as of 2023, she had nineteen living descendants in North American zoos.
Bart Schleyer: a Henry Cavill of the outdoors and a wildlife renaissance man. He not only hunted moose and sheep and bears with bows he made himself but also was an experienced taxidermist, an accomplished landscape artist, and one of the leading grizzly bear trappers in the United States.
Dale and Zhenya had spent many nights at the farm while out tracking her, telling him tales of Olga—the places she went and the things she did. Olga shared these forests with the farmer, walked the coastline as he did, and skirted his field, where she left his cattle to graze in peace. They were neighbors. And this was what he’d wanted to tell Dale, that he understood this. He could live with a tiger because she was just as much a part of this place as he was. The farmer walked off after a handshake, bustling away to complete other tasks while in town, leaving Dale speechless. For the first time, he saw conservation working on the individual level. People and tigers could live together.
* While to Dale and Bart this felt like looking at a crime scene through cataracts, Igor could see clearly. He had read passages like this a hundred times, dramas written in snow, the final moments of deer and boar... Igor swept his arm from the base of the tree to the trail, guiding their eyes along a path of rumpled snow about fifteen meters long to show how the tiger had moved out of concealment first in four small, tentative steps, followed by four long, assertive bounds. Igor’s arm slowed to rest at a larger patch of disturbed snow. This was where it took its prey, he said. The others watched silently as Igor walked over and, kneeling as he had with the tiger track earlier, carefully brushed back the white blanket to reveal a carpet of red hidden underneath... Igor told the story with such detail that Dale could almost see it, the ghosts of this horror gliding translucent across the forest floor, marionettes on Igor’s string.
Unfortunately, history had shown that once the line to human flesh was crossed, it was easy for a tiger to become a repeat offender,.. Man-eating behavior can also be learned when adult tigers teach their offspring how to effectively stalk and kill humans, resulting in several generations of man-eaters.
The researchers wanted to recapture her and swap the old collar out for a new one, which would allow them to track her for at least two more years. At times, the study of Olga felt obsessive to Dale, his existence devoted entirely to locating this single tiger again and again and again, with the hopes of finding an opening where they could trap her.
* As a concept, a winter capture from a helicopter might work. Winter was the only time of year when they’d be able to see and dart a tiger running under the forest canopy. More important, the dangers of winter trapping were related to the long hours a tiger might be trapped in a snare. A helicopter capture would be quick and eliminate that threat. <> The approach was also not without precedent: helicopters had been used for decades elsewhere to capture free-ranging wildlife... The only helicopters available here were Soviet-era Mil MI-8s—massive and sluggish transport vessels—workhorses to the Robinson’s Thoroughbreds. Navigating an MI-8 among the trees to tranquilize a tiger was akin to driving a school bus on a sidewalk in pursuit of a squirrel, while trying to avoid hitting the parking meters.
There she was: Olga. The tigress was plodding through the snow along the base of a hill, turning unhurriedly away from the approaching behemoth. From above she was lithe, a strand of dull orange and black weaving among the understory like an eel twisting through seagrass. Oak leaves, exposed from the previous autumn, swirled around Olga in disorienting frenzy as the air displaced by the helicopter’s rotor blades reached her. The tigress broke into a cross-slope run, her form seeming to disappear anytime she crossed a patch where the snow had thawed, her pelage mixing perfectly with the browns of the exposed forest floor.
* “and lower me halfway down. I’ll dart her from the air.” Bart’s plan, it seemed, was to dangle above the enraged tiger like an oversized cat toy... there’d been a miscommunication. The winch operator did not stop lowering Bart when he reached seven meters, and the American suddenly found himself on the ground, stumbling backward from a wild tiger that sat only ten meters away, blinking at him as though frozen by the audacity of this provocation.
* to behold one up close—to see the pink of the nose or feel its chest expand as it breathes—is life-changing. It is a moment in which the mythical becomes real. Despite the long chase through the snow and forest understory, Olga appeared remarkably clean. Other species can be downright filthy even on their best days. Brown bears, for example, are like the beach bums of the forest: their fur is often disheveled and matted with twigs, debris, and pine sap, and they smell like wet dogs. Tigers, in contrast, seem to take a certain pride in their appearance.
Some duties once reserved for state structures had been ceded to civil society, with a full third of all investment in Russia’s biodiversity in 1994 coming from foreign sources. By engaging in fundraising, public awareness, and lobbying, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) could bypass bureaucratic stagnation to prepare tight packages of reform, then deliver them to government counterparts to oversee their adoption into law. The mid-1990s was the start of a period of remarkable cooperation between the U.S. government, provincial authorities, and national and international NGOs, and Dale could sense it.
the Emmy Award–winning Tigers of the Snow. This documentary contained incredible footage of Igor, Kolya, Bart, and Maurice snaring and tranquilizing a male tiger, and Dale, Zhenya, and Bart tracking Olga to her den among the roots of a windfallen tree... Matthiessen eventually published his experiences as Tigers in the Snow; Maurice wrote the foreword... To increase interest and support from the Russian public, Maurice brought in some star power. Through acquaintances he reached the American actor Bruce Willis... For years the likeness of the crouching actor, wearing shorts amid fake snow while stroking a tiger cub, could be spotted on shop walls and city buses in Vladivostok.
* If the team wanted to accommodate a long-legged passenger in the front seat, they’d need a wrench, enough light, and about ten minutes to adjust its position. Or, if they wanted to engage the four-wheel drive, a process that required no equipment and perhaps thirty seconds with a Japanese pickup truck of the same era, they needed to set aside thirty minutes and have three different tools on hand: a tire iron to turn the hubcap, a wrench to remove it, and a hex key to engage or disengage the hubs as needed. The interior of the UAZ-469
The researchers resumed tracking the next day, and the day after that, walking slowly to absorb as many details as they could, the trail leading them south through frozen forests. The dominant male had followed the defeated one closely, apparently escorting the interloper off his territory. <> “Tracking is about unraveling mystery,”
In Terney, John settled into his routine as the project coordinator. The team was seasoned, and John worked with Zhenya to send Kolya, Lyosha, and Bart to track their seven collared tigers, plagued by the constant need to ration fuel and repair vehicles.
charged by a tiger: In each of these instances John reacted differently. With Katya he could not afford to be vulnerable: Linda was next to him and afraid; he had to take control. When Olga charged later, however, he allowed himself some fear—Bart and Kolya were in control, commanded the situation, and de-escalated it. And when he was charged on his own he just assumed he was dead. Thankfully, he pulled his flare right before the tiger knocked him over, and he was able to use it like a weapon to drive the tiger away.
There, among a patch of rhododendron, the biologists found evidence of denning. It seemed that John and Linda had inadvertently walked almost right to the spot where Katya had hidden her cubs while she was out hunting. She may have just returned to them when she found John and Linda at her doorstep and, incensed, had driven them away. Katya’s behavior suddenly made sense to Linda, and her impressions of the event evolved from fear to sympathy.
he’d sometimes light a candle on one side of a clearing and fire arrows at the oval flame in the dark. He did this to help him understand how to concentrate on just one thing: all else was interference. Bart may never have actually hit the flame, and if he did, it was probably luck. The exercise itself was the point. During helicopter captures Bart was able to erase the noise in the fuselage, account for the interplay of swaying branches and the rocking helicopter, focus on a single point on the tiger’s body, anticipate an opening, and then take the shot.
* She reached the precipice above the valley and roared again, her voice pushing far into the dark forest below. This, in turn, triggered a chain reaction of red deer alarm calls, barks that popped like distant fireworks in the still night.
When in estrus, tigers become different creatures entirely. Hormones take over: they abandon their fear, walk in the open, and make as much noise as possible to catch the attention of a potential mate. But Amur tigresses like Katya needed to be patient: given the huge areas that adult males roam, they might have only one potential suitor in an area the size of Los Angeles.
He’d been shot twice, then left just off the trail, hidden under a pair of hastily chopped birch trunks. Chokecherries were in bloom, trees with bronze bark and crowns full of white blossoms, and a member of the search party recalled covering Kaplanov’s body with cherry flowers like a blanket. The murdered biologist was brought to the village of Valentin on a horse cart and buried in the local cemetery.
