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The
South China tiger, Panthera tigris amoyensis, was
formerly abundant in South China's temperate upland
forests, with a population estimated by Chinese
authorities at 4,000 in the late 1940s. By the early
1950s, extensive forest clearing for agriculture had
destroyed much habitat, and "pelt harvest"
of the tiger for the fur trade increased. In 1959,
under Mao Tse-tung, eradication campaigns against
these "pests" were encouraged by government
bounties, resulting in uncontrolled hunting, not only
for the skin but for blood, bones, organs, and other
body parts used in traditional medicines. By the early
1960s the South China tiger had declined to an
estimated 1,000 animals; a decade later it was listed
as endangered.
Today
its wide range has been reduced to three isolated
areas in south-central China, where small and
scattered populations are said to persist along the
mountainous borders between provinces. Two of these
regions include parts of Jiangxi Province, where in
the winter of 1993, on a crane expedition, I made a
five-hour journey overland from the capital, Nanchang,
to Poyang Lake, near the Yangtze River, and also two
flights over the region at low altitude and in clear
weather, which provided a good look at this rough,
mountainous region. One can only hope that Jiangxi is
not typical of the last tiger habitat in China, for it
appeared fatally battered and denuded.
According
to official Chinese estimates, more than 150 amoyensis
survive. But some Western authorities now fear that as
few as 20 to 30 are left, and even this low figure may
be optimistic, since no one knows of any recent
sightings. Even if not already extinct, the South
China race seems destined to become the fourth to
vanish in our lifetime.
The
tiger subspecies to the south of amoyensis (and the
one most recently recognized by scientists as a
distinct form) is the Indochinese tiger, Panthera
tigris corbetti. Smaller and darker than the South
China race, it ranges widely from eastern Burma, now
known as Myanmar, through Laos, Thailand, Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Malaysia. Present estimates of the
Indochinese tiger's population range from 600 to 900;
but little is known about its distribution, and recent
surveys of Indochina's vast, empty forests by Wildlife
Conservation Society biologists George Schaller and
Alan Rabinowitz are not encouraging. According to
Schaller, local people have set snares "from the
mountain-top all the way down into the valley,"
and Rabinowitz agrees that "the people are
literally wiping out everything-sambar, barking deer,
even young elephants. The forests look good, but there
are no tigers because there is nothing for them to
eat. In these areas it is not the tiger that is being
killed directly but the prey."
Much
the same can probably be said of the rest of
Indochina. In Myanmar, scarcely 1 percent of the
country is protected, although 45 percent remains
forested; and even where guerrilla warfare has not
prevented the few forest guards from entering the
forests, they are not permitted to arrest poachers. In
the other countries, large areas have been set aside
as reserves and parks, but none of these nations try
to control the use of firearms. The ill-paid guards
are imperiled by well-armed poachers and even by local
people, who perceive them as enemies who interfere
with their traditional harvest in the forest.
According to Rabinowitz, "no more than an
estimated two hundred and fifty adult tigers are
currently in Thailand," and "all Thailand's
tiger populations are in danger of further
decline." The same--or worse--can probably be
said of the populations elsewhere in corbetti's range.
Little
is known of the tiger race found less than 50 miles
across the Malacca Straits in Sumatra, the last
sanctuary of tigers in Indonesia. Sumatra is the
world's sixth-largest island, more than 1,000 miles
long, though far less populous than nearby Java and
Bali. Poor agricultural soils put off the destruction
of its forests until after World War II. But in the
1960s the conversion of forestland was greatly
expanded by timber concessions, rubber and palm-oil
plantations, and oil fields, and the habitat loss was
compounded by hunting and trapping. Today the Sumatran
tiger, Panthera tigris sumatrae, is largely confined
to the southwestern mountains and remote northern
regions, which include the largest and best of the
reserves known as Gunung Leuser, a complex of about
7,927 square kilometers where 20 to 100 tigers are
said to persist. (The numbers spread is an indication
of how little is actually known about sumatrae.)
At
a conservation workshop in 1992, some 35 Indonesian
forestry and conservation officials assigned to
Sumatran parks and protected areas--the majority of
the tiger professionals in Sumatra--were asked how
many had ever laid eyes on a wild tiger. Four raised
their hands. How many had seen tiger tracks? Perhaps
half of them. How many with raised hands had seen
tracks 10 or more times? Half the hands went down.
