Of all the big cats, the most magnificent and formidable is the Amur tiger. An adult male may weigh more than five hundred pounds and measure eleven feet from nose to tail. These prodigious beasts inhabit not the tropical jungles of India and Southeast Asia, home to most of the world’s tigers, but the snow-swept forests of Russia’s far east, where the Amur River borders northeast China. In winter their coats may thicken and pale to a ghostly version of their summer ones, blending with the snowscape. They are so elusive that even humans living within their territory may go all their lives without glimpsing more than a trail of pugmarks in the snow. But their presence haunts Russian villagers. Tales of their sudden appearance abound, and those who have seen them never forget.
Until recently much of the tigers’ behavior was unknown. With the melting of their tracks each spring, their movements became nearly impossible to trace. In regions where their prey is often scarce and dispersed, a single animal may carve out a domain of three hundred square miles or more, which it patrols in a far-flung loop, mostly by night. Their chosen game is wild boar and red or sika deer, but they will kill everything from racoons and grouse to lynx, bears, and, if provoked, humans.
Two centuries ago as many as three thousand tigers inhabited the vast basin of the Amur River, roaming from central Siberia to the Pacific and south through China into the Korean peninsula. But in the mid-nineteenth century, with the Chinese empire in decline, the Russians advanced south and the river became a frontier where Chinese migrants on one side, Russian on the other, settled and multiplied along redefined borders.
Within a few decades, forest clearing and game hunting decimated the tigers and their habitat. By the 1930s they numbered barely more than twenty in Russia, and were saved from extinction only by the conservation measures of Soviet scientists. In 1947 the Soviet Union became the first state to ban the hunting of tigers, and by the mid-1980s the tiger population had risen to about 250. In China, meanwhile, the numbers plummeted. In the 1930s there were about five hundred in the country, but intensive agriculture, accelerating resource exploitation under Japanese occupation in the northeast, and the pest control campaigns of Mao Zedong all but exterminated them, so that by the 1980s scarcely thirty were left.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 threatened the hard-won stabilization of the Russian tiger population with an outbreak of poaching and logging. As the protective laws of the old order unraveled, as many as sixty tigers a year were killed. Their carcasses were stripped for their supposed medicinal benefits and smuggled into China in suitcases or sent on boats to South Korea, hidden among logs or in shipping containers.
At the same time, there began a remarkable collaboration between Russian and American conservationists. The Siberian Tiger Project was founded in 1992 by the American cougar biologist Maurice Hornocker, whose small team worked with Russian colleagues to combine Soviet fieldwork expertise with advanced US tracking and snaring technology. Their aim was to study the tigers’ lifetime habits: how often they gave birth, the range of their patrolling, what they hunted, and how they died. Such data would provide crucial insight for their conservation.
The thirty years that followed—years of struggle, elation, sometimes terror—are the subject of Jonathan C. Slaght’s intensively researched Tigers Between Empires. Slaght is a conservationist whose acclaimed study Owls of the Eastern Ice (2020) recorded his two decades monitoring the endangered Blakiston’s fish owl, largest of all owls, in the same harsh territory described in Tigers Between Empires. The immediacy of that personal quest is absent from his new book, a chronicle of the Siberian Tiger Project based on its own records and on meticulous interviews. But Slaght walked the project’s traplines, flew in its tracking helicopters, and witnessed the capture of the project’s final tiger. Often his descriptions, along with their scientific rigor, have the precision and vividness of firsthand experience, where the tigers become as characterful as their trackers.
The site on which the US-Russian team focused was a nature reserve in the Sikhote-Alin Mountains: two thousand undisturbed square miles in Russia’s Primorye province. Its ecology is unique. For some eight hundred miles this low, densely forested range runs beside the Pacific. On its western slopes a boreal mass of fir, birch, and oak prevails, but where its eastern slopes descend to the Sea of Japan, swaths of moist, subtropical flora—cork, Manchurian walnut, wild grape vines—cover an understory of jasmine and barberry, and Korean pines rise to 150 feet. This climatic wonderland, mingling northern and southern flora, became the heartland of the Amur tiger.
