TIGERS BETWEEN EMPIRES

A study of conservation biology in action in the quest to recover an endangered species.

Admirers of Akira Kurosawa’s film Dersu Uzala and the memoir by V.K. Arseniev on which it’s based will know the story of the Amur tiger, extirpated from its forested, mountainous habitat by loggers and miners a century ago. Bordering Russia and China, the Amur region suffered from breakneck development in both countries. Fortunately, efforts by Soviet scientists in the 1930s to set aside habitat helped preserve the rare Amur tiger, while “laws prohibited sport hunting of adult tigers, then later banned the capture of cubs.” The work continues today in an increasingly uncommon joint effort by Russian and American biologists—uncommon in part, conservationist Slaght writes, because after the fall of the Soviet Union, “few people in Russia had pursued wildlife science degrees, as a lack of funding and future prospects made it difficult to earn a living wage.” In China, tigers were long valued—and killed—for their presumed medicinal powers. Some Amur tigers traveled back and forth between the two countries, the “strange space between two empires,” fording the swift-flowing, wide Amur River, and in the process, Slaght notes, raising important questions: “How do these animals navigate hostile landscapes? How many transients live to establish their own territories, find mates, and breed? How do they die?” Such questions are being answered, and even in China the Amur tiger is flourishing, relatively speaking. Whereas by Slaght’s accounting there may have been only 18 to 20 wild tigers in both countries half a century ago, now there may be a hundred or more, with additional hundreds in a nearby Russian wildlife preserve. “We are closer than ever to seeing Amur tigers return to northeast Asia as a contiguous population,” Slaght concludes in this fluent narrative, which is as much about human history as it is about wild cats.

A well-crafted story of a successful conservation effort, against all the odds.