teven E. Sanderson missed his 11 a.m. meeting yesterday. He was busy tiger-watching. The tiger he was watching was soon watching wide-screen television. No, not Animal Planet, the cable channel where talking heads share time on camera with roaring, barking and hissing heads — this was just a closed-circuit videotape of tigers carousing with one another. Mr. Sanderson, the president and chief executive of the Wildlife Conservation Society, said not a word — he was so captivated, he was almost speechless. Was he thinking about breakfast cereals? Gas stations? A certain Ivy League university? No. He was simply doing what visitors to the Bronx Zoo can do starting Thursday, when its $8.5 million Tiger Mountain exhibit opens. Tiger Mountain is the new home of half a dozen Siberian tigers who have been moved from the Wild Asia exhibit, where people riding a monorail once got their best glimpses of tigers through binoculars. Tiger Mountain now offers the possibility of nose-to-nose views through inch-thick glass. Or, if the tigers decide to go for a swim in the 10,000-gallon pool, through two-inch-thick glass. Yesterday, not much swimming was going on. One tiger went so far as to drink from the pool. One person's 10,000-gallon pool is one tiger's 10,000-gallon water dish. "Come on, babe, get in," said Richard Lattis, a vice president of the society. "This is like people who go to the beach and just want to be seen and don't want to get wet." The tiger — Taurus, an 11-year-old female whose twin sister, Zeff, was not far away — later plopped down on a rock that serves as a waterfall feeding the pool. She was 15 or 20 feet away. "You just don't get these kinds of views," Mr. Lattis said. Mr. Sanderson did not miss a beat. "Unless you're dinner," he said. For those who remember William Blake's famous verse — "Tiger! Tiger! burning bright/In the forests of the night" — Tiger Mountain is a forest, half the size of the Central Park Zoo, Mr. Sanderson said. But the tigers will not spend their nights where they spend their mornings. (They sleep in a separate building.) John Gwynne, the society's vice president and chief creative officer, said the zoo's design team had worked hard to make the three-acre Tiger Mountain "feel like a place that feels like Asia." But this is Asia with comforts that will appeal to big, striped creatures. There is a rock with a heating element to make wintertime lounging more pleasant. There is a rock that has cool water piped in to make summertime lounging bearable. There is grass that one zookeeper said was "TurfBuilder with meat" (it is really rye grass). And there is a tree that smells of Obsession. This is not a tiger fashion secret — they do not wear it, they roll around in it. "It's musk-based," explained Sue Chin, one of the designers. "They also roll around in deer feces, so it's not necessarily a commenting on how great the perfume is." In other words, cats will be cats — these just happen to weigh 250 to 600 pounds and to be on endangered species lists. "People that have cats, they'll be surprised how many behaviors they see in their pets that they'll see in our tigers, doing the same things," said Patrick Thomas, the zoo's mammal curator. Giant cats, though, need giant cat toys. So at Tiger Mountain, there is a scratching post — a tree. There is a ball on a spring, but the ball is the size of a bowling ball and the spring has links like a chain. There are treats — smallish morsels of liver, for example. But cat owners do not feed Fluffy or Princess from behind a floor-to-ceiling metal gate, the way the tigers' keepers do. Fluffy and Princess have not lost finger-size incisors to roughhousing with siblings, the way some of the tigers at Tiger Mountain have. And Fluffy or Princess do not claim an old tire as a favorite toy, the way one of the residents at Tiger Mountain does (Sasha, the lone male among the six tigers). "Our goal is to have animals engaged in normal behaviors," Mr. Thomas said. "You want the exhibit to inspire visitors to care about saving tigers." At that moment, he heard something on his walkie-talkie and pushed the talk button: "Jamie, reward her for that," he told a keeper. The reward was for going into a bedroom in the tigers' 4,000-square-foot private living quarters. "Everything we do is positive reinforcement," he said. The society says the purpose of the new exhibit is to increase people's awareness of tigers and the need to save them. The society, which has been involved in tiger conservation since the 1960's and organized a cooperative venture between Russian and American biologists to help save Siberian tigers in the 1990's, says there are only 5,000 tigers left in the wild. Not that the six at Tiger Mountain are exactly tame. A zoo videographer, Thomas J. Veltre, manager of the media services office, remembers the time in Wild Asia that he zoomed in for a close-up — maybe the close-up on the monitor that caught Taurus's eye as she looked through the inch-thick glass yesterday. That monitor, on the far wall of the humans' side of the glass, shows videotaped views of tigers so visitors can say they saw a tiger if the real ones have sauntered out of sight. Taurus's long-distance vision is so good she was glued to the tube. Back to Mr. Veltre and his close-up, which happened to be of Alexis, a 6-year-old born at the zoo. "I got a good shot," Mr. Veltre said, "and she turned around and lunged right at the fence." Did he mention that he was on the other side of the fence? Or that he caught the whole thing on tape? Or that he e-mailed a video clip to the society's trustees? Not at first. He was still talking about the suddenness, the visceralness. "She looks up very cute," he said, "and, `Roar!' "

Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times A new exhibit at the Bronx Zoo will allow visitors to look deep into the eyes of a tiger, through the safety of inch-thick glass.