The Russian and American teams started almost in innocence of each other. The Russians were camouflaged in handsewn deerskin coats; the Americans arrived in blue jeans and L.L. Bean fleeces. The Russians wondered whether the Americans would survive. But in time a mutual dependence and respect arose. The linchpin of the project became the partnership of Dale Miquelle, a moose researcher from New England, and Zhenya Smirnov, a rodent biologist from western Russia. Miquelle managed the Siberian Tiger Project for a full three decades, and it is he, above all, whose career drives Tigers Between Empires.
In order to study the tigers closely, the team needed first to capture them—but their initial attempts were a failure. The Russians proposed a giant box trap of heavy logs baited with a dog, but the tigers shunned it. The Americans’ snares were risky but more successful. Ideally they were laid close to a cat’s kill, or to a so-called scent tree where a tiger had urinated to mark its territorial domain or to attract a mate. A loop of braided steel was laid over a shallow hole, covered lightly by soil, and anchored with a steel cable to a nearby tree. Any creature that stepped in it would trigger a spring that lashed the loop around its foreleg.
The tiger would then be sedated with tranquilizer darts and for an hour its body measurements and weight assessed, blood samples taken, and perhaps a tissue sample collected. Before release, a collar would be attached to the tiger’s neck, carrying a radio transmitter that sent out a VHF signal by which the animal’s location might be known from as far as five miles away.
Miquelle’s first encounter with a captured tiger terrified him. Before he could even see it, he heard it roaring. Slaght writes:
It was a sound that moved through his body to fill the morning air like an avalanche scraping through a valley. Noises like this are designed to incapacitate without contact, to stun prey or aggressors into terrified inaction, to soften a target before the fatal strike. Throughout his career Dale would speak to dozens of tiger biologists from around the world, and all of them admitted intimidation by these roars no matter how many times they’d heard them.
Miquelle and a colleague attempted to shoot the trapped animal with tranquilizer darts, but the angles of fire proved difficult, and the tiger was infuriated. When it charged him, Miquelle was certain it had broken its cable. He panicked and fled, yet he knew there was no escape—a tiger can charge at thirty-five miles an hour. Then glancing back he saw the tiger collapse under a spray of snow: the cable had held.
In time the biologists came to admire and even love the tigers. They celebrated when they gave birth, bestowed Russian names on them, and lamented their often untimely deaths. Olga, captured as a cub, gave birth to six litters and over thirteen years became the longest continuously monitored tiger in the world. She grew to be a friendly rumor in the village near her roaming grounds: a discreet, unseen mother whose territory of beautiful coastal oaks was apparently ceded to her by her own mother, giving Olga’s trackers the first evidence of tigers’ female inheritance. She proved too that cubs, with careful mothering, gained their independence at eighteen months, far earlier than was thought.
Then there was Galina, another tigress who lived peaceably close to humans but was fatally infected with distemper by the roving male Ivan; and the enterprising Kuzya, nicknamed “Putin’s tiger,” who had been orphaned as a cub and whose release from a rehabilitation facility was attended by the president. Within months of being able to roam freely, Kuzya swam across the Amur and settled in China.
But in the practice of snaring and collaring there were dangers to both animals and humans. The inadvertent death of a tiger would bring the whole project to an end. The tranquilizer darts were unreliable, and the shooting of a rampant bear, with the perils of intrusive conservation, haunted Miquelle for years.
Other troubles came as the Soviet Union disintegrated, with Russian salaries unpaid and inflation skyrocketing. But barriers of language and culture were subsumed in the shared hardship of tracking and snaring. Winter snows blanketed the region for five months of the year, when average January temperatures drop to -9.5 degrees Fahrenheit. In summer there were the ubiquitous ticks carrying encephalitis, from which 20 percent of sufferers die. The ticks waited in the undergrowth, Slaght writes, “with their forelegs outstretched and sometimes waving hypnotically, like seagrass in a gentle current,” before attaching themselves to a passing deer, bear, or unwary biologist.
