A SIBERIAN TIGER IS RESCUED FROM POACHER’S SNARE STORY AND PHOTOS BY JOHN GOODRICH
FEBRUARY 21, 2004. Two Russian wildlife students are hiking
through the forest in the Russian Far East counting tracks of
tigers and tiger prey. They are 20 miles from the nearest town,
which is another 60 miles from nowhere. Suddenly, they hear a
tiger’s roars and moans of distress. They stop and listen. The
roars are coming from one spot and apparently from only one tiger.
Slowly and silently, hearts pounding, the students creep forward.
They see movement through the firs, and with a few more
steps they see the tiger. He is caught in a cable snare set by poachers,
one end cinched tightly around his body, the other tied securely
to a tree.
The students could have slipped away and returned a few
days later to collect the tiger’s bones and skin, worth between
$5,000 and $10,000 on the black market—probably more than
the two of them together made during 2003. Instead, they rushed
three miles through knee-deep snow to contact a tiger specialist
from Ussurisky Zapovednik (Reserve).
The specialist then drove more than 50 miles over terrible
roads to get to a telephone—there is no cell phone service in most
of that region—and relay the information to the Russian Ministry
of Natural Resources’ Inspection Tiger Department in
Vladivostok. Inspection Tiger, in turn, contacted Boris Litveenov,
head of their Tiger Response Team, in Terney, more than 400
miles to the north.
Litveenov’s Tiger Response team was en route home after ten
days of trying (and failing) to capture a tiger that had been killing
livestock in the Chuguevsky district. To find the team, Litveenov
skipped dinner, hopped in his car, and drove south. He met them
an hour later, and they all immediately turned around and headed
for the distressed tiger, a drive of about six hours.
Litveenov, Evgeny Tsarapkin, Victor Koodrin, and Hermann
Tretiakov of the Tiger Response Team and Nikolai Reebin, capture
specialist for the WCS Siberian Tiger Project, arrived at the
site at about one in the morning on February 22. Nikolai quickly
loaded darts with anesthetizing agent, and the group followed
their flashlight beams toward the frightened and angry roars emanating
from the darkness. After Nikolai fired the anesthetizing
darts into the cat, the team backed off until the drug took effect.
With the tiger safely and soundly sleeping, the team removed
the snare and examined the cat for injuries. Although snares
large enough to hold tigers are often set for ungulates and tigers
are sometimes captured incidentally, the snare appeared to have
been set specifically to catch a tiger. To the team’s surprise, they
found only abrasions around the animal’s chest, which although
probably painful, were far from life threatening. Still, the snare
had been tight around the tiger’s abdomen, and Litveenov, who
is ultimately responsible for the tiger, decided to take the animal
into captivity for observation.
The team transported the tiger to Terney, the base of the Tiger
Response Team and the WCS/Hornocker Wildlife Institute
Siberian Tiger Project. Along the way, the tiger was dubbed Victor,
after Victor Koodrin, who had driven us safely to the cat.
At Terney, Victor was released into a small enclosure. He
was estimated to be an eight- to ten-year-old male, unusually fat
and healthy. He weighed 385 pounds, and measured more than
six feet from the tip of his nose to the base of his tail. Including
his tail, Victor was nearly ten feet long. After several days of observation,
we decided to put a radio collar on and release him.
Much snow had fallen since Victor was captured, and it was
unlikely that we would be able to drive all the way to the spot
where he had been captured. This made little difference, because
a tiger’s territory is huge—often more than 400 square miles. On
February 29, Reebin, Tsarapkin, and I transported the tiger back
and released it about a mile from the capture site.
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