On September 26, 2021, an infrared camera in the jurisdiction of the Tianqiaoling Forestry Bureau in Jilin Province captured a Siberian tiger.
It is "Wandashan No. 1", since it was captured in the village of Mishan City, Heilongjiang Province on April 23, 2021, to the release in Muling City, Heilongjiang Province, on May 18, and now wandering from Heilongjiang to Jilin to prepare to establish its own territory, people have also changed from panic to adaptation, from curiosity to understanding...
This is the story of a tiger that concerns 1.4 billion people.
"China's Big Cat", by Lü Zhi, CITIC Publishing Group, July 2022 edition
Why do tigers enter the village? A national concern and reflection on tigers
On April 23, 2021, in Linhu Village, Baiyuwan Town, Mishan City, Heilongjiang Province, a Siberian tiger appeared in the village, and the video instantly detonated the Internet.
The tiger ran fast, and a few steps approached its target: a woman standing in a field.
It leapt forward and threw the woman in a standard hunting position, but instead of following the hunt, it continued to run forward. The Siberian tiger's actions put itself in danger, but it may have saved itself — it didn't become a murderous tiger. The way people deal with the killer tiger is either to kill or put in a zoo, of which the former is the majority.
At 21:00 that night, the Siberian tiger wandered the village for nearly 15 hours before being anesthetized and captured by the rescue team.
But why did the tiger enter the village? Who is it? Where did it come from? Where is it going?
This Siberian tiger is about 2 meters long, weighs about 225 kilograms, and is 2 to 3 years old. This age is the same as the seventeen or eighteen years old of humans for wild tigers, and judging from the posture and mobility it shows, it is undoubtedly a male tiger with the ability to survive in the wild.
Siberian Tiger (illustration on the inside page of "The Big Cat of China")
The town of Whitefish Bay, which occurred, is located in the northwest corner of Xingkai Lake, and there is no mountain forest suitable for tigers to survive. However, about 100 kilometers east of here is the largest tiger population in Russia, the Sikhot arin population. About 50 kilometers to the north is the northern extension of the Changbai Mountains, the Wanda Mountain, which extends from southwest to northeast, where tigers have been reported from time to time in recent years, and its northeast end is also next to the Sikhot arin population. To the south from Baiyuwan Town is TaipingLing and Laoye Ridge on the southwest side of Xingkai Lake, which used to be the habitat of Siberian tigers, and now there are occasional reports of tigers. The southern part of Laoye Ridge is the Siberian Tiger and Leopard National Park, which is about 200 kilometers away from the town of Whitefish Bay.
Taken together, the source of this tiger should be the Sikhote Alin population. In fact, in recent years, with the strengthening of conservation efforts, the population has continued to grow, its habitat in Russia has become saturated, and many individuals have tried to spread to China, and the increasingly frequent reports of Siberian tigers along the Wandashan line may be related to this. Therefore, it is very likely that this tiger is a wild Siberian tiger that has recently entered China and is trying to have "Chinese nationality".
As a young male tiger, like many of its predecessors, it left its birthplace to begin looking for a new habitat to establish its territory. The territory of tigers is very large, and the russian female Siberian tiger has a home area of 224 to 414 square kilometers, and the male tiger is 800 to 1000 square kilometers. There are few such large continuous habitats in eastern Heilongjiang, and this long-distance Siberian tiger has found that in its habitat, on the roads where it spreads, there are villages everywhere, and there is no way to avoid it.
Perhaps before that, it had quietly crossed many roads, bridges, and villages, but it had not been discovered by humans; It may be that the village dogs, pigs and other domestic animals attracted it; Perhaps it just came to the vicinity of the village at night, and then found a hidden place to rest during the day, planning to wait until the night to leave under the cover of night, and continue its diffuse exploration until it finally found its ideal home. However, it was discovered and later caught, which triggered a national concern and thinking about the tiger.
The perfect ending of wildlife rescue must be successfully released into the wild
After the tiger was caught and its physical condition was confirmed, "whether to release the tiger to the mountain" became a hot topic of discussion: some people thought that this tiger was not afraid of people, and after being released, it would develop the habit of attacking people; Some people also feel that it should be kept in place to "keep seeds" for captive Siberian tigers; There are also people who are worried that it can't take care of itself because of its eye injuries...