But it was poaching, even within the nature reserve, that caused heartbreaking tiger casualties. A tiger skin could be sold to Chinese dealers across a newly porous border for as much as $15,000. In traditional Asian medicine, a tiger’s parts—including its eyes, whiskers, heart, and penis—are marketed for ailments ranging from epilepsy and toothache to acne and impotence. Of the first forty-two tigers monitored in the Sikhote-Alin Reserve, almost half were eventually killed by poachers. Male tigers, circling their territories outside the reserve, were especially vulnerable, and even more so were tigresses with cubs. As Slaght writes:
Mothers stand fast to protect them, putting themselves between their cubs and the threat, and are thus exposed. The small creatures scatter when their mother is shot, but they are inexperienced, still with milk teeth, and wholly unable to hunt on their own. The cubs wait instinctively for their mother to return…. Then they disappear, sometimes to lie down together in a pile for warmth and comfort, and they don’t get back up. The truth is that poaching a tiger with cubs doesn’t just kill one tiger; it means the loss of two to five of them.
Among the photographs that accompany Tigers Between Empires, one shows Olga climbing a tree (something of which tigers were supposed to be incapable). She is trying to swat a helicopter out of the sky, as if it were a mosquito. The unwieldly Soviet-era MI-8 helicopter was a shaky platform from which to shoot tigers with tranquilizer darts, and the lowering to earth of the biologists to treat and collar them carried dangers of its own; but the practice, as early as 1994, avoided the precariousness of snaring.
In another initiative the telemetric locating of tigers was facilitated by Miquelle’s chartering a creaky Antonov biplane, from which VHF signals could be picked up as far as twenty miles away. And in 2010 the use of satellite collars allowed tigers to be tracked automatically from space, relaying their location back to Miquelle’s email inbox.
In 2003 camera traps became more viable with the improvement of lithium batteries and digital photography. The photographing of tigers had been the passion of other enthusiasts, such as the Korean researcher Sooyong Park (unmentioned in Slaght’s book), who for over twenty years spent the winter months in homemade bunkers waiting to film Amur tigers.* Now, however, networks of motion-triggered cameras could ascertain numbers and even trace a single tiger’s whereabouts, its identity recognizable by the pattern of stripes unique to each cat.
But in 2012 an “exposé” of the Siberian Tiger Project’s practices on a Russian blog went viral. It was cowritten by a former volunteer and claimed that the project’s snaring method was killing tigers. Slaght provides no details of this claim, which Miquelle successfully refuted in the courts, but public demand forced a ban on snaring tigers for research. The blog’s purpose, Slaght writes, was clearly “to build public support against ‘outside’ influence over tiger conservation.” It was a blow to biological field research, and a grim portent for the future.
To Miquelle and his team this was peculiarly painful. From the start the possibility of damaging the animals they were dedicated to protect tinges Slaght’s narrative with an ever-present tension. And revering the sheer wildness of these great cats, while intruding on it to preserve them, remained an irony impossible to resolve.
