Young Tigers Reunite After Release Into the Wild

An innovative new conservation program is on a mission to repopulate 270,000 square miles of northeast Asia with an endangered species of tigers that once roamed the area, The NYT reports. The program has already successfully released 12 tiger cubs raised in captivity, including two young lovers that trekked through more than 100 miles of frozen forest to find each other. 

Boris and Svetlaya
Boris and Svetlaya are two Amur tigers from different prides that were both orphaned in the wild when they were around four months old. Smithsonian Magazine explains that it’s not uncommon for young Amur tigers to lose their mothers, citing a study that tracked the ability to release orphaned cubs raised in captivity, back to the wild. Researchers surmised that cubs are orphaned after mother tigers, defending their litter, are killed by poachers.

Whatever the reason for their abandonment, Smithsonian Magazine continues, Boris and Svetlaya were rescued and raised together in a special conservation program designed to teach young cubs the skills they need to be re-introduced to the wild. 

At 18 months, the cubs’ caretakers dropped them back off in the Siberian wilderness. They were released 100 miles away from each other with the goal of expanding the range of these endangered felines. 

However, a year after Boris’s release, researchers observed the big cat walking straight across the forest for 120 miles, where he reunited with his cub-mate Svetlaya. Six months later, the pair gave birth to a litter of cubs.

Teaching cubs to hunt in captivity
Boris and Svetlaya’s love story was made possible by a unique and innovative conservation program that seeks to prepare cubs raised in captivity for life in the wild. This program minimizes the young tigers’ contact with humans and feeds them live prey so that they learn the necessary hunting skills for life outside the program. The cubs start out hunting rabbits and pheasants in their enclosures and graduate to large prey, such as boar and deer.

 Learning to hunt isn’t intuitive, even for Amur tigers, Dale Miquelle, a tiger researcher working at Boris and Svetlaya’s conservation program, shared with Smithsonian Magazine when the program first opened its doors in 2015.

“It was like a kid trying to figure out a puzzle,” Miquelle told Smithsonian Magazine about one tiger cub teaching herself to hunt boar. “She got it, but it took a little time.”  

Fast forward a decade, NYT reports that the program has successfully released 12 of the 13 orphaned tigers that it raised, back into the wild. The exception was one graduate who, once released, demonstrated a preference for hunting domesticated goats over wild deer. Conservationists recaptured the cub and he is now living out his life in a zoo. 

The other 12 released tigers have acclimated to their new homes in the Siberian wilderness, producing between themselves at least six litters of cubs of their own and hunting with an identical success rate to tigers raised in the wild, according to a statement by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

Miquelle writes in the statement that, “Basically, the data demonstrated that orphaned cubs, raised in captivity and released, were just as good as wild tigers at hunting, targeting the same types of wild prey, and very rarely killing livestock.This success demonstrates that tigers with proper isolation from humans and provided the opportunity to learn to hunt, can be successfully re-released into the wild.”

Restoring the range

According to the WCS statement, tigers currently occupy only eight percent of the area that they lived in centuries ago. Although much of their historical range is now settled by humans or no longer suitable for tigers, one study found that the mountains of northeastern Asia contain as much 270,000 miles of habitat that would be suitable for the tigers but is “empty” of them. 

“The grand vision, “executive director of the Big Cats Program, WCS, Luke Hunter, tells the New York Times, “is that this whole area would be connected. There’s lots of habitat that could be recolonized by tigers.”

While 12 cubs is a small start towards the “grand vision” of filling the forest with tigers once again, the WCS statement indicates that their successful release, “provide a pathway for returning tigers to large parts of Asia where habitat still exists but where tigers have been lost.” And, as Boris and Svetlaya’s story demonstrates, these big cats are determined and can find their way to live, hunt, and raise cubs, in the wilderness that they call home.