Twenty-five years ago, when I was beginning my research on tiger conservation, the great field biologist George Schaller gave me some advice: ‘the problems of conservation are universal but solutions are always local.’ At the time, poaching was laying waste to tiger populations all across Asia, but the political situation in the Russian Far East, where poaching took place against a backdrop of habitat exploitation and post-Soviet corruption, was uniquely challenging. Any scheme to slow the decline of its tiger population would have to take account of all that. 

Siberian tigers travel far. In India, a tigress might hunt an area of twenty square miles; in Russia, it could be two hundred. Field scientists hardly ever see a Siberian tiger, researching them instead through the use of camera traps and radio-telemetry (which involves snaring a tiger, tranquillising it and attaching a collar that transmits its location). These scientists, Russian and American, are the heroes of Jonathan Slaght’s fascinating and important new book, Tigers Between Empires. 

In September 2002, as I walked with these same scientists in the forests of the southern province of Primorye, they told me that, although there was a lot of hunting and they often heartbreakingly lost radio-collared tigers to poachers, tiger numbers were stable at about 450. Today, thanks to their