In 1943, death in war was a common outcome for a young Soviet. Yuriy Salmin, the bright scientist whose work helped establish the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve and a close colleague of Kaplanov’s, went to war as a sniper in late 1942 and was dead within a year at the age of thirty-four. In fact, a staggering 36 percent of Russian males ages twenty to thirty-four, nine million men in total, died between 1941 and 1945.
One exception to this rule was the Nechet cabin, unique in the reserve in that there were no mice there at all... The trade-off, however, was all the snakes. <> The Amur rat snake, a nonvenomous and not particularly aggressive reptile, is the largest of Primorye’s seven snake species, three of which are venomous. Rat snakes grow to nearly two meters in length
* bow making: Different parts of a bow are subject to different pressures: the inside of the bow, called the belly, is under compression pressure. This was where Bart found that his experiment with birch failed, as this pressure caused the bow to weaken over time and lose power. The outside, or the back, is subject to tension pres- sure, which if too great could snap the bow. Bart addressed tension pressure by reinforcing the back of the weapon with red deer sinew, which he and John harvested from tiger kills then mashed until it separated into individual threads. Then they dipped these stringy fibers into a glue solution and affixed them to the back of the bow in several layers. When dried, the sinew coating became as hard and flexible as fiberglass. Bart and John regularly had heated discussions about different glue compounds—they had nothing else to argue about—and Linda started referring to them wryly as the Glue Guys.
Those that he kept he named after whichever tiger had killed the deer whose antler crowned his weapon. Bart’s first bow was the Katya Bow; the Zhenya Bow followed next.
In fact, it seemed to Dale that the Russian scientific literature had a whole subgenre devoted to argument over the validity of tiger population surveys. He knew that a statistically defensible estimate was the highest standard for wildlife population surveys, some number that included a margin of error, but he also knew that secretive animals like tigers were incredibly difficult to count well. Dale also realized that surveys did not need to be completely accurate to be useful—as long as the same method was used across multiple surveys, and biases could be minimized, the results could give researchers an indication of population trajectory.
The implication of this question was that Dale would be able to attract more funding to tiger conservation if they found only a few. This was Russian society’s mood at the time—it was the era in which the ultrarich oligarchs had come to power and everyone seemed to be out for themselves.
In March 1969, almost thirty years earlier to the day, a two-week border clash on Zhenbao left dozens of Chinese and Soviet soldiers dead. A Beijing museum still displays a T-62 Soviet tank brought from the island as a war trophy. At that time it would have been inconceivable that Russian, Chinese, and American colleagues would ever walk the border itself, that narrow line between empires, working together.
Linda and her colleague Galina Salkina were able to train five dogs to reliably identify tiger scats found in the forest and link them to known individuals. This was a noninvasive method of keeping tabs on tiger movements
At about the same time that John and Linda’s relationship fell apart, Dale got married. His wedding to Marina was a true celebration:
It’s easy to romanticize those who have passed, to polish the flaws from our memories of them. But Bart genuinely radiated goodness and was, as Dale noted, “the kind of person that legends grow around.” He had an innate ability to understand and appreciate different perspectives, which made him the hub of any field camp or social circle. Bart was often the one thing that everyone could agree on.
Dale was astonished to discover a stack of decapitated seal bodies that Roma gathered against the base of a cliff like cordwood as he waited for more to emerge from the water.
With fourteen collared tigers actively being monitored as 2004 turned to 2005, the most the project would ever track at one time, the team in Terney aspired to fly weekly telemetry flights in the biplane to keep tabs on their elusive herd of cats.
As Zhenya’s condition worsened, his official partnership with the project ended amicably. But to Dale, the slow-motion disintegration of his closest Russian confidant pained him... The American did not know it then, but Zhenya had been diagnosed with prostate cancer the previous year
After she was killed, John tallied how many times they’d actually seen Olga in the wild. Given how much she’d meant to the team, and how much she’d taught them, the number was remarkably small. Outside of capture events, members of the Siberian Tiger Project had only seen her five times for a cumulative total of fifteen minutes across a thirteen-year period. Olga’s passing to poaching was more than a personal loss for Dale: it felt like a personal failure.
IN RETROSPECT, Dale viewed the years spanning the new millennium as the golden days of tiger conservation in Russia, a time of stable funding and strong governmental and public support. The early 2000s had seen government actively cooperating with NGOs and scientific institutions in a congenial manner. Research conducted by the WCS Siberian Tiger Project, World Wildlife Fund, and others fed directly into government policy. The number of people involved in tiger conservation in Russia bloomed to more than fourteen hundred individuals around this time
they had Putin’s endorsement to do so. Russian investigative journalists later, however, revealed that the entire exercise was staged. By examining the stripes of the snared tigress they demonstrated that she had come from a nearby zoo, where she was called Araliya.
* For a breathtaking moment the road rose sharply above the ice, following the thinnest of shelves hewn from a steep mountain slope with rock on one side and a drop to the river far below on the other. Then the road pulled away from the water and shrank into the hills, a scrape of gravel and dirt that wove spineless and yielding among swelling waves of forest and cliff. The road would branch here and there into a disorienting network of logging trails
Since conflict tigers were usually caught and released far from where the Siberian Tiger Project and its collaborators worked, and moved erratically and far distances, it was almost impossible to find one after a release with VHF technology. <> But, for the first time, the team had an answer: GPS satellite collars. These were cutting-edge devices that allowed a tiger to be tracked automatically, from space, ideal for keeping tabs on a tiger in a remote area.
a healthy male tiger captured near the Vladivostok city limits in 2016 was helicoptered away and released in the upper reaches of the Bikin River, a paradise for tigers far from roads and teeming with juicy boar and deer. According to his satellite collar, the tiger’s first course of action was to head due south; within a year, he had walked more than seven hundred kilometers and was back near Vladivostok
* And now twice they had received exaggerated reports of her tragic demise. Every time, it seemed, PT99 came back from the dead. “She’s like a Christ in stripes,” someone quipped, smiling at the tiger’s seeming propensity for resurrection. And from that moment on it was settled: PT99 was known as Kristina.
To Dale, after nine years Galina almost felt like an active collaborator in the project rather than a study animal. Like Olga, Galina was an ambassador for her species: an example of how humans and tigers could live together.
Galina appeared oblivious to her transgression: she saw the humans and was not afraid. Dale felt as though he was watching a disaster unfold in slow motion, like when his old friend Zhenya started drinking and could not stop. As then, Dale was sick with concern, hopelessly confused, and completely powerless... If she made it into the settlement, gaped at by a frothing gaggle and hounded by baying dogs, she would likely panic
The VHF receiver was nearly useless, as the tigress was too close for an accurate reading. The signal seemed to come from everywhere and was distorted, with radio waves bouncing off the cliffs in that narrow valley to confuse their origin.
* Galina was PT56—the fifty-sixth tiger collared by the Siberian Tiger Project—and none, until this year, had become conflict tigers. In the span of only months, two had. Dale stopped short as he suddenly realized that these were connected: Ivan and Galina had mated... both animals had suffered from an infection of canine distemper virus (CDV). This was a particularly insidious disease
In fact, Ivan’s and Galina’s deaths were part of a perfect storm that saw the tiger population in the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve, which had risen steadily since the 1960s, crash in 2010. ... This was a case of infanticide: remains of the cubs were found in his stomach. The biologists hypothesized that the male killed the cubs in hopes of mating with their mother, and the tigress fatally wounded the male in their defense.
He looked up to see a tiger roaring from across a clearing, moving toward him rapidly with ears tight against its head and tail thrashing. The sight and the sound were so terrible that it seemed to Didyuk that the world was ending in violent calamity. And maybe it was.
Tigers are at the tip of evolution’s spear, the culmination of millennia honing strength and cunning to stalk, catch, and kill an ungulate with the least effort and the greatest reward. Any injury, even slight, could throw this machine off balance and disrupt the tiger’s ability to successfully bring down prey, increase the risk of further injury, and push the tiger toward unnatural food sources such as horses, dogs, or even people.