With a growing Russian hostility to any Western presence, Miquelle was increasingly sidelined, and by 2016 much of the capture and monitoring of tigers had passed from the Siberian Tiger Project to other groups controlled by Moscow. The tiger had become a political pawn. President Putin, in a macho publicity stunt, himself collared a sedated tigress, harnessing the animals’ identity to Russian national pride. (The tigress, it was later revealed, actually came from a local zoo.) But since Putin’s patronage, the sentences for poaching tigers have steepened. Those convicted can face seven years in prison. “Wildlife tends to do well under autocratic rule,” Slaght has commented wryly. “Tigers were restored when Stalin was in power.” In 2022, with a deepening sense of his own redundancy and with the onset of the Ukrainian war, Miquelle boarded a plane back to America.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
John Macallan Swan: Study of a Jaguar, late nineteenth–early twentieth century
No setback or failure could mar the project’s achievements. At the time of its establishment the Amur tiger was close to extinction. Over thirty years the team’s biologists monitored 114 tigers, and now more than five hundred roam the Asian far east. Pioneering methods of snaring and telemetry revealed a range of the great cats’ behavior previously unknown. A flood of scientific publications followed. And other biologists and administrators have built on these foundations. In Russia the twofold increase of protected land brought closer a vision that Miquelle had entertained for years: a tiger habitat stretching from the Sikhote-Alin to China’s eastern mountains. Already tigers migrate to and fro across the border from the Primorye to a newly conservationist China.
Tigers Between Empires, despite its author’s esteem for the project, reads not as an encomium but as a balanced, lucid, and intimately knowledgeable record. Slaght is all too conscious of the uncertain future, in which politics, ecology, and finance are intricately entwined. Logging companies and poachers still stir in a weakened economy. The tigers are also vulnerable to canine distemper virus, their wild boar prone to a deadly swine fever, and tiger numbers are still low enough to keep them on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s endangered species list.
If Miquelle’s concept of an unbroken tiger corridor between Russia and China was beset with difficulties, its realization seems closer than the vision for jaguars that is the focus of James Campbell’s Heart of the Jaguar. Campbell is an adventure writer and journalist, and the vastly ambitious project he describes is a so-called road map from Mexico to northern Argentina, a conservation corridor to which almost all the relevant countries have committed. This was the brainchild of a friend, the pioneering zoologist Alan Rabinowitz, who dominates Campbell’s book as Dale Miquelle does Tigers Between Empires. Both passionately dedicated men shared a buoyant strategic vision for the future of their cats. But Rabinowitz was intemperate, iron willed, and tormentedly complex, shadowed for almost eighteen years by the leukemia from which he died in 2018.
As a young biologist for the New York Zoological Society, working on his own in the jungle of central Belize, Rabinowitz was based among the huts of a few bemused Mayan families. While conducting a foundational study of jaguars, he became violently protective of their territory and of the creatures he collared. He sometimes used dogs to drive the jaguars up trees, where he darted them without the use of snares. Once they were sedated, he recorded their body details, noted their scars and the wear of their teeth. Uneasily he felt his life becoming intertwined with theirs. He gave them Mayan names—one became Ah Puch, the god of death, and another Ixchel, the goddess of the moon. On one occasion, when he found a favorite jaguar dying, he hoisted it onto his shoulders and carried it back to his hut to euthanize it, crazed and weeping. The local Mayan people thought him insane.
But his petition to the Belize government for a jaguar reserve was munificently granted. The Cockscomb Forest Reserve was established in 1984 and was the first such park in the world. Encouraged by the great field biologist George Schaller, who pioneered the in-depth study of endangered species in the wild, Rabinowitz went on to work among tigers, clouded leopards, and rhinoceroses in Thailand, Myanmar, and Borneo, and helped establish Taiwan’s largest protected park. These were years of grueling field work, frustration, and usually success. Although five immense reserves were created in Myanmar, Rabinowitz was denounced for working in a nation under brutal dictatorship. He countered:
If wildlife conservation has first to be considered through political filters, then where should I work in the world?… And when did animals get to vote and decide what governments they must live and die under.
The creature that Rabinowitz so revered, Panthera onca, is the most formidable predator of the Americas, the third largest of the big cats after the tiger and lion. It is shorter and lighter than them—an Amur tiger may weigh twice as much—but the jaguar is uniquely stocky and compact, and highly adaptable. It climbs trees with ease, catches fish, and preys even on caimans. Its camouflage of rosettes and spots blends its body with the surrounding jungle, so that it ambushes its prey at close quarters; and where tigers typically kill with a suffocating bite to the throat, the jaguar pierces the skull with a bite so powerful that it can fracture the shell of a turtle.