(Since tigers commonly use roads and trails, leaving
big pug-marks, this informal poll was even more
ominous than it may appear.)
A
recent report by the Wildlife Conservation Society
claimed that about 650 Sumatran tigers may survive,
and one hopes, without much confidence, that this is
true. Hundreds of stuffed specimens adorn Sumatran
government offices and private homes, in addition to
the hundreds shipped abroad. Between 1975 and 1992
South Korea alone imported 3,720 kilograms of dried
tiger bone from Indonesia (in effect, Sumatra, since
the tiger was already extinct in Java and Bali), or
somewhere between 338 and 620 tigers over an 18-year
period; between 1991 and 1993 South Korea imported 475
kilograms of bone, or about 20 tigers annually. In
Singapore a well-tanned Sumatran tiger skin brings
about $2,000; a tiger penis fetches $100. Small
wonder, then, that according to one recent report,
"the Sumatran form is close to extinction in the
wild."
In
1936, when the Sikhote-Alin International Biosphere
Reserve was established, on the Siberian coast north
of Vladivostok, perhaps 50 Amur tigers were left in
the wild--too few, some said, to provide the genetic
variation critical to the long-term survival of the
race. Yet everywhere throughout its range, Panthera
tigris has shown itself to be a marvelously
resourceful and adaptable animal, and during World War
II, with most of the hunters off shooting at other
human beings, it made a small recovery in numbers. By
the mid-1980s, the wild population was thought to
approach 450 animals, including 250 breeding
adults--an exciting recovery that justified hope for
reestablishing a viable population, assuming the
tigers had avoided long-term damage from inbreeding.
But with the implosion of the Soviet Union, the Amur
country was laid wide open to the international
poaching that was destroying the last tigers
everywhere. Within a few years, more than a third had
been destroyed, and once again the Amur, or Siberian,
tiger, Panthera tigris altaica, was in serious danger
of extinction. In this emergency, a group of Russian
researchers and U.S. wildlife biologists founded the
Siberian Tiger Project, with headquarters in Terney, a
fishing port north of Vladivostok.
In
June 1992, not long after the project's fieldwork had
begun, I joined the researchers at Terney and
accompanied them on treks into the forest. In the
beautiful early--summer taiga, I saw fresh tiger
sign--pugmarks and scent posts and scat--and joined in
the reconnaissance of the territory of a tigress that
had been captured, radiocollared, and released two
days before. Using telemetry, we approached the stream
where she lay in hiding; as we drew near, the tigress
rose and began moving, changing her radio signal to a
rapid beep, and my heart with it, for this was my
first experience with a tiger in the field. According
to Maurice Hornocker, an eminent authority on the
great cats and a codirector of the project, her sharp
eyes were probably watching us through those silent
trees, and certainly she could hear us. Knowing she
was intent upon our presence, the striped fur of her
harlequin mask rising and falling with her fetid,
meaty breath as she stared and listened, was
exhilarating, to say the very least.
In
January 1996 I returned to the Russian Far East by way
of Vladivostok, where I was met by Siberian Tiger
Project biologists Howard Quigley and Dale Miquelle.
Next day we flew up the coast to the new timber port
at Plastun and from there drove north along the coast
road through what is now the Sikhote-Alin reserve, in
the heart of tiger country. During the next fortnight,
taking part in air monitoring and snow tracking of the
animals that had been captured, radio-collared, and
released since my first visit, four years before, gave
me a chance to compare the prospects of altaica with
those of the other tiger races.
The
Amur tiger, generally regarded as the largest of the
world's great cats, once ranged widely in Siberia,
from Lake Baikal east to Korea. Today it is almost
entirely confined to the Russian Far East, in the
Sikhote-Alin Mountains. Officially, it is still
reported to exist in contiguous North Korea and
northeastern China, but the biologists and researchers
of the Siberian Tiger Project mostly dismiss these
remnant animals as border wanderers.