Treaded like a tank, the TDT-55 was indifferent to rough terrain, its tarnished red hull scarred like a gladiator from years of service. The vehicle was nearly six meters long and two and a half wide—laterally compressed like a tiger—a narrow footprint that allowed it to pass between obstructions too formidable to knock over or roll across. The dominant feature of a TDT-55 was a massive metal plate sloped at a forty-five-degree angle that occupied the back half of the chassis.
He had lost eight of his fingers—one to Kristina and the others to frostbite—which meant that he had also lost his only source of income: it would be almost impossible for him to hunt again. The police considered a criminal charge to be an unnecessary and additive punitive measure. <> In a way, Kristina and Didyuk shared similar, tragic fates. Each broke social taboos because the systems in which they were assigned roles had become corrupted.
THE CHANGBAI MOUNTAINS rise near the Bohai Sea of China, then arch nine hundred kilometers east, climbing to straddle the North Korean border and the highest-elevation volcanic lake in the world, and then descend into Primorye, where they end without fanfare at the Borisovskoye Plateau just shy of the East Sea.
Gray crept slowly into his beard like fingers of a glacier, and cracks formed around his kind eyes when he smiled.
But such was not the fate of this Changbai tiger. In her case, a remarkable network of like-minded individuals ensured that she would be given a second chance at life. From the hunters who found her, to the wildlife inspector who restored her health, to the capture and immobilization specialists, and finally to the rehabilitation center, there were now people and facilities in place to address emergencies such as hers. Dale felt relief: this was exactly what had been missing in 1992, when he and Zhenya captured Lena’s four orphaned cubs and eventually sent the two surviving ones to a U.S. zoo.
The Siberian Tiger Project learned lessons from these experiences. Dale, John, Kolya, and Sasha thought that fear of humans was a critical trait that tigers needed to retain to survive in the wild
With time, as prey deliveries varied between deer and boar, Zolushka began to adeptly shift her kill strategy to match, just as a tiger would in the wild: quick nape kills for deer, throat latches and strangulation for boar.
sufficient loopholes that allowed illegally harvested pines to be exported. For example, a logging company could legally harvest pines if they interfered with road construction, or if they were diseased. Such concessions were exploited: one logging road near Terney twisted across the Tunsha River valley with unnecessary complexity,
* the city of Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Named after two rivers, the Biro and the Bidzhan, and on the banks of the former, Birobidzhan had a history perhaps most succinctly summarized by the journalist Masha Gessen as “sad and absurd.” <> The Jewish Autonomous Region, a third larger than Israel and pre-dating it by fourteen years, was in 1934 the first officially recognized Jewish state in the world... tens of thousands of Russian Jews were recruited to, then abandoned in, what amounted to a roadless swamp.
In the early 2000s, remote-triggered photography started to be used in Russia as a way to monitor tiger populations.
By 2014, China had an estimated twenty-four tigers, including multiple females with cubs. In 2015, the partial logging ban in China’s Heilongjiang Province became a total, nationwide ban, and the next year the government created the 14,612-square-kilometer Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park. This protected area is the largest in the world focused on tigers and almost twice the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, including the former Hunchun Nature Reserve and other lands in Jilin and Heilongjiang Provinces. <> Dale’s dream of donuts was back on track.
reintroductions: Zolushka, who as of 2024 has raised four litters and in 2021 became a grandmother, was and remains the matriarch of the Pri-Amur tigers. <> In 1992, as Dale and Zhenya sat along a forest road in an idling car full of orphaned tiger cubs, they dreamed of an outcome like this, some silver lining to numb the pain of a poached mother. Thirty years later, even though Zhenya did not live to see it, this vision was realized.
This support of young scientists was not limited to tiger study: Dale fostered the professional development of graduate students studying brown and Asiatic black bears, Amur leopards, musk deer, and Blakiston’s fish owls, among others.
while science lost important insights into tiger behavior when snaring was banned, such as what individual tigers were hunting outside of winter or where young tigers dispersed, camera trap monitoring could still keep tabs on which tigers were where, what they were doing, and how population structure and density changed over time... The days were long gone when people like Dima Pikunov and Igor Nikolayev were willing and able to spend months in the forests living with tigers to learn about them.
in order to ensure that a foreign NGO was not listed as a contributing organization. He declined. This event, among a growing mountain of others, made Dale realize with profound sadness that he had become, in some ways, an impediment to tiger conservation in his adoptive home. <> Indeed, the government of Russia became more suspicious of NGOs
As of 2023, Dale’s dream of donuts looked closer to an achievable reality. There were perhaps 330 tigers in the Sikhote-Alin population to the east, 20 tigers in the Pri-Amur population to the north, and nearly 100 tigers in the transborder Changbai population to the south. This latter statistic is worth highlighting.
Russian forestry law is vague with respect to pine nuts, and so cones are removed at unsustainable rates. The number of people in Terney County can double in good mast years, from ten to twenty thousand, as organized groups from across the broader region descend on these forests. The road leading north from Terney is lined with nut harvesting camps, their campfires glowing like strings of patio lights, and rival gangs of nut harvesters bludgeon one another for the best territories.
* Dale has said that the study of tigers is the study of death. But it’s also the study of life. Conservation is about finding a comfortable balance between the needs of people and of wildlife. Perhaps the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve has found a way closer to this medium at Lake Blagodatnoe. The people of Terney know more about tigers now, and as a result, some care.
Two months later, the governments of Russia and China finalized plans for the Land of the Big Cats protected area, a transborder reserve encompassing the existing Land of the Leopard National Park on the Russia side and the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park on the China side. While this legal designation does not add any new land, it offers an important mechanism to share information across borders and to start managing the Changbai tiger population as a whole.
// As an introvert, I was uncomfortable with the concept of conservation, a discipline that focuses on people just as much as nature. “Just collect data?” I responded uncertainly. He looked at me for a long moment, then told me to think about what mattered. I did, and in 2002 Dale and his employer, the New York–based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) supported me during my master’s research
The Amur tiger’s fortunes changed for the worse in the second half of the nineteenth century, when two accords were signed between Russia and China, first the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and then the Convention of Peking in 1860. These agreements were unequal—Russia gained everything and China nothing—and wedged a political border in the center of the Amur tiger’s range. Everything north of the Amur River and east of the Ussuri River became Russia, including what are today Primorye Province, the Jewish Autonomous Region, some of Khabarovskiy Province, and most of Amur Province. <> In the immediate aftermath of the treaties, both the Chinese and Russian empires poured settlers into the Amur region, the Russians eager to consolidate gains on their side and the Chinese anxious to stave off any further territorial losses on theirs.
By 1898, only an estimated eight hundred Amur tigers remained in Russia. Within four decades the tiger population had fallen to no more than thirty—and maybe only twenty, a 96 percent decline.
The Amur is the only tiger subspecies that showed a positive population trend in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, tigers were once again being killed in large numbers
* the Siberian Tiger Project evolved across three decades, becoming the longest-running tiger research project anywhere in the world.
AMUR TIGERS, popularly called Siberian tigers, are paradoxes of grace and violence. These lithe, elegant creatures regard their surroundings with the dispassionate air of royalty. They are also predators, evolved to slip unnoticed across the landscape; to insert themselves like puzzle pieces among rises, rocks, shadows, and trees;
* Throughout most of the twentieth century, scientists largely investigated Amur tigers in the colder months of the year, when the creatures left pugmarks, or tracks, in the snow. Researchers could follow these imprints to glean insights into tiger life and behavior,
In Leopold’s consequential work A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949... when he shot a wolf in 1912: _We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.
despite the invitation, the tiger forests of eastern Russia remained behind the Iron Curtain. <> At about the same time, President Richard Nixon’s official visit to Beijing in 1972 precipitated a thaw in relations between the United States and China, and led to a period of cultural and scientific exchanges. This offered Maurice another opportunity. He joined an American delegation of academics who spent six weeks at Harbin University
The province of Primorye dangles from the jaw of eastern Russia like an eyetooth, long and sharp.. This is the equivalent of the length of the Washington and Oregon coasts in North America, or the distance from Norway south almost to Rome in Europe.
The Russian also told of the intrepid researchers who studied the Amur tigers, men almost as wild as the predators themselves, who sacrificed comfort and safety to advance our scientific understanding of this endangered species.
