Tigers Between Empires
The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Publisher Description
A Best Book of the Year: The Minnesota Star Tribune, Scientific American, BookPage
A Chicago Tribune Most-Anticipated Book of the Season
“Epic . . . Slaght again shines his scientific-yet-soulful spotline on one of the world’s most amazing creatures . . . [A] fascinating survival-revival tale.” —Michiela Thuman, The Minnesota Star Tribune
The thrilling saga of the great Amur tiger and the scientists who came together, across the world, to save it.
The forests of northeast Asia are home to a marvelous range of animals—fish owls and brown bears, musk deer and moose, wolves and raccoon dogs, leopards and tigers. But by the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred tigers stepped quietly through the snow of the Amur River basin. Soon, the Soviet Union fell, bringing catastrophe; without the careful oversight of a central authority, poaching and logging took a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species.
Just as these changes arrived, scientists came together to found the Siberian Tiger Project. Led by Dale Miquelle, a moose researcher, and Zhenya Smirnov, a mouse biologist, the team captured and released more than 114 tigers over three decades. They witnessed mating rituals and fights, hunting and feeding, the ceding and taking of territory, the creation of families.
Within these pages, characters—both feline and human—come fully alive as we travel with them through the quiet and changing forests of Amur. We travel across time, too, as the fate of the species has been shaped by the history and politics of empires—such as the Qing dynasty’s Willow Palisade, which once slowed human settlement, or the later introduction of roads through Russian reserves. The Siberian Tiger Project became the longest-running tiger research initiative; its work continues to guide conservationists today. Jonathan C. Slaght’s Tigers Between Empires is the thrilling saga of the great Amur tiger and the scientists who came together, across the world, to save it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wildlife biologist Slaght (Owls of the Eastern Ice) delivers a captivating account of the Siberian Tiger Project, a multi-decade collaborative effort among American and Russian scientists to study and protect Siberian tigers. Human settlements and hunting practices caused rapid decline in the Siberian tiger populations in Russia and China in the 19th and 20th centuries, Slaght explains. The initial aim of the Tiger Project, launched in the 1990s, was to capture, collar, and monitor tigers in the Russian Far East using radio signals. It was a difficult task: scientists dealt with primitive living conditions, brutal cold, malfunctioning equipment, struggles for funding, and a language barrier, as well as the challenge of finding a tiger; an adult male can routinely patrol an area the size of New York City. Slaght sketches an empathetic portrait of these intrepid researchers as well as the imperiled creatures they studied. Among the latter are Olga, the first tiger collared, who was monitored for 13 years, longer than any other tiger in the world, and Zolushka, an emaciated orphaned cub who was painstakingly rehabilitated and successfully returned to the wild. Slaght brings their stories to life on the page with vivid detail and suspense. The result is a hopeful celebration of the fight to save a vulnerable species.