The
Sikhote-Alin, 600 miles north and south, with a very
low human population, is the largest single region of
potentially good habitat in all of Panthera tigris's
modern range. If its large reserves can be linked by
wooded corridors across the mined and timbered
forestlands, and if its prey species can be protected
from overhunting, the Sikhote-Alin might offer a
better future for the tiger than any Asian region
except possibly the huge Ganges-Brahmaputra delta,
called the Sunderbans, which is generally inhospitable
to humans. On the other hand, the population densities
of the tiger's prey species, poached relentlessly
since firearms became generally accessible a few years
ago, are now so low that the carrying capacity for
this region may have already been reached. Few
authorities give the Amur tiger much chance of
long-term survival into the next century, but having
observed and listened to the Americans and Russians
involved in the Siberian Tiger Project, and the local
people, too, my own views are more optimistic. Low
prey densities and small numbers
notwithstanding--according to a 1996 census, about 330
adults and 101 subadults--this may well be the most
stable tiger population left on earth.
The
vanished tiger races, never studied, might have told
us much about the phylogeny of tigers--the origin and
evolution of the species. Tigers and lions both
descend from a jaguarlike Panthera ancestor, but
although the lion was widespread in western Asia and
southern Europe as well as Africa, no tiger fossils
have been found outside of Asia. Among the earliest
were skulls and bones from the late Pliocene and the
early Pleistocene, discovered in China and also in
Java and on the north coast of Siberia. These Ice Age
tigers were larger than the modern races, among which
only the Amur approaches them m size.
In
the Pleistocene the species was widely distributed,
crossing land bridges to Japan, and the geographic
region where the species originated is still debated.
While some authorities now suggest a southern Asian
origin, most adhere to a "northern
hypothesis." According to that theory, the early
tiger dispersed westward to the Caspian Sea and south
into India and Southeast Asia more than a million
years ago when most of central Asia was covered in
forest. When sea levels receded during the Pleistocene
to expose the continental shelf that linked the
Malayan peninsula with the East Indies, the tiger
reached Sumatra, Java, and Bali. At some unknown time
it vanished from Japan, and in later ages, for want of
water, it withdrew from the arid Himalayan rain shadow
of Tibet and central Asia. (Though the tiger can adapt
to cold, it cannot survive in arid country.) But all
around this great desert ellipse, its range appears to
have been almost continuous.
As
the earth warmed after the Pleistocene, the dispersing
tigers spread through Asia, losing their long-haired
pelage and heavy, tufted paws. Until regional
populations were cut off from one another by climatic
changes, all Asian tigers were essentially the same
animal; yet the only one that remained comparable in
size to the Amur race was the Indian tiger, which
needed to deal with the large prey animals of the
subcontinent. In the tropics, with mostly smaller
prey, the cumbersome size of the northern tiger proved
nonadaptive. The South China, Indochinese, and Caspian
races became smaller than the Amur and the Indian, and
the three island races of the equatorial tropics were
smaller still.
Tiger
dimensions adapt readily to prey size, which is
generally (though not invariably) smaller in island
fauna. The extinct Japanese tiger of the Pleistocene
was approximately the same size as the Balinese race,
which seems to have been the smallest of modern
tigers. According to tiger authority John
Seidensticker, curator of mammals at the National Zoo,
in Washington, D.C., the original habitat of the
island tigers of Indonesia appears to have been the
great river swamps, where the tiger evolved as the
largest predator in a chain of life whose essential
members were deers and wild boar.
In
modern times, Bali's rich volcanic slopes encouraged
an intensive wet-rice agriculture, but its tigers were
found mostly in the high western forests. So far as is
known, no Balinese tiger was ever captured, though
eight were killed for museums in the 1930s. Collecting
specimens from a small population hastened the
extinction of the race, and the Bali Barat Game
Reserve, created in western Bali in 1941, came too
late to help it. In the 1960s and '70s, much
plantation forest was cut down, by which time, in all
likelihood, the Balinese tiger, Panthera tigris balica,
was already gone. Seidensticker tells me that in July
1978 he spoke with a local man who claimed to have
observed a tiger one month earlier as it drank from a
spring at the base of a great ficus tree shading his
temple; in 1979 a Bali newspaper printed reports that
at least six tigers still survived in the Bali Barat
reserve. I, too, was told that, on a journey there
last winter en route from Siberia to India, and the
legend seemed persuasive enough when I gazed at those
mysterious, high, dark mountain forests in the
distance. Pressed a little, however, the genial
Balinese agreed that their tiger was gone.