* global advances in VHF radiotelemetry, which allowed for remote tracking and had been accessible to Western scientists since the 1960s, had not yet reached the Soviet Union.
Vladivostok was a dull city with a colorful past, tucked into a secluded bay once ruled by the Balhae, Jurchen, Ming, and Qing empires for a thousand years before the Russians arrived.
shouldn’t be found here: kiwis, apricot, yew, and ginseng grew alongside birch, pine, and oak. This section of northeast Asia had escaped glaciation during the Pleistocene, and as a result served as a refugium for plant and animal assemblages found together nowhere else on earth, a blend of subtropical and boreal species swirled in a temperate forest. Peter Matthiessen would later visit Maurice in Primorye to research his book Tigers in the Snow.
The cougar researcher had long mistrusted how biologists steeped in the study of ungulates approached wildlife management; he felt that too many of them viewed predators as enemies. Maurice contended that they cared only about population sizes, assessing bag limits for hunting season, or collecting metrics relevant to an anonymous herd. Carnivore scientists, in contrast, needed to focus on behavior and the individual.
Russia’s famous October Revolution took place in much of the world’s November, and Russian Orthodox Christmas happens when the rest of the world is in January. So while Dale’s calendar might have read January 7, pre-revolution Julian acolytes considered it December 24.
The broad, snowy tree-lined avenues were patrolled by sluggish vehicles of antiquated Soviet design: boxy Lada and Zhiguli sedans, and city buses that looked like giant, colorful breadboxes. The city was like a disorganized museum where all the historical exhibits had been jumbled together.
* As the plane continued east, the snow gradually disappeared and the land abruptly gave way to sea: a resolute void that stretched to the horizon. It seemed that whatever ancient gods had designed this place gave the Sikhote-Alin their all, then ran out of steam.
Back then, unscrupulous entrepreneurs had taken advantage of the political uncertainty to cut down the forests around Terney as quickly as they could. They logged vast tracts of enormous and valuable Korean pine, a species that grows forty-five meters tall, lives up to seven hundred years, and is prized as a source of lumber for everything from bridges to furniture. It is also a species essential to the survival of the ecosystem: without Korean pine there would be no Amur tigers. The pine nuts from this tree feed badgers, bears, deer, and wild boar.
Tigers, he said, were canid connoisseurs, something that Russians had discovered almost as soon as they’d arrived in the region more than a century before... Perhaps dogs made easy targets: they were loud, clumsy in the snow, and often cocky, approaching tigers with baying bravado. Or perhaps domestic dogs reminded tigers of wolves, age-old nemeses and despised competitors for prey.
On a clear day, Dale would pause on the beach to listen to the slushy waves washing over the smooth pebbles and watch the sun pull itself from the East Sea. The entirety of the landscape would slowly come into focus in this soft, warm light, the sun reflecting off the wet bodies of harbor seals resting on the rocks on the northern edge of the bay.
Russia’s long history of nature protection dated to the end of the seventeenth century, when Peter the Great purposely set aside tracts of forest, sustainably managed to ensure sufficient supply of timber to build his empire’s ships.
* His treks though the Blagodatnoe valley and in the surrounding hills were a meditative, introspective process—a slow courtship between person and place... in times of stress he’d remember the stillness of the bay, the soft sound of water pulling pebbles to and fro in the tide.
Amur tigers and their habitat were protected to the south from human encroachment by a dense barrier of interlocking trees. Called the Willow Palisade, this was a seven-hundred-kilometer-long double wall, planted in northeast China in the middle of the seventeenth century by the Qing dynasty to demarcate the southern extent of their homeland... Willow saplings were planted along each of the rises, with the branches of one tree tied to those of its neighbor so that they would grow together in a thick braid.
the Shengjing imperial hunting reserves, a vast tract of wooded hills set aside for exclusive use by the emperor, his family, and the empire’s soldiers. Nearly ninety thousand square kilometers of northeast China, an area larger than all of contemporary Primorye, was set aside for warriors to pursue game and demonstrate skills before their ruler.
Trappers: Their strategy was to follow tracks of tiger families in the snow—a mother with young cubs. They would scrutinize tracks to see where the cubs were walking. Older and therefore more menacing cubs wandered alongside their mother, while smaller cubs stepped directly in their mother’s footprints... Trappers would ignore the mother and follow the cubs, running the exhausted young creatures down, pinning them with forked sticks, binding them with shackles, and then shuttling them to markets for sale.
while the average distance male tigers moved in twenty-four was about seven kilometers, they could travel as far as forty-two kilometers a day if they wanted.
* People can live their entire lives in tiger country and never see one; those who do, remember. These animals evoke awe, respect, fear—anything but apathy. Russian villagers, when recounting their own tiger experiences, tell stories full of color, motion, and smell. It’s as though the body understands the weight of the moment and absorbs as much sensory information as possible before the experience ends.
In contrast to a tiger’s summer coat, which is short and pops crisply with orange and black, its winter pelage is longer, shaggier, and duller, an adaptation to colder temperatures and a concession to the soft palette of a winter landscape. This animal had leaned into its hardships and converted them to strengths.
A carousel of anxiety nagged him in the darkness. Had they set the snares correctly? Would they finally catch a tiger? How would a trapped tiger fare in the deep freeze? How should the team approach the site?
Dale pictured it in his mind and frowned: this was the most exposed of the snares, farthest from the trees and anchored to a gangly alder. In one sense this was good, as Howard would have a clear line of sight to dart it with his tranquilizer gun. But it was also the snare Dale had set with the longest lead. Too much slack in the line could be dangerous for everyone: if the tiger tried to escape or charge at the researchers, it would have plenty of space to get a running start.
* While both systems used the tranquilizer ketamine, the differences in how they delivered the drug were subtle but important. First, Telinject relied on air pressure to propel the dart, while Palmer used gunpowder. Gunpowder’s weakness was humidity, resulting in misfires, while air pressure could be low in the extreme cold, leading to insufficient propulsion. <> The needles used in each system also differed. Whereas the Palmer needles had fishhook-like barbs near the tip to keep the dart secured under the skin after impact, Telinject needles were simply thicker in the middle, which allowed them to stay in place but did not tear the skin upon extraction.
Tigers have laterally compressed bodies, meaning that they are very narrow, an adaptation that minimizes their visibility to stalked prey. A tiger can seem enormous from the side, but when you look directly at it from the front, most of that mass is hidden behind the tiger’s head.
Tagging: Their fingers ached and then lost feeling as they tried to work in the cold. They took turns burying their hands in the dense, warm fur between the cat’s legs as if she were a down sleeping bag.
But Kathy, with her needles and gauges and instruments, was the star. No one had seen an animal get back up and wobble into the forest as Olga had after being brought down by a human. Immobilization of wildlife had never before been done here; everyone recognized her as a true specialist.
the moose of Primorye, members of the Ussuri subspecies that range from there to northeast China and eastern Mongolia, are the smallest moose anywhere in the world. In addition to their diminutive stature, they also differ from other subspecies by the twig-like structure of their antlers—more like a deer’s
Japanese buyers were stockpiling Primorye’s wood—purchasing what they could now at a cheap price, then sinking the logs into the ocean to preserve them for later use or sale, like a long-term investment
Inflation had kneecapped the Russian ruble, and as its value dropped catastrophically, people’s life savings were disappearing. In 1992, inflation reached 2,500 percent:
* ration: This meant that Dale and Zhenya burned more than three-quarters of their gasoline allotment just driving to Plastun and back, leaving fewer than five liters—enough for about thirty-four kilometers of driving—to devote to tiger study. To squeeze as much road as they could from those few liters, Dale would cut the engine at the crests of the mountain passes and coast downhill, that way saving up to three kilometers’ worth of fuel each trip.
potential sites to situate their traps. The first were natural pinch points, or funnels—locations through which a tiger was almost certain to walk because of obstacles in the forest... The second attractive snare sites were scent trees. These were usually obvious markers on the landscape, something notable from a distance, like a large, old-growth tree trunk leaning over the trail. Tigers backed up to these slanting pillars and sprayed their undersides with a fine mist of urine about half a meter to a meter and a half off the ground.
