New photos: more evidence that Amur tigers still burn bright in the forests of the night.

July 10, 2017

I saw the pictures just 17 minutes after they were posted on BBC Earth’s official website, under the heading “Rare Siberian tiger ‘selfie’ pictures are released.” A camera trap recorded the images of big cats at play in Russia’s remote Far East, in Russia’s somewhat prosaically named Land of the Leopard National Park.

The park, 262,000 hectares (650,000 acres) of untrammelled wilderness in one of the most remote corners of the world’s largest country, was established in 2012, thanks to the merger of Russia’s Kedrovaya Pad Reserve, Barsovy Federal Wildlife Refuge and Borisovkoya Plateau Regional Wildlife Refuge. The newly created park was named for the Amur leopard, officially labelled the “world’s rarest cat” by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The Amur tiger, also known as the Siberian tiger, is doing little better, though recent surveys suggest their numbers have increased slightly in recent years, thanks in no small part to Russia’s renewed focus on big-cat conservation and habitat preservation in the remote Primorsky Krai region of Russia, which borders China in the southeast.

Population surveys are one thing. Actual photographic evidence is quite another. Seeing is believing, after all.

No more than two dozen tigers are said to be roaming in the park, but two dozen is better than none, especially when the species itself is facing extinction.

The new images are particularly striking because they show a young family at play — a sight rarely seen by human eyes, let alone photographed. The Amur tiger may be nature’s largest big cat by size, but they’re reclusive and rarely seen.

The advent of camera traps, which can be set up well in advance and eliminate the need for any human-animal interaction, have had a profound influence on both wildlife photography and conservation studies in recent years.

Russian scientists are taking a strictly objective approach in their tiger studies. There’s no room for sentiment here, no Bambi-style anthropomorphization with cuddly, human-sounding names.

The mother tiger featured in the photos is known as T7F. She was first photographed in 2014. She had three cubs at the time two of which have grown and are now believed to be across the border in China.

China has also taken a more protective attitude toward its remaining wild tiger population, which had been heavily poached for its fur and so-called medicinal properties.

If nothing else, the pictures prove one thing: Where there’s life, there’s still light at the end of the tunnel.

http://blogs.wwf.org.uk/blog/wildlife/tigers/tigers-and-camera-traps/

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/amur-tiger

Tiger, tiger, still burning bright in the forests of the night.

June 30, 2017

Good news is increasingly rare these days — as rare, one might say, as the Amur tiger.

The Amur tiger — commonly known by its more familiar though less geographically specific label, the Siberian tiger — is of particular interest right now because recent surveys suggest the fabled cat’s numbers are actually rising.

Make no mistake: the Siberian tiger is still critically endangered. Just 500 to 1,000 remain.

Understand, though, that those numbers, while low, have climbed from an estimated 20 to 30 cats just a few decades ago. (Estimates range as high as 1,000, but I always prefer to guess low. Environmental studies teach us that, where numbers are concerned, especially apex predators like tigers, it’s always a good idea to focus on the low end of the guessing scale.)

A World Wildlife Fund appeal designed to highlight the threat of habitat destruction and climate change, as opposed to illegal hunting and poaching, appears to be having a more pronounced effect, at least in eastern Russia where tiger numbers are believed to have increased in recent years.

It’s easy to blame illegal hunting, especially as it comes with a seemingly obvious and relatively simple solution: Catch poachers in the act, prosecute them to the full extent of the law, and jail them for as long as it takes to send a stern message.

Habitat destruction and climate change are harder to fight. They’re more costly than a simple policing operation, and take more time. The hard truth is that without large enough habitats to hunt in and procreate, apex predators cannot survive in any appreciable number, regardless of whether they’re being hunted illegally or not.

The World Wildlife Fund, in conjunction with efforts like the National Geographic Society’s “Big Cats Initiative,” has unveiled a campaign to increase the world’s wild tiger population to 6,000 over the next five years. Not entirely by coincidence, the year 2022 is the next official Chinese year of the tiger.

The world has lost 97 per cent of its tigers in little more than a century, according to World Wildlife Fund estimates. The tide has turned, however, albeit slightly. Last year, the World Wildlife Fund reported that the global tiger population — all tiger species — is just shy of 4,000, an increase of 700 since 2010, when the WWF estimated just 3,200 tigers remained.