Some people say that after releasing the rescued tigers back into the mountains and forests, there are endless troubles, because "tigers that will hurt people are not afraid of people, and they will hurt people again after being released." However, is this tiger that enters the village really not afraid of people? This is not the case. In fact, it is very afraid, but it will not curl up in a ball, shiver or run out of control, but will try to dodge, leave, such as nervously curled up in the grass behind the abandoned house, uneasy walking in the exposed field, looking left and right, pressing down the body and trotting across the road, angrily throwing itself at the tracking car or the exposed human and leaving immediately, etc., all of which shows that this Siberian tiger entering the village is actually as panicked as we are, and is very panicked about this unexpected encounter. Even after being hit by anesthesia gun, it did not actively attack people without interference, and it did not consciously kill the victim during the attack, the whole process was more like a kind of displacement of harassment.
A female Siberian tiger walking in the snow. Li Dongwei / Photo (Illustration on the inside page of "Chinese Big Cat")
In addition, there is no scientific basis for "the release of the wounded tiger will hurt people again". On the one hand, the tiger's prey is not human, but the tiger's home area is too large, and it is difficult not to encounter humans. In most cases, tigers are wary and avoid encounters with humans, and even in India, where tiger densities are high (tiger populations can range from 8.5 to 16.8 per 100 square kilometers in some parts of India), tiger casualties are quite rare. On the other hand, even if the tiger is detained, there is no guarantee that no other tigers will appear in the village. Instead, putting a satellite tracking collar on a tiger and monitoring its movements allows researchers and policymakers to understand the tiger's habits and living conditions, and to take measures such as evacuation or eviction before it approaches a human settlement to prevent problems before they occur.
Is "seed retention" feasible? Many people believe that the living conditions of wild animals in the wild are very bad, and wild tigers entering the tiger park to be "wrapped up" not only has no worries about food and clothing, but also improves the genes of captive tigers... However, for a solitary animal with a vast home, captivity can never meet the needs of its nature, and the total number of captive tigers in China has surpassed that of wild tigers, and the addition of this wild Siberian tiger does not have much significance for captive populations. Correspondingly, according to data released by the State Forestry and Grassland Administration and the Siberian Tiger and Leopard National Park in 2021, the number of wild Siberian tigers in China is only about 50 – just enough for a class size in schools, so a wild male Siberian tiger contributes much more to the population in the wild than it does in tiger parks.
In the images after the capture of the tiger, it was also found that one of the tiger's eyes had congestion problems, although the official news said that its eyes had recovered the next day, there were still many people who worried that its eyes were not good, or that its limbs were injured in the conflict, and its ability to survive after being released into the wild was worrying... In fact, the vitality of wild animals is more tenacious than we think, even if its eyes are not fully restored, it does not affect its return to the wild. In the wild, even if there is a disability, most cats can hunt normally, and infrared cameras have also photographed blind leopards, severed snow leopards, tigers and other special individuals.
For example, in February 2012, in Primorsky Krai in russia's Far East, a 4-month-old female Siberian tiger cub was found, when it was in a state of extreme hunger and coma, accompanied by frostbite, and its mother was likely killed by poachers. Due to frostbite, rescuers removed 1/3 of his necrotic tail. Fifteen months later, in May 2013, the Siberian tiger was released into the wild and soon adapted to the wild environment, and later gave birth to a baby tiger.
Another example is that in January 2017, a male Siberian tiger cub was sent to a rescue center in Russia's Jewish autonomous region because of a face shot. Veterinary experts reconstructed the skeletal structures around the nose and maxilla and completed eye surgery. In May 2018, it was released into the wild. The male Siberian tiger hunted its first prey in only three days of release and successfully established its territory.
So, in the face of wild animals, what kind of rescue attitude is correct? The deputy director of Xining Wildlife Park, who once rescued snow leopards who broke into houses, has a vivid analogy about this: "It is unreasonable for a person to go to the hospital to see a cold and then lie in the inpatient department and not leave; Similarly, when people come to the hospital to check for a cold, the hospital directly buttons people down and presses them to the inpatient department to not let them go, which is even more unreasonable. ”
The perfect ending of wildlife rescue must be successfully released into the wild, and the same is true of this tiger.