Tigers used scent trees as territorial markers to inform one another of who was around and whether or not a female was in estrus and ready to breed. But tigers weren’t the only ones to examine these scent marks; the trees acted almost like community bulletin boards, letting all animals know the comings and goings of the striped terrors in their lives.
* wild dog species such as wolves or coyotes, which have twice the sensitivity of wild cats. Canid trapping is a much more laborious process: not only do researchers have to hide any obvious signs of the trap itself, but they also sometimes boil all trap components beforehand, including the snares and springs, to eliminate human scent. They even go so far as to lay down special mats to serve as a barrier between their clothes and the ground. Moose, which Dale had considerable experience tranquilizing in Alaska, were on the other end of the difficulty spectrum: to tranquilize a moose, he’d spot one from afar, simply walk to within ten or twenty meters while it eyed him suspiciously, and fire a dart into its side.
The temperate forests north of the Willow Palisade line are the only place in the world where tigers and brown bears coexist; the relationship between them is complicated and the stuff of nightmares. They alternately fight, see one another as prey, or avoid one another entirely.
Igor and his research partner Anatoliy Yudakov had tracked tigers on foot, in the snow, cumulatively walking more than eight thousand kilometers across three years. This was grueling work. Skis would have allowed them to float atop the snow, which was sometimes half a meter deep or more, but they opted instead to slog from tiger track to tiger track. Because their own pace would slow or quicken depending on the tiger’s gait, this allowed the biologists to infer behavior... This led to such nuanced discoveries as “prey detection distances,” or how close potential targets such as deer or boar had to be to a tiger before the predator noticed it.
Deciduous trees, just blushing with spring green, ceded slowly to fir and spruce, spindly and aromatic. These were the southernmost tendrils of the Eurasian boreal, the largest forest in the world, one that began here and stretched six thousand kilometers—ten time zones—west to Scandinavia. This was an intact forest the size of the entire contiguous United States.
* Bears, however, seem to puzzle over you. Their dark eyes bore into yours as if assessing what kind of person you are and what, exactly, they are going to do with you should they find you lacking. Bears seem to see you in a way that other animals do not; it is a deeply uncomfortable and vulnerable feeling. And an angry bear is vindictive... Dale met the bear’s eyes as he paced angrily and growled like an idling dump truck.
Everything had gone wrong here: the seed of one mistake had fruited many more. They’d trapped a bear, not a tiger; the immobilization process had been drawn out, causing the bear undue stress because their tranquilizer needles hadn’t been long enough to penetrate his thick fat; the collar hadn’t been big enough, so they’d had to improvise, and they moved before the bear was far enough away, the sound causing him to double back and attack them. All these missteps led to the tragedy of a dead bear in the forest.
The U.S. government spent upward of $1 million in an attempt to rescue three gray whales in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea... this was a case where focus on a few individuals benefited the species: the story raised awareness of whales in general. People who had never before cared about whales suddenly did... Moreover, Operation Breakthrough was not just about chipping away literal ice; it also resulted in a thawing of U.S.-Russian relations, as two Soviet icebreakers were instrumental in the rescue attempt. This form of cooperative science was a means of diplomacy, and in some ways this whale rescue paved the way for other bilateral collaborations, such as the Siberian Tiger Project. Focus on a few individuals could indeed have positive outcomes for the species.
As Dale took bearings on Olga’s location, he listened to these newcomers, not knowing the explosive babbling of a Manchurian bush warbler from the nervous clicks of a Daurian redstart. A Latham’s snipe, a stout shorebird with a gaudy courtship display, circled the fields, chattering in the sky then dropping precipitously at high speed, the wind between its tail feathers shrieking like the engines of a dive-bomber.
This was a drag mark, the path a tiger used to pull something large from the site of a kill to a location more suitable for feeding. Cautiously, Dale followed this route to the end as if it were some macabre rainbow. Instead of a pot of gold, he found a half-eaten red deer carcass.
Tigers usually attack from the side or behind, swatting at an ungulate’s hindquarters to slow it down. Then they work their way along the body, using their claws like a climber’s ice ax for traction, to reach then grip the animal’s throat with their jaws. They lock on and drop their weight to bring their target to the ground, strategically keeping their prey’s legs and feet, the sharp parts that can kick and wound, on the far side of their own body. Then killing tends to happen in one of two ways. For animals with slender necks like deer, the kill typically comes in the form of a quick bite to the nape of the neck. A tiger carefully positions its canines along the spine and, as one observer described it, forces them “like a wedge” between vertebrae to sever the spinal cord... the alternative is strangulation. Once on the ground with the large animal, a tiger, using its weight to keep the struggling beast from getting back up, will readjust its grip to clamp its jaws tight to the throat for six minutes or more until the animal simply runs out of oxygen.
If a deer is alone, it is comparatively easy to catch—35 percent of such hunts are successful. But if a deer is in a group, tigers have only an 8 percent track record of success, too many vigilant eyes scanning for that singular threat.
* Dale had trouble negotiating the waves of sensory and emotional stimulation these packages elicited. He continued to feel deep seclusion here, like a sailor shipwrecked in a cultural sea. Care packages were like crates washed ashore, full of his favorite things and tales of lives back home moving on without him. It was bittersweet.
* BEN & JERRY’S CHERRY GARCIA: He looked again at the famous logo inside but suddenly realized, with panic, that of course he could not simply wolf it down: it was −56 degrees Celsius. Even touching the cardboard container would burn his hands, and it would be hours before the ice cream thawed enough for him to safely eat it. <> Dale felt desperate, trapped by the conundrum, like in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.”
On June 22, the day before the permits were to expire and they’d be forced to pull their traps, they caught a tiger.
That Lena was in estrus now, only two months after this tragic event, showed that she’d somehow lost all three cubs of her previous litter. If they were still alive, she would not be ready to breed again for another year or so. This was because tigresses with cubs only reproduce again once their offspring have left to find their own territories
The first American program broadcast in the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union was the soap opera Santa Barbara. Starting on January 2, 1992, and inexplicably with the 217th episode, it aired twice a day and became an absolute cultural sensation.
Following some logic that escaped Dale, Zhenya decided to stake out the goat at a trap site on the other side of the Kuruma River from their cabin. And so, every evening, Dale hoisted the irritable goat onto his shoulders and carried it across the knee-deep river, trying not to lose his balance on the smooth, slippery river stones.
* Dale’s schedule, which was grueling. His attentions were split between two worlds, one on the ground trapping tigers and the other in the air tracking them. .. If both traplines were empty, which to date they had been, he was not further needed. So he’d walk two hours downstream, fording the river repeatedly as the trail wound across it, to reach the Maysa cabin, where he’d parked the Niva. There he’d coax the hatchback to life with the hand crank to jump-start its battery, then drive to the Terney airport. If the stars of weather, airplane availability, and pilot sobriety aligned, he’d get in a Soviet-era Antonov An-2 biplane and rise into the skies above the Sikhote-Alin to collect VHF locations on the tigresses Olga, Lena, and Natasha.
At first, when he was simply fishing for any signal at all, both channels were open. Once a tiger was detected, the idea was to fly at the signal until it started to weaken, meaning they’d passed it. Then, using just one antenna, Dale would motion for the pilot to home in on the signal with ever-tightening spirals, like the slow circling of a drain
A moment later a yellow-throated marten reached the ridge. These are lithe, ferret-like creatures about the size of a dachshund, with sharp faces, pale yellow torsos, and dark tails longer than their bodies. Yekaterina was taken aback: it looked like a furry, vengeful pencil... it is said, they are harder to spot in the forest than tigers.
There was a silent round of open mouths and raised eyebrows as the team tried to process this information. It had taken them nearly a year to catch and collar three tigers, and now, in one day, they had just as many growling in snares.
It was a frantic scene. The team was juggling two striped time bombs that could rise from their stupors at any moment. They worked quickly to fit and attach the collars, and Igor started taking measurements while Dale collected blood and tissue samples. The minutes flew by.
