Poachers thinning ranks of hardy Siberian tigers

TERNEY, Russia — The air is thick with mosquitoes near the top of the ridge, blanketed in Mongolian oak, not far from where the Sea of Japan laps up to the jagged, verdant cliffs of Russia's Far East coastline. But that doesn't seem to bother American biologist Dale Miquelle and his Russian assistants, who busily pore over a small swatch of forest like gumshoes at a crime scene.

They note in their logbooks a few strands of orange fur they find clinging to a leaf, and measure how high off the ground they find claw marks gouged into a nearby tree.

"This is where they played," Miquelle says, finding a matted patch of grass and a set of trees used as scratching posts.

It's Day Two of Miquelle's hunt for Galya, and while the elusive Siberian tiger has evaded him again, he has found her den.

He'll spend a half-hour combing over every trace of Galya and her cubs, then eight more hours tracking her radio-collar signal before nightfall ends the trek. The next morning, Miquelle and his crew will set out once more, hoping for a moment when Galya has strayed far enough away that they can swoop in and attach radio collars on the cubs.

In the Russian Far East, where decades of poaching have diminished the Siberian tigers' numbers to an estimated 500, Miquelle and fellow Wildlife Conservation Society biologist John Goodrich are waging a lonely battle to keep the largest member of the cat family from disappearing. The odds against them are stiff.

Many villagers and hunters regard tigers as a nuisance, and often won't hesitate to kill one if it has preyed on a dog or cow. Illegal logging continues to erode tiger habitats. And poorly equipped, undermanned Russian forest-ranger staffs are no match for poachers who feed China's thriving traditional medicine market, offer top dollar for every ounce of a tiger: bones, skin, meat, even whiskers.

Every tiger monitored by Miquelle's team that has died since 1992 has died for reasons other than natural causes. In most cases, poachers were responsible.

Though the Siberian tigers' future is far from certain, Miquelle takes solace in the fact that the animals' numbers have stabilized since the mid-1990s, when poaching was claiming as many as 80 tigers each year. At the time, the Russian government clamped down on poaching by stepping up patrols, but recently Moscow has drastically pared back funding for local conservation officers.

"Wildlife is really low on the list of priorities in Russia today," Miquelle says. "But the fact that we have some stability here in number of tigers — and stability in prey — gives us hope that we can inch forward to the next step of actually trying to increase numbers of tigers."

The Siberian tiger's habitat once stretched from Mongolia eastward into Chinese Manchuria, southeastern Russia and the Korean Peninsula. Today, the tigers are primarily found in the southeastern tip of the Russian Far East, in the dense, mountainous birch and pine forests wedged between the Amur River and the Sea of Japan.

Winters here are brutal, with snow blanketing the woods five months of the year and temperatures routinely dropping as low as minus 12 degrees Fahrenheit. But the Siberian, or Amur tiger as it's also called, is built for Russian winters; weighing up to 675 pounds with lengths of up to 13 feet, Siberian tigers develop thick layers of insulating fat. Their fur grows as long as 21 inches, longer and thicker than the fur of a Bengal or Sumatran tiger.

Siberian tiger populations began plummeting between 1910 and 1940, when the animals were hunted as game or regarded as pests and culled. By 1940, an estimated 50 Siberian tigers were left. The Soviet Union banned tiger hunting in 1947, and for the remainder of the Soviet era, the number of Siberian tigers steadily grew.

But with the economic chaos that accompanied the Soviet collapse in 1991, poaching re-emerged as a serious threat to the subspecies' survival. Chinese traditional medicine's ravenous demand for tiger parts gave poachers a steady market. Those poachers rarely had to worry about getting caught.

"There was an increase in poaching of tigers across Asia, but in Russia the burden was greatest because the country was essentially lawless for those five or six years," Miquelle says.

Miquelle has studied Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East since 1992, Goodrich since 1995. They carry out field work all year, capturing tigers and equipping them with radio collars that allow the animal's movements to be tracked via global-positioning systems. In the winter, they survey tiger prey, including wild boar and deer. With all of the data, scientists can raise red flags when populations of tigers or their prey fluctuate.

The work is physically demanding — tigers can travel as far as 60 miles on a given day, within a home range that can span 300 square miles.

"They're incredibly elusive," Miquelle says. "And when they don't have a collar on them, they're like ghosts."

The Wildlife Conservation Society office also works closely with local game wardens and conservation officers. In the case of Roman Kozhichev, a government conservation officer responsible for 10,400 square miles of Siberian tiger territory ringing the Sikhote-Alin Reserve, the society goes a step further. It supplies Kozhichev's cash-strapped agency with its only patrol car and money for fuel.

"Judging from the money we get from the state, we can see that no one in government cares about preservation of nature, and the Siberian tiger in particular," says Kozhichev, 25, who makes $250 a month and oversees a staff of four. "Apparently they have more pressing issues to take care of."

In Russian courts, poachers rarely receive more than a slap on the wrist, Miquelle and Russian conservation leaders say. On average, one or two Russians get arrested each year for tiger poaching and face a maximum of 3 years in jail. But in the past 15 years, no one has ever served any jail time for poaching a tiger, says Vladimir Krever, coordinator of the World Wildlife Fund's Moscow office.

In most cases, poachers are fined between $500 and $1,000, an amount dwarfed by the $15,000 a poacher can make from a single tiger carcass, according to the WWF. On the black market, prices for tiger parts soar: $380 for a pound of meat, $180 for a pound of bone, $120 for a tooth.

In Chinese traditional medicine, virtually every part of a tiger carcass is used — either pulverized into a powder or boiled to make tinctures and broths.

Miquelle and Russian conservation leaders say the best hope for ensuring a Siberian tiger revival, says Miquelle, lies in wholesale changes in Russian attitudes toward poaching. That won't be easy in a country where poaching fish, berries, deer, timber and tigers has been a way of life for centuries.

"It's part of the culture," Miquelle says, "partly because the laws are such that it almost makes it impossible to do things legally, to get licenses legally. So they do it illegally, which is the way they have always done it."