What is happening
The Amur tiger is the largest cat alive: up to ten feet nose to tail, six hundred and sixty pounds, moving soundlessly on fur-lined paws.Source 1Source 2
It is the only tiger built for deep winter — the thickest coat of any tiger, a short ruff, snow-pale orange with sparse stripes.Source 3Source 2
Its forest runs on one tree: Korean pine, whose nuts feed the boar and deer that feed the tiger.Source 4Source 5
A single tiger may range over ten thousand square kilometers.Source 3
In the early 1900s hunters took fifty or sixty tigers a year, until by the 1940s only twenty or thirty were thought to remain.Source 6
Russia's 1948 hunting ban — the first tiger protection of its kind — likely saved the subspecies.Source 6
Recovery has been slow and guarded: rangers backed with intelligence support, and camera traps watching the same valleys since 1992.Source 7Source 8
Even orphans count: six rescued cubs released in the Pri-Amur have produced at least twelve wild cubs where tigers were absent for fifty years.Source 9
Russia's 2022 census counted more than 750, and across the Chinese border sightings keep increasing.Source 10Source 4
To witness the Amur tiger is to stand with the deep snow forests — and against everything the poachers' market still wants from them.Source 5Source 1