But six tigers? This was proof of concept. Over the course of nearly a year, they’d worked out a capture protocol that focused snaring on game trails, at scent trees, and at kills. As a result, they had collars on two young females, one young male, and three territorial adult females, animals that had slowly started to reveal the intricacies of tiger ecology to them.
The message was clear: this was a landscape full of natural wonders reserved for others, not them, and it resulted in a culture of apathy toward the protected area and its mission. <> Then, in late 1991, the structures that supported this exclusion broke down. It was no longer clear who was in charge and, driven by fuel shortages and inflation, the reserve’s ability to protect itself faltered... the social contract to respect the reserve’s border had expired.
* Then, in a daze, he trudged through the snow, following the Russian’s deep voice to meet him. There, at Zhenya’s feet, he saw fresh tracks. Of tiger cubs. <> The most vulnerable tiger demographic to poaching is, in fact, mothers with cubs. These tigresses have treasures to protect—awkward, naïve, and distractible cats. An adult tiger will often slink off when even the whisper of a threat is breathed, but cubs sometimes can’t get away fast enough in deep snow or are too busy pouncing on each other to notice the danger until it is too late. Mothers stand fast to protect them, putting themselves between their cubs and the threat, and are thus exposed.
Species all over the world, especially endangered ones, are threatened by roads... The impacts of roads on wildlife include not just death by way of vehicle strikes or poachers’ bullets; roads can even alter the genetic composition of a species. For example, in southern Primorye, the road between the cities of Vladivostok and Ussuriysk is such a barrier for tiger movements
There was a bundle of orange just off the road, four cubs huddled against one another uncertainly, the largest no bigger than a cocker spaniel. They were waiting for their mother. Dale gasped at this sight, this scene of unfiltered vulnerability, and his opinion instantly changed. “We have to catch these things,” he thought. “We have to save them.”
Dale finally suggested a game drive in which they’d ring the area they knew the cubs were still in, with everyone in sight of the people on either side of them. Then they’d slowly walk forward, tightening the noose until someone spotted the cubs. This strategy, called shouwei in China, had been used to hunt deer and tigers in the Qing dynasty’s Shengjing imperial hunting reserve.
Khuntami and Lena would become important members of the captive tiger population in North America, infusing much-needed genetic diversity. They were never bred together because they were siblings, but collectively these two tigers produced fifty-four descendants... If there was a silver lining to the poaching of Lena in Russia in 1992, this was it: as of 2023, she had nineteen living descendants in North American zoos.
Bart Schleyer: a Henry Cavill of the outdoors and a wildlife renaissance man. He not only hunted moose and sheep and bears with bows he made himself but also was an experienced taxidermist, an accomplished landscape artist, and one of the leading grizzly bear trappers in the United States.
Dale and Zhenya had spent many nights at the farm while out tracking her, telling him tales of Olga—the places she went and the things she did. Olga shared these forests with the farmer, walked the coastline as he did, and skirted his field, where she left his cattle to graze in peace. They were neighbors. And this was what he’d wanted to tell Dale, that he understood this. He could live with a tiger because she was just as much a part of this place as he was. The farmer walked off after a handshake, bustling away to complete other tasks while in town, leaving Dale speechless. For the first time, he saw conservation working on the individual level. People and tigers could live together.
* While to Dale and Bart this felt like looking at a crime scene through cataracts, Igor could see clearly. He had read passages like this a hundred times, dramas written in snow, the final moments of deer and boar... Igor swept his arm from the base of the tree to the trail, guiding their eyes along a path of rumpled snow about fifteen meters long to show how the tiger had moved out of concealment first in four small, tentative steps, followed by four long, assertive bounds. Igor’s arm slowed to rest at a larger patch of disturbed snow. This was where it took its prey, he said. The others watched silently as Igor walked over and, kneeling as he had with the tiger track earlier, carefully brushed back the white blanket to reveal a carpet of red hidden underneath... Igor told the story with such detail that Dale could almost see it, the ghosts of this horror gliding translucent across the forest floor, marionettes on Igor’s string.
Unfortunately, history had shown that once the line to human flesh was crossed, it was easy for a tiger to become a repeat offender,.. Man-eating behavior can also be learned when adult tigers teach their offspring how to effectively stalk and kill humans, resulting in several generations of man-eaters.
The researchers wanted to recapture her and swap the old collar out for a new one, which would allow them to track her for at least two more years. At times, the study of Olga felt obsessive to Dale, his existence devoted entirely to locating this single tiger again and again and again, with the hopes of finding an opening where they could trap her.
* As a concept, a winter capture from a helicopter might work. Winter was the only time of year when they’d be able to see and dart a tiger running under the forest canopy. More important, the dangers of winter trapping were related to the long hours a tiger might be trapped in a snare. A helicopter capture would be quick and eliminate that threat. <> The approach was also not without precedent: helicopters had been used for decades elsewhere to capture free-ranging wildlife... The only helicopters available here were Soviet-era Mil MI-8s—massive and sluggish transport vessels—workhorses to the Robinson’s Thoroughbreds. Navigating an MI-8 among the trees to tranquilize a tiger was akin to driving a school bus on a sidewalk in pursuit of a squirrel, while trying to avoid hitting the parking meters.
There she was: Olga. The tigress was plodding through the snow along the base of a hill, turning unhurriedly away from the approaching behemoth. From above she was lithe, a strand of dull orange and black weaving among the understory like an eel twisting through seagrass. Oak leaves, exposed from the previous autumn, swirled around Olga in disorienting frenzy as the air displaced by the helicopter’s rotor blades reached her. The tigress broke into a cross-slope run, her form seeming to disappear anytime she crossed a patch where the snow had thawed, her pelage mixing perfectly with the browns of the exposed forest floor.
* “and lower me halfway down. I’ll dart her from the air.” Bart’s plan, it seemed, was to dangle above the enraged tiger like an oversized cat toy... there’d been a miscommunication. The winch operator did not stop lowering Bart when he reached seven meters, and the American suddenly found himself on the ground, stumbling backward from a wild tiger that sat only ten meters away, blinking at him as though frozen by the audacity of this provocation.
* to behold one up close—to see the pink of the nose or feel its chest expand as it breathes—is life-changing. It is a moment in which the mythical becomes real. Despite the long chase through the snow and forest understory, Olga appeared remarkably clean. Other species can be downright filthy even on their best days. Brown bears, for example, are like the beach bums of the forest: their fur is often disheveled and matted with twigs, debris, and pine sap, and they smell like wet dogs. Tigers, in contrast, seem to take a certain pride in their appearance.
Some duties once reserved for state structures had been ceded to civil society, with a full third of all investment in Russia’s biodiversity in 1994 coming from foreign sources. By engaging in fundraising, public awareness, and lobbying, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) could bypass bureaucratic stagnation to prepare tight packages of reform, then deliver them to government counterparts to oversee their adoption into law. The mid-1990s was the start of a period of remarkable cooperation between the U.S. government, provincial authorities, and national and international NGOs, and Dale could sense it.
the Emmy Award–winning Tigers of the Snow. This documentary contained incredible footage of Igor, Kolya, Bart, and Maurice snaring and tranquilizing a male tiger, and Dale, Zhenya, and Bart tracking Olga to her den among the roots of a windfallen tree... Matthiessen eventually published his experiences as Tigers in the Snow; Maurice wrote the foreword... To increase interest and support from the Russian public, Maurice brought in some star power. Through acquaintances he reached the American actor Bruce Willis... For years the likeness of the crouching actor, wearing shorts amid fake snow while stroking a tiger cub, could be spotted on shop walls and city buses in Vladivostok.