Released to "Wandasan 1": The tiger cannot avoid the future of encounters with humans
At 8:00 a.m. on May 18, 2021, Heilongjiang Muling, "Wandashan No. 1" will be released soon. After the cage door was opened, the male Siberian tiger wearing a collar first carefully sniffed outside the door for about 20 seconds, then stepped forward with his right palm and slowly stepped out of the cage. After leaving the cage, it squatted and looked in the direction of the cage for a while, then quickly turned around, quickly left the cage, and walked deep into the forest...
"Wandasan No.1" with a collar. (Illustration on the inside page of "Chinese Big Cat")
This is the first time that China has successfully rescued and released a wild Siberian tiger. In the face of this Siberian tiger that accidentally broke into a human village, in the midst of panic and controversy, we finally made the best treatment at present in the most feasible way at present – which seems to represent another step forward in China's wild tiger conservation.
However, the release is only the beginning, and the subsequent living conditions of "Wandashan No. 1" and the emergency plan for re-entering the human settlement area require continuous monitoring and risk and responsibility of relevant personnel.
Thanks to the satellite tracking collar, we know that "Wandashan 1" soon entered the Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park and wandered back and forth around the national park for a long time: on May 25, 2021, it entered the Jilin Tianqiaoling Forest Area within the Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park; On August 12, it appeared at the junction of the Tianqiaoling Forest Area and the Heilongjiang Forest Area; On September 26, an infrared camera of Xiangyang Forest Farm in the Tianqiaoling Forest Area captured its video; On October 29, it entered the Shanghe Forest Farm in the Tianqiaoling Forest Area; On November 27, it was photographed in the northeast fork forest area of Mudanjiang City, Heilongjiang Province; On December 16, it was photographed at the Xiangshui Forest Farm in the Tianqiaoling Forest Area; On December 27, it was photographed by the Forestry Bureau of Tokyo City, Heilongjiang... Whenever it appears, the relevant departments will release early warning information to the people in the forest area in a timely manner, and the patrol and inspection team will conduct field investigations based on the tracking trajectory to assess its survival and health status in the wild.
Siberian tiger in Siberian Leopard National Park. Feng Limin/Courtesy photo (Illustration on the inside page of "China's Big Cat")
The entry into the village of "Wandashan No. 1" also seems to herald the future in which tigers cannot avoid encountering humans, and this will never be the last time a wild Siberian tiger will approach humans. So next time, can we face this "encounter" more rationally and scientifically?
Ideally, when we find a tiger sleeping in the back corner of the house in the morning, we can:
1. Promptly notify the villagers to close their accounts to ensure their own safety;
2. Notify the professional disposal team to arrive at the scene, observe and evaluate the tiger with a telescope or other equipment at a safe distance: shoot and identify the tiger individual with a telephoto camera, judge its health status through the image, and assess whether it needs rescue;
3. If the tiger is injured or emotionally unstable, it will be rescued quickly;
4. If the tiger itself is not in trouble, it is driven out of the village by scientific means of expulsion, or waiting and monitoring its movements until it leaves on its own – after all, a wild tiger does not live in the village all the time.
For humans, tigers are not prey, but competitors of land and prey, and enemies when operating in the wild; For the tiger, although it has the ability to kill humans, humans are not its prey. During the long years of man-tiger rivalry, tigers learned to see humans as natural enemies. As a very vigilant and concealed cat, although the tiger is the top species in nature, a normal, healthy tiger will instinctively avoid humans and avoid conflict with humans. However, the tiger needs such a vast home area, and the footsteps of humans are so deep into every corner of the earth, it cannot avoid encountering humans after all.
Siberian tiger. Li Dongwei / Photo (Illustration on the inside page of "Chinese Big Cat")
Today's tigers have become objects of protection in the face of humans, and their number in the wild is now only more than 4,500 – less than the weekend traffic of a large shopping mall in China's third-tier city, and a drop in the ocean compared to China's huge population of 1.4 billion. But tiger protection does not mean just protecting tigers in the forest, and the safety of humans who are their neighbors also needs to be guaranteed. In the face of the inevitable encounter between man and tiger, I hope that one day, we can form a more perfect emergency response mechanism for human-tiger conflicts and move towards a future where people and tigers coexist in harmony.