Departing
Bali en route to India, the aircraft passed along the
northern coast of Java, a mysterious and striking dark
massif of 20 or more volcanic cones. The once-abundant
Javan tiger was bountied and killed throughout the
19th and early 20th centuries, and not until the 1920s
and '30s was a system of reserves established. The few
captive animals reported in zoos and collections
before World War II were dispersed during the war, and
none survive. By 1945 the Javan tiger, Panthera tigris
sondaica, was mostly gone from all but the most
inaccessible regions of the island, as much of the
monsoon forest was converted to teak plantations and
rubber trees and coffee.
Java
is one of the world's most populous places, aswarm
with 120 million people, and this virulent population
growth--with forest loss and intensive
cultivation--made survival impossible for the tiger.
By the mid-1960s, when civil unrest spread across the
island, the Javan tiger survived in only three of the
reserves; in the same period one of its main prey
species, the ruse deer, was reduced severely by
disease. By 1970 the last four or five animals were
confined to a rugged area on the coast, known as
Meru-Betiri, which was made a park in 1972. The last
good sighting of sondaica was made in 1976, and it is
presently assumed that the Javan race died out in the
1980s, despite the local legends to the contrary.
Not
surprisingly, all three of the first races to go
extinct--the Balinese, the Javan, and the
Caspian--were located at the extremities of tiger
range and were cut off from the main body of the
species. Perhaps even before the advent of human
beings, the Caspian tiger, Panthera tigris virgata,
lived 1,000 miles or more from its westernmost kin, in
Siberia, and was cut off from the Indian and South
China populations by high mountains and deserts. The
Caspian tiger is the exotic creature seen scowling and
skulking in ancient Persian art--the rather small,
dark race of the Transcaucasus and the shores of the
great inland seas of western Asia. A specimen killed
in the Transcaucasus in 1932 was the last one seen
until 1964, when one or more were sighted near
Lenkoran, on the southwest shore of the Caspian Sea
near the Iranian border. In the early 1970s a US.
researcher surveying the Caspian shore with camera
traps found leopards but no evidence of tigers, and a
survey of Iran's remote mountains between 1973 and
1976 had the same result. The Lenkoran tigers, it
appears, were the last of this subspecies ever to be
seen, and today the Caspian tiger is presumed extinct.
One
day last April in Washington, D.C., John Seidensticker
was kind enough to give Belinda Wright and me a close
look at two of his Sumatran tigers in their cages
beneath the exhibit pens at the National Zoo. Perhaps
two and a half feet at the shoulder, this last
representative of Indonesia's island tigers is little
more than half the size of the Amur or Indian tigers,
with a smaller head and shoulders relative to its
weight. The ground color of the Sumatran tiger is
comparatively darker, rather tawny (the Javan and
Balinese forms were darker still), and its underside
is a dirty, gray white, as opposed to the bright white
of its northern kin. Its stripes are narrower and more
closely spaced and may be spotted at the tips, and it
is oddly big footed, like a toy tiger. The watchful
male, slung out on his hard bench, had his head close
to the bars. When I peered too closely, our intent
visages scarcely a yard apart, the tiger closed his
agate eyes and opened his jaws in a silent, yawning
snarl. The face of sumatrae is relatively narrow, with
a pronounced white ruff--characteristics that might
camouflage its bulk as it approaches, Seidensticker
suggests, since the body does not extend outside the
ruff when seen head on.
Seidensticker
remains mildly skeptical of the current separation of
the tiger into eight races, since the status of these
subspecies is still argued--the Indochinese tiger,
Panthera tigris corbetti, was only "created"
three decades ago--and because, in more than one pair
in the group, the alleged differences seem problematic
at best. In his opinion, "viable population"
might be a more useful designation than
"geographic race," since--in a creature that
seems equally adaptable to dry upland forest and
tropical rainforest, monsoon mangrove habitat and
Himalayan foothills, northern taiga and the reedbeds
of Asia's inland seas--size, external appearance, and
behavior tend to be more influenced by climate and
ecology than by geographic range. Like most of the 36
species of cat, the tiger is exceptionally flexible,
adapting to a range of habitats perhaps unmatched by
any other large mammal except Homo sapiens.
Yet
even if all necessary steps to protect the last wild
tigers are undertaken, it may not be enough. As
Seidensticker says, traditional
conservation-management techniques for tigers have
failed or are failing, even where there has been
increased protection. Effective restoration will
require corrective and preventive management, to
insure that mere benign neglect--as in Java and Bali,