The population gain has been attributed to more aggressive anti-poaching patrols and a concerted effort to preserve what remains of wild tiger habitats in countries like Russia, China, India and Nepal.

“The increase in tiger numbers is encouraging,” World Wildlife Fund tiger specialist Rebecca May told the UK Guardian newspaper this past weekend, “but the species’ future in its natural environment still hangs in the balance and numbers remain perilously low.”

©Andrew Lichtenstein,  Corbis via Getty Images for The Guardian (UK) — ©Andrew Lichtenstein, Corbis via Getty Images for The Guardian (UK)

May hopes the WWF campaign and similar programs like National Geographic’s Big Cat Initiativewill push recent progress even further. That means not only engaging animal lovers the world over to help fund and finance conservation efforts but, just as importantly — even more importantly, perhaps — encourage the commitment of and urgent action from tiger-range countries, at all levels of government.

For all the negative news reporting surrounding Russia, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin is an ardent supporter of tiger conservation, and the poaching of Siberian tigers is considered a serious crime — and dealt with accordingly.

China’s forestry authority, meanwhile, has claimed that the country’s population of Amur tigers has virtually doubled in the past 15 years, thanks largely to the country’s recently implemented National Forest Protection Program.

The numbers are still tiny by wildlife estimates — today’s population is 27 tigers, up from 14 in 1999, but officials in Northeast China, where the Amur tiger is endemic, insist the curve is headed in the right direction. Recent figures were providedby the Feline Research Centre of China’s State Forestry Administration (CSFA-FRC) and published in the Global Times, an English-language Chinese newspaper affiliated with China’s People’s Daily.

Small-scale fund-raising on a large scale may be the key to future success. The World Wildlife Fund initiative is asking members of the general public to become so-called “tiger protectors,” by agreeing to donate £5 UK pounds a month — or roughly $7 USD — to its conservation programs.

The money is destined for the black hole of “administration costs,” either; the Fund says much of the money will be used to expand existing tiger reserves, so existing wild tiger populations can mix and breed in greater numbers.

Bastak Nature Reserve, Russia ©Wikimedia Commons

The tigers’ range across Asia has shrunk by 95% over the past 150 years — roughly the same amount of time during which the world has lost 97% of its wild tigers. The similarity between the two percentages is no coincidence.

In the meantime, captive breeding programs in zoos around the world continue to try and find the answer. Later this summer, Moscow Zoo will send a three-year-old male Amur tiger to the Denver Zoo, where zoo officials hope it will breed with one of the Denver zoo’s three existing Siberian tigers. It’s becoming increasingly evident, though, that captive breeding programs alone will not suffice where saving the species is concerned.

Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano ©Wikimedia Commons

The Amur tiger is officially listed as “endangered” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), but tiger experts say the word ‘endangered’ isn’t strong enough. Even by tigers’ standards, the Amur tiger is special. It is by far the world’s largest surviving big cat; males can grow to be as large as 450 pounds, or 180 kilograms.

A long and potentially treacherous road lies ahead for the world’s remaining Amur tigers, with many hidden forks and potentially treacherous turns.

Still, in a world with so much bad news, it’s heartening — encouraging, even — to be able to grab onto a flicker of light on occasion.

When the ‘wild’ in wildlife photography isn’t all that.

May 06, 2017

Two photos. One, immaculately composed, brightly lit, showing a mountain lion, bright-eyed and well-fed in the foreground against a pristine backdrop of fresh snow. Its furry coat is glossy, every hair in place; the photo itself is in carefully measured, brilliantly sharp focus.
The second photo, in focus but otherwise unprepossessing from a technical standpoint, shows a mountain lion, skinny and weather-beaten, huddling under a rocky overhang. The semi-cave is open to the elements; the mountain lion, in dimly lit shadow is in the background. If you had not been told there was a mountain lion there, you might easily miss it. As a photo, you wouldn’t give it a second glance.
One photo becomes a lightning rod for public attention; the other is quickly forgotten.
It should be no surprise which photo was submitted to a number of prestigious wildlife photography contests.
There’s just one problem — a minor problem or a major problem, depending on your personal sense of ethics and what, if anything, constitutes a legitimate wildlife photo.
The first photo was taken in a game farm, the kind that has been proliferating of late in rural states in the continental U.S. and Canada, where visiting photographers are charged a fee — substantial, in some cases — for access to the animals.