In contrast to the Amur tiger, the estimated number of jaguars is large: some rate it as high as 173,000. Yet they are in steep decline. Increased human settlement, with its attendant deforestation, farming, and hunting, has fragmented and halved the jaguars’ territory in the past century.
In Rabinowitz’s vision a five-thousand-mile corridor would stretch from end to end of the jaguars’ terrain. Large sanctuaries would be linked by arteries of jaguar habitat that would enable movement even across national borders, crucially reinforcing the species’ genetic diversity. By the time of his death in 2018, the jaguar corridor had been mapped out in collaboration not only with government officials but with rangers, reserve administrators, ranchers, and farmers. Three months later the Jaguar 2030 Roadmap, built on his project’s insights and initiatives, was adopted with international support, aiming to secure thirty interlinked jaguar landscapes.
It is this evolving corridor that Campbell intermittently follows in journeys that are both revealing and troubling. Some 80 percent of the jaguars’ current range lies in the shrinking Amazon rainforest; and the Pantanal basin of the Paraguay River, the biggest tropical wetland on earth, may hold the largest jaguar concentration: some two thousand animals. But the Pantanal has been reduced by a surge in soybean farming (a byproduct, in part, of President Trump’s tariffs on China) and by raging wildfires; it is occupied too by some 2,500 cattle ranches, where there is little love for the jaguar. “If the connectivity of the corridor is to be maintained,” Campbell writes,
the Pantanal and traditional landscapes like it—made up of a mosaic of public and private lands, where humans and wildlife share the same resources—are where the critical battles for the future of the species will be waged.
Bolivia is another such arena. Campbell travels here too (although Rabinowitz never did) and describes a jaguar stronghold whose immense forests, covering half the country with a rich biodiversity, are vanishing so quickly that according to one study they could be completely gone by 2050. And the threats to the jaguar are the same: aggressive logging for cattle and soy farming, rampant fires, poaching for the Chinese traditional medicine market.
Jaguars once roamed the US’s desert Southwest, but the country’s last known female was killed in the mountains of Arizona in 1963. The recent sightings in New Mexico and Arizona of several male jaguars that crossed into the US brought widespread speculation about their possible return—and also publicity, especially in 2011 when a jaguar nicknamed El Jefe, the Boss, became an overnight celebrity. Some conservationists are campaigning to foster a jaguar community within the US, but such a hope, writes Campbell, will likely founder on the building of Trump’s 225-mile wall in Arizona, which by one estimate will “alter the evolutionary history of North America forever.”
Though sporadic and ambiguous, there are other signs of hope for the jaguar. Perhaps 80,000 still thrive in the Brazilian Amazon; and Bolivia, home to the world’s largest protected dry forest, remains a jaguar haven. Lucrative wildlife tourism can persuade local communities to protect them. And alongside hard-pressed rangers and conservationists, a few dedicated individuals inspirit Campbell’s journeys. In Brazil the extensive lands bought by the American philanthropist Tom Kaplan, spanning a vital jaguar corridor, have become a region where ranches and jaguars coexist, conserving the cats’ wild prey while ranchers mingle vulnerable cattle with a feisty, long-horned breed to protect them.
In the opening pages of Tigers Between Empires, Slaght records the words of the ecologist Aldo Leopold after he’d shot a wolf:
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.
The sense of a great creature’s separateness, of a being both unknowable and precious, seems often to accompany a first sighting in the wild. A five-second glimpse of a jaguar was enough to convert the conservationist Nick McPhee into a lifelong devotee of the animal. Rabinowitz, elated after his first encounter with a jaguar, felt as if he’d crossed an invisible boundary when he snared it. His initial euphoria was suffused by sadness, the feeling that his “interference was soiling something beautiful.” To him it became a too familiar dilemma: the despoiling of wildlife in the cause of its protection.