For nearly 100 years, tiger populations have declined dramatically
Once widely distributed across Asia, the population of tigers today has plummeted from 100,000 100 100 years ago to about 4,500, and its range has shrunk to about 7% of its historical range.
Today, the tiger is found only in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Russian Far East and China's northeast and southwestern borders. Among them, the Bengal tiger is distributed in South Asia, mainly found in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and there are also very small distributions in southeast tibet, China; The Siberian tiger, once widely distributed in Russia's Siberia region, northeast China and the Korean Peninsula, is today only found in the Russian Far East and parts of northeast China near the border; Indochina tigers and Malay tigers are divided from north to south in the Indochina Peninsula by the Isthmus of Thailand, and the Indochinese tigers in the north have been distributed from Yunnan, China to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and other places in the past, and are now mainly found in Thailand, and the Southern Malay Tiger is mainly distributed in Malaysia; The Balinese Tiger, the Sumatran Tiger and the Javanese Tiger once dominated the three Indonesian islands – Bali, Sumatra and Java – and today only the Sumatran Tiger represents the last glory of the Island Tiger.
Tiger (illustration on the inside page of Big Cat China)
Caspian tigers that used to live in Central and Western Asia have also become extinct, and their records ended in the 1970s. The South China tiger in southern China also disappeared from the wild at the turn of the century.
In China, tigers have also spread throughout the country, and in addition to Taiwan and Hainan, other provinces and regions have records of tiger distribution. China once had four subspecies of Siberian tiger (including Caspian tiger), South China tiger, Bengal tiger and Indochina tiger, which is the country with the largest number of tiger subspecies in the world, of which the South China tiger is a subspecies endemic to China. Today, however, only Siberian tigers maintain a stable population in the Changbai Mountains on the northeastern border, and Bengal tigers retain potential hope on the southern slopes of the Himalayas in southeastern Tibet.
As a widely distributed big cat, tigers can adapt to different habitat types. They are more common in relatively gentle hilly areas, and the high grass and sparse forest areas around some wetlands are also preferred environments for tigers. Tigers can also adapt to large mountain ranges, but avoid particularly steep peaks. The size of the tiger determines that it will avoid particularly dense jungle areas, and a certain degree of openness is an important condition for its hunting. No matter where they live, tigers prefer a watery environment.
In the past 100 years, with the expansion of human activities to occupy the habitat of tigers, as well as the large-scale hunting of tigers due to their fur and medical use, human-animal conflicts, the population of tigers has declined sharply, the Javan tiger, the Balinese tiger and the Caspian tiger that is now considered to be annexed to the Siberian tiger have become extinct, and the South China tiger has disappeared from the wild and remained only in zoos. Now, although all countries have legislated to prohibit the direct hunting of tigers, habitat destruction and hunting activities have led to a continuous decline in large ungulate populations such as bison and red deer on which tigers depend, making it difficult for tiger populations to recover. The total number of wild tigers extant is only about 4,500. Among them, the Bengal tiger is the largest surviving subspecies of tiger, with a population of about 3300; It is followed by Siberian tigers with more than 600 (2018 data); The number of wild Indochinese tigers is about 300; The number of Malay tigers is about 250.
Bengal Tiger Footprints. Wang Yuan/Photo (Illustration on the inside page of "Chinese Big Cat")
Tigers represent the integrity and health of forest ecosystems
In China, the tiger's range has retreated to the northeast and southwest borders. The Caspian tiger in Xinjiang has been basically extinct in the early 20th century, the South China tiger widely spread from central to southeast has also become extinct in the wild, the Indochinese tiger distributed in Yunnan has not been reliably recorded in the field for more than 10 years, and the current population of the Bengal tiger distributed in southeast Tibet is unknown, and only the Siberian tiger distributed in the northeast region has real hope of revival.