* If the team wanted to accommodate a long-legged passenger in the front seat, they’d need a wrench, enough light, and about ten minutes to adjust its position. Or, if they wanted to engage the four-wheel drive, a process that required no equipment and perhaps thirty seconds with a Japanese pickup truck of the same era, they needed to set aside thirty minutes and have three different tools on hand: a tire iron to turn the hubcap, a wrench to remove it, and a hex key to engage or disengage the hubs as needed. The interior of the UAZ-469
The researchers resumed tracking the next day, and the day after that, walking slowly to absorb as many details as they could, the trail leading them south through frozen forests. The dominant male had followed the defeated one closely, apparently escorting the interloper off his territory. <> “Tracking is about unraveling mystery,”
In Terney, John settled into his routine as the project coordinator. The team was seasoned, and John worked with Zhenya to send Kolya, Lyosha, and Bart to track their seven collared tigers, plagued by the constant need to ration fuel and repair vehicles.
charged by a tiger: In each of these instances John reacted differently. With Katya he could not afford to be vulnerable: Linda was next to him and afraid; he had to take control. When Olga charged later, however, he allowed himself some fear—Bart and Kolya were in control, commanded the situation, and de-escalated it. And when he was charged on his own he just assumed he was dead. Thankfully, he pulled his flare right before the tiger knocked him over, and he was able to use it like a weapon to drive the tiger away.
There, among a patch of rhododendron, the biologists found evidence of denning. It seemed that John and Linda had inadvertently walked almost right to the spot where Katya had hidden her cubs while she was out hunting. She may have just returned to them when she found John and Linda at her doorstep and, incensed, had driven them away. Katya’s behavior suddenly made sense to Linda, and her impressions of the event evolved from fear to sympathy.
he’d sometimes light a candle on one side of a clearing and fire arrows at the oval flame in the dark. He did this to help him understand how to concentrate on just one thing: all else was interference. Bart may never have actually hit the flame, and if he did, it was probably luck. The exercise itself was the point. During helicopter captures Bart was able to erase the noise in the fuselage, account for the interplay of swaying branches and the rocking helicopter, focus on a single point on the tiger’s body, anticipate an opening, and then take the shot.
* She reached the precipice above the valley and roared again, her voice pushing far into the dark forest below. This, in turn, triggered a chain reaction of red deer alarm calls, barks that popped like distant fireworks in the still night.
When in estrus, tigers become different creatures entirely. Hormones take over: they abandon their fear, walk in the open, and make as much noise as possible to catch the attention of a potential mate. But Amur tigresses like Katya needed to be patient: given the huge areas that adult males roam, they might have only one potential suitor in an area the size of Los Angeles.
He’d been shot twice, then left just off the trail, hidden under a pair of hastily chopped birch trunks. Chokecherries were in bloom, trees with bronze bark and crowns full of white blossoms, and a member of the search party recalled covering Kaplanov’s body with cherry flowers like a blanket. The murdered biologist was brought to the village of Valentin on a horse cart and buried in the local cemetery.
In 1943, death in war was a common outcome for a young Soviet. Yuriy Salmin, the bright scientist whose work helped establish the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve and a close colleague of Kaplanov’s, went to war as a sniper in late 1942 and was dead within a year at the age of thirty-four. In fact, a staggering 36 percent of Russian males ages twenty to thirty-four, nine million men in total, died between 1941 and 1945.
One exception to this rule was the Nechet cabin, unique in the reserve in that there were no mice there at all... The trade-off, however, was all the snakes. <> The Amur rat snake, a nonvenomous and not particularly aggressive reptile, is the largest of Primorye’s seven snake species, three of which are venomous. Rat snakes grow to nearly two meters in length
* bow making: Different parts of a bow are subject to different pressures: the inside of the bow, called the belly, is under compression pressure. This was where Bart found that his experiment with birch failed, as this pressure caused the bow to weaken over time and lose power. The outside, or the back, is subject to tension pres- sure, which if too great could snap the bow. Bart addressed tension pressure by reinforcing the back of the weapon with red deer sinew, which he and John harvested from tiger kills then mashed until it separated into individual threads. Then they dipped these stringy fibers into a glue solution and affixed them to the back of the bow in several layers. When dried, the sinew coating became as hard and flexible as fiberglass. Bart and John regularly had heated discussions about different glue compounds—they had nothing else to argue about—and Linda started referring to them wryly as the Glue Guys.
Those that he kept he named after whichever tiger had killed the deer whose antler crowned his weapon. Bart’s first bow was the Katya Bow; the Zhenya Bow followed next.
In fact, it seemed to Dale that the Russian scientific literature had a whole subgenre devoted to argument over the validity of tiger population surveys. He knew that a statistically defensible estimate was the highest standard for wildlife population surveys, some number that included a margin of error, but he also knew that secretive animals like tigers were incredibly difficult to count well. Dale also realized that surveys did not need to be completely accurate to be useful—as long as the same method was used across multiple surveys, and biases could be minimized, the results could give researchers an indication of population trajectory.
The implication of this question was that Dale would be able to attract more funding to tiger conservation if they found only a few. This was Russian society’s mood at the time—it was the era in which the ultrarich oligarchs had come to power and everyone seemed to be out for themselves.
In March 1969, almost thirty years earlier to the day, a two-week border clash on Zhenbao left dozens of Chinese and Soviet soldiers dead. A Beijing museum still displays a T-62 Soviet tank brought from the island as a war trophy. At that time it would have been inconceivable that Russian, Chinese, and American colleagues would ever walk the border itself, that narrow line between empires, working together.
Linda and her colleague Galina Salkina were able to train five dogs to reliably identify tiger scats found in the forest and link them to known individuals. This was a noninvasive method of keeping tabs on tiger movements
At about the same time that John and Linda’s relationship fell apart, Dale got married. His wedding to Marina was a true celebration:
It’s easy to romanticize those who have passed, to polish the flaws from our memories of them. But Bart genuinely radiated goodness and was, as Dale noted, “the kind of person that legends grow around.” He had an innate ability to understand and appreciate different perspectives, which made him the hub of any field camp or social circle. Bart was often the one thing that everyone could agree on.
Dale was astonished to discover a stack of decapitated seal bodies that Roma gathered against the base of a cliff like cordwood as he waited for more to emerge from the water.
With fourteen collared tigers actively being monitored as 2004 turned to 2005, the most the project would ever track at one time, the team in Terney aspired to fly weekly telemetry flights in the biplane to keep tabs on their elusive herd of cats.
As Zhenya’s condition worsened, his official partnership with the project ended amicably. But to Dale, the slow-motion disintegration of his closest Russian confidant pained him... The American did not know it then, but Zhenya had been diagnosed with prostate cancer the previous year
After she was killed, John tallied how many times they’d actually seen Olga in the wild. Given how much she’d meant to the team, and how much she’d taught them, the number was remarkably small. Outside of capture events, members of the Siberian Tiger Project had only seen her five times for a cumulative total of fifteen minutes across a thirteen-year period. Olga’s passing to poaching was more than a personal loss for Dale: it felt like a personal failure.
IN RETROSPECT, Dale viewed the years spanning the new millennium as the golden days of tiger conservation in Russia, a time of stable funding and strong governmental and public support. The early 2000s had seen government actively cooperating with NGOs and scientific institutions in a congenial manner. Research conducted by the WCS Siberian Tiger Project, World Wildlife Fund, and others fed directly into government policy. The number of people involved in tiger conservation in Russia bloomed to more than fourteen hundred individuals around this time
they had Putin’s endorsement to do so. Russian investigative journalists later, however, revealed that the entire exercise was staged. By examining the stripes of the snared tigress they demonstrated that she had come from a nearby zoo, where she was called Araliya.
* For a breathtaking moment the road rose sharply above the ice, following the thinnest of shelves hewn from a steep mountain slope with rock on one side and a drop to the river far below on the other. Then the road pulled away from the water and shrank into the hills, a scrape of gravel and dirt that wove spineless and yielding among swelling waves of forest and cliff. The road would branch here and there into a disorienting network of logging trails
Since conflict tigers were usually caught and released far from where the Siberian Tiger Project and its collaborators worked, and moved erratically and far distances, it was almost impossible to find one after a release with VHF technology. <> But, for the first time, the team had an answer: GPS satellite collars. These were cutting-edge devices that allowed a tiger to be tracked automatically, from space, ideal for keeping tabs on a tiger in a remote area.
a healthy male tiger captured near the Vladivostok city limits in 2016 was helicoptered away and released in the upper reaches of the Bikin River, a paradise for tigers far from roads and teeming with juicy boar and deer. According to his satellite collar, the tiger’s first course of action was to head due south; within a year, he had walked more than seven hundred kilometers and was back near Vladivostok
* And now twice they had received exaggerated reports of her tragic demise. Every time, it seemed, PT99 came back from the dead. “She’s like a Christ in stripes,” someone quipped, smiling at the tiger’s seeming propensity for resurrection. And from that moment on it was settled: PT99 was known as Kristina.