Photographers pay a set fee for each, individual species. Bears fetch more than raccoons, and Siberian tigers are at the top of the pay scale. The animals are kept in enclosures and released into a wild-looking compound, with a handler directing their every move, when a paying photographer visits.
The second photo, taken by a field biologist fed up with seeing photos of well-fed, “happy” mountain lions supposedly living in the wild, wanted to take a “real” photo, to show ordinary, everyday animal lovers just how hard life in the wild can be for an apex predator living rough. There is no such things as a well-fed wild mountain lion in winter. Big cats don’t die of comfortable old age; they either starve, being too old to fend for themselves, or are killed by a younger, fitter, more aggressive cat moving in on its territory.

It may seem like semantics, but the issue of whether wildlife photos depict genuinely wild animals behaving naturally, without the use of bait or the promise of easy food, or whether they’re taken of captive animals under controlled circumstances has taken on added significance now that environmental and conservation photography is as prestigious as commercial art photography and photojournalism. The London Natural History Museum’s annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition and the U.S.-based Nature’s Best Awards, which culminates in an annual gallery display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC are serious, well-attended events.

©Scott Joshua Dere/Nature's Best Photography

Natural history photography is now a regular component of the World Press Photo awards and the annual Magnum Photography Awards, open to submissions right now, until the end of the month.
National Geographicwhich encourages amateur photographers to submit images to their daily “Your Shot” competition, as well as semi-annual nature and travel photographer-of-the-year competitions, features a disclaimer in its award contests requiring photographers to sign an affidavit confirming that any images of wildlife were taken in the wild unless noted otherwise.
Most people judge a photograph on its merits — either it’s a compelling photo or it isn’t — but the issue of breeding captive animals for photographic purposes has also become an animal-rights issue. Many game-farm animals are abused or are penned up in small, uncomfortable enclosures when no one is looking, as the following links to news sites show.

https://qz.com/969811/game-farm-photography-love-wildlife-photos-theres-a-good-chance-they-werent-shot-in-the-wild/

https://africageographic.com/blog/a-photographers-perspective-the-wild-vs-captive-debate/

http://www.audubon.org/magazine/march-april-2010/phony-wildlife-photography-gives-warped-view

http://www.westernwild.org/wild-vs-captive-wildlife-photography/

As with so many divisive issues, there is no easy answer, no clear-cut set-of-rules.
Swiss-born, Vancouver-based nature photographer Daisy Gilardini, whose near-miraculous sequence of photos of a mother polar bear with two virtually newborn cubs has won several prestigious awards in the past year, captured her polar bear images last March northern Canada’s Wapusk National Park, in Manitoba, in temperatures reaching 50 below zero.

It was so cold, she says, she felt shaken to the core of her being. Even for someone born and raised in the Italian-Swiss Alps, huddling in minus-50-degree temperatures for a picture of a polar bear seemed extreme — but the sacrifice was worth it in the end.
Gilardini is an avowed believer in the idea that “wild is wild,” and that images of captive or baited animals have no place in wildlife photography competitions.
Her image “Hitching a Ride” was shortlisted forthe 2016 Wildlife Photographer of the Year’s “People’s Choice Awards,” subject to a popular vote.

©Daisy Gilardini/WPOTY People’s Choice Award

Another image in the same category, a visually striking close-up of a crocodile chomping down on a ball of loose meat, was taken in a private game reserve in South Africa; the crocodile was lured to a hide by bait from the carcass of an animal that had been killed on a nearby reed island.

Another, even more evocative image in the category, showed a Japanese macaque’s hand gently cradling her sleeping baby. The image was taken at Japan’s world-famous Jigokudani Monkey Park, outside Nagano, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics.

©Alain Mafart Renodier/WPOTY People's Choice Award

Jigokudani Monkey Park is a wilderness area, famous for its snow monkeys. The monkeys are fed by park attendants — so they can be seen by tourists year-round and not just during the four months of the year it snows — the monkeys are not considered genuinely wild.
Does it really matter?
Possibly not. Except that — quite aside from the moral question of ethical treatment of animals — a competition that promotes itself as a wildlife photography contest, or even a nature photography contest, should be a true reflection of nature and the wilderness at its most wild, with no interference from outside agents, either it’s the photographer or actual, trained animal handlers.
It’s called wildlife photography, after all. The clue is in the name.