As a subspecies of tiger endemic to China, the fate of the South China tiger is the most breathtaking. Historically, the South China tiger was the most widely distributed tiger subspecies in China, from southern China to the entire central China region, and then to east China, south China and parts of southwest China. Because these areas are also suitable for human agricultural development and habitation, the South China tiger has also become the most acutely contradictory beast with humans. Since the 1950s, with economic development and population booms, as well as the disorderly use of natural resources by humans, the South China tiger has been hunted as a pest and economic product, and by the 1970s, the record of the Wild South China tiger has been very rare.
Since 1990, many large-scale surveys of South China tigers have found no evidence of wild survival of South China tigers. At present, more than 200 South China tigers live in captivity, and since they are all the offspring of 6 wild-caught tigers, they face high inbreeding pressure and it is difficult to revive into a promising healthy population. And their native habitat has long been occupied by dense populations, fertile farmland and busy cities, making it difficult to find a continuous forest that can support the South China tiger population.
In May 2007, researchers at Beijing Normal University photographed a wild Indochinese tiger with an infrared camera in the China-Laos border area of the Xishuangbanna Nature Reserve in Yunnan. In February 2009, an Indochinese tiger was illegally hunted in the same area, and there has been no reliable record of Indochinese tigers in Yunnan since then. Since tigers in Laos and Vietnam, which border China, have also become extinct, and the area where tigers are found in Myanmar does not border China, the possibility of natural spread of indochinating into China is basically non-existent.
In Tibet's Metuo County, There were frequent attacks on livestock by Bengal tigers in the 1990s.
Bengal Tiger Footprints (illustration on the inside page of "Big Cats of China")
In 1996, a tiger that frequently attacked livestock was approved for shooting, at which point the mertugadang township was thought to have survived the Bengal tiger population. In 2019, researchers once again photographed Bengal tigers through infrared cameras in Metuo, according to which it was judged that there were indeed Bengal tigers living in southeast Tibet. Relying on the excellent habitat of the southern slopes of the Himalayas, the Bengal tiger may still have hopes of population revival in the southeastern Tibet-southern Tibet region.
Historically, siberian tigers were distributed in the three northeastern provinces of China and most of northeastern Inner Mongolia, and entered northern Hebei. After entering the 20th century, the population of Siberian tigers in China continued to shrink, and by the first few years of the 21st century, The Siberian tigers in China were on the verge of extinction. In the vast Russian Far East adjacent to the northeast, the most important distribution area of the Siberian tiger, the Siberian tiger was also endangered in the 1930s due to poaching and other factors, and fewer than 100 of them remained. However, after decades of conservation management, the number of Siberian tigers in Russia has begun to pick up, and today it has more than 600. These Siberian tigers have also begun to infiltrate or spread into China, bringing hope for the revival of China's Siberian tiger population.
In recent years, with the establishment of the Siberian Tiger and Leopard National Park, China has carried out fruitful work on the monitoring and protection of Siberian tigers. According to data released by the government in 2021, the number of wild Siberian tigers in China has reached 50. Unlike the South China tiger, which has lost its homeland, there are still large areas of potential Siberian tiger habitat in northeast China, so the wild Siberian tiger population in China is expected to show a growing trend against the background of increasing protection of the Siberian tiger and leopard.
The tiger is the top carnivore on land in Asia, and it represents the integrity and health of the forest ecosystem. Tigers need a large number of prey and large areas of habitat for survival, and the protection of tigers means the comprehensive protection of the ecological environment. Although there are still considerable mountain forests in many parts of China, the tiger's main prey, such as sika deer, sambar deer and other large deer, is very scarce, which means that the tiger has no hope of returning to the wild. Only by systematically and comprehensively restoring the ecological environment, restoring the composition of different levels of biomes, from plants to large herbivores, and strengthening the study and population restoration of tigers, will it be possible to return tigers to their hometowns across China in the future.
This article is selected from "Chinese Big Cat", which has been abridged and modified compared with the original text, and the subtitle is added by the editor, not owned by the original text. The illustrations used in this article are from the book. It has been authorized by the publishing house to publish.
Original author / Lü Zhi
Excerpts/Ann also
Edit/Zhang Jin
Introduction Proofreading/Chen Diyan