To Dale, after nine years Galina almost felt like an active collaborator in the project rather than a study animal. Like Olga, Galina was an ambassador for her species: an example of how humans and tigers could live together.
Galina appeared oblivious to her transgression: she saw the humans and was not afraid. Dale felt as though he was watching a disaster unfold in slow motion, like when his old friend Zhenya started drinking and could not stop. As then, Dale was sick with concern, hopelessly confused, and completely powerless... If she made it into the settlement, gaped at by a frothing gaggle and hounded by baying dogs, she would likely panic
The VHF receiver was nearly useless, as the tigress was too close for an accurate reading. The signal seemed to come from everywhere and was distorted, with radio waves bouncing off the cliffs in that narrow valley to confuse their origin.
* Galina was PT56—the fifty-sixth tiger collared by the Siberian Tiger Project—and none, until this year, had become conflict tigers. In the span of only months, two had. Dale stopped short as he suddenly realized that these were connected: Ivan and Galina had mated... both animals had suffered from an infection of canine distemper virus (CDV). This was a particularly insidious disease
In fact, Ivan’s and Galina’s deaths were part of a perfect storm that saw the tiger population in the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve, which had risen steadily since the 1960s, crash in 2010. ... This was a case of infanticide: remains of the cubs were found in his stomach. The biologists hypothesized that the male killed the cubs in hopes of mating with their mother, and the tigress fatally wounded the male in their defense.
He looked up to see a tiger roaring from across a clearing, moving toward him rapidly with ears tight against its head and tail thrashing. The sight and the sound were so terrible that it seemed to Didyuk that the world was ending in violent calamity. And maybe it was.
Tigers are at the tip of evolution’s spear, the culmination of millennia honing strength and cunning to stalk, catch, and kill an ungulate with the least effort and the greatest reward. Any injury, even slight, could throw this machine off balance and disrupt the tiger’s ability to successfully bring down prey, increase the risk of further injury, and push the tiger toward unnatural food sources such as horses, dogs, or even people.
Treaded like a tank, the TDT-55 was indifferent to rough terrain, its tarnished red hull scarred like a gladiator from years of service. The vehicle was nearly six meters long and two and a half wide—laterally compressed like a tiger—a narrow footprint that allowed it to pass between obstructions too formidable to knock over or roll across. The dominant feature of a TDT-55 was a massive metal plate sloped at a forty-five-degree angle that occupied the back half of the chassis.
He had lost eight of his fingers—one to Kristina and the others to frostbite—which meant that he had also lost his only source of income: it would be almost impossible for him to hunt again. The police considered a criminal charge to be an unnecessary and additive punitive measure. <> In a way, Kristina and Didyuk shared similar, tragic fates. Each broke social taboos because the systems in which they were assigned roles had become corrupted.
THE CHANGBAI MOUNTAINS rise near the Bohai Sea of China, then arch nine hundred kilometers east, climbing to straddle the North Korean border and the highest-elevation volcanic lake in the world, and then descend into Primorye, where they end without fanfare at the Borisovskoye Plateau just shy of the East Sea.
Gray crept slowly into his beard like fingers of a glacier, and cracks formed around his kind eyes when he smiled.
But such was not the fate of this Changbai tiger. In her case, a remarkable network of like-minded individuals ensured that she would be given a second chance at life. From the hunters who found her, to the wildlife inspector who restored her health, to the capture and immobilization specialists, and finally to the rehabilitation center, there were now people and facilities in place to address emergencies such as hers. Dale felt relief: this was exactly what had been missing in 1992, when he and Zhenya captured Lena’s four orphaned cubs and eventually sent the two surviving ones to a U.S. zoo.
The Siberian Tiger Project learned lessons from these experiences. Dale, John, Kolya, and Sasha thought that fear of humans was a critical trait that tigers needed to retain to survive in the wild
With time, as prey deliveries varied between deer and boar, Zolushka began to adeptly shift her kill strategy to match, just as a tiger would in the wild: quick nape kills for deer, throat latches and strangulation for boar.
sufficient loopholes that allowed illegally harvested pines to be exported. For example, a logging company could legally harvest pines if they interfered with road construction, or if they were diseased. Such concessions were exploited: one logging road near Terney twisted across the Tunsha River valley with unnecessary complexity,
* the city of Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Named after two rivers, the Biro and the Bidzhan, and on the banks of the former, Birobidzhan had a history perhaps most succinctly summarized by the journalist Masha Gessen as “sad and absurd.” <> The Jewish Autonomous Region, a third larger than Israel and pre-dating it by fourteen years, was in 1934 the first officially recognized Jewish state in the world... tens of thousands of Russian Jews were recruited to, then abandoned in, what amounted to a roadless swamp.
In the early 2000s, remote-triggered photography started to be used in Russia as a way to monitor tiger populations.
By 2014, China had an estimated twenty-four tigers, including multiple females with cubs. In 2015, the partial logging ban in China’s Heilongjiang Province became a total, nationwide ban, and the next year the government created the 14,612-square-kilometer Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park. This protected area is the largest in the world focused on tigers and almost twice the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States, including the former Hunchun Nature Reserve and other lands in Jilin and Heilongjiang Provinces. <> Dale’s dream of donuts was back on track.
reintroductions: Zolushka, who as of 2024 has raised four litters and in 2021 became a grandmother, was and remains the matriarch of the Pri-Amur tigers. <> In 1992, as Dale and Zhenya sat along a forest road in an idling car full of orphaned tiger cubs, they dreamed of an outcome like this, some silver lining to numb the pain of a poached mother. Thirty years later, even though Zhenya did not live to see it, this vision was realized.
This support of young scientists was not limited to tiger study: Dale fostered the professional development of graduate students studying brown and Asiatic black bears, Amur leopards, musk deer, and Blakiston’s fish owls, among others.
while science lost important insights into tiger behavior when snaring was banned, such as what individual tigers were hunting outside of winter or where young tigers dispersed, camera trap monitoring could still keep tabs on which tigers were where, what they were doing, and how population structure and density changed over time... The days were long gone when people like Dima Pikunov and Igor Nikolayev were willing and able to spend months in the forests living with tigers to learn about them.
in order to ensure that a foreign NGO was not listed as a contributing organization. He declined. This event, among a growing mountain of others, made Dale realize with profound sadness that he had become, in some ways, an impediment to tiger conservation in his adoptive home. <> Indeed, the government of Russia became more suspicious of NGOs
As of 2023, Dale’s dream of donuts looked closer to an achievable reality. There were perhaps 330 tigers in the Sikhote-Alin population to the east, 20 tigers in the Pri-Amur population to the north, and nearly 100 tigers in the transborder Changbai population to the south. This latter statistic is worth highlighting.
Russian forestry law is vague with respect to pine nuts, and so cones are removed at unsustainable rates. The number of people in Terney County can double in good mast years, from ten to twenty thousand, as organized groups from across the broader region descend on these forests. The road leading north from Terney is lined with nut harvesting camps, their campfires glowing like strings of patio lights, and rival gangs of nut harvesters bludgeon one another for the best territories.
* Dale has said that the study of tigers is the study of death. But it’s also the study of life. Conservation is about finding a comfortable balance between the needs of people and of wildlife. Perhaps the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve has found a way closer to this medium at Lake Blagodatnoe. The people of Terney know more about tigers now, and as a result, some care.
Two months later, the governments of Russia and China finalized plans for the Land of the Big Cats protected area, a transborder reserve encompassing the existing Land of the Leopard National Park on the Russia side and the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park on the China side. While this legal designation does not add any new land, it offers an important mechanism to share information across borders and to start managing the Changbai tiger population as a whole.
// As an introvert, I was uncomfortable with the concept of conservation, a discipline that focuses on people just as much as nature. “Just collect data?” I responded uncertainly. He looked at me for a long moment, then told me to think about what mattered. I did, and in 2002 Dale and his employer, the New York–based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) supported me during my master’s research
