EAZA Tiger Campaign 2002/4

Project 6 - Latest News Letter from Russia by Goodrich, J., Wildlife Conservation Society, 2003. Notes from the field. The river is inches from breaching its banks as my Russian colleague Sasha and I launch our kayaks into its roiling waters. I wonder if Oksana Pahomovna, the radio-collared Siberian tigress we're searching for, met her fate while trying to swim across the swollen river. Or did she meet with a poacher's bullet, as have most of our other tigers over the past ten years? When Sasha located this cat from the air, the inactive signal he picked up indicated that Oksana was dead, but we need to find out for sure. Two hours downstream, we manoeuvre our kayaks ashore. Following her signal on foot, we push through dense brush and climb over jumbled piles of logs left by previous floods. Within ten minutes, a strong signal leads us back to the river's edge, where we pick our way out into the middle of a logjam. We find the collar tied to a plastic bottle that has washed up on a log. The bottle served as a float, carrying the collar several miles from the scene of the crime. I have seen this too many times in the seven years that I've been tracking tigers in the Russian Far East: a collar crudely cut from its owner. As I hold Oksana's collar in my hands, I remember all the others: Natasha, Nadia, Vita . . . Their collars hang in my office, a collection of memorials to murdered friends. Each cat has its own story. The winter of 2001 was bitterly cold, with deep snows. Oksana, weak and desperate from starvation after losing two toes in a steel trap, began killing dogs in a village. One night, she killed a dog and spent the night sheltered in its doghouse. In the morning, villagers barricaded her inside with boards. Too weak to break out, she was captured and taken to the Utes Wildlife Rehabilitation Center near Khabarovsk. There, she regained her strength. Five months later, in July, the decision was made by Utes' staff and representatives of the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and WCS to radio-collar and release Oksana and another tigress, Troya, away from people, near the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Zapovednik (Reserve). Within a few weeks, Troya moved into an area with high human activity and disappeared. It's likely she was shot and her radio-collar destroyed. But Oksana, after moving nearly 100 miles from her release site, established a new territory. There she remained until her death thirteen months later. After her release, we monitored Oksana on biweekly flights. Early in her first winter, we located her near a logging camp. Worried that she might again turn to people for food, we dispatched a ground team to the area to keep closer tabs on her. They arrived the next morning, but Oksana had already left, and fresh snow overnight had covered her tracks. However, the loggers reported sighting tiger tracks on a nearby road. Oksana had avoided the camp. They also discovered fresh scat with wild boar hair in it, suggesting that Oksana had been able to kill large wild prey on her own. And indeed, from the plane a month later, we saw her near the carcass of a wild boar she had killed. Oksana Pahomovna had fulfilled three of the four criteria we use to evaluate a successful release: survival over the course of two months, survival through the first winter, and no problems with people. The fourth criteria, and ultimate measure of success, is reproduction, but a poacher killed Oksana before she had time to breed. Still, we consider this experiment our first-ever attempt at releasing a rehabilitated Siberian tiger back into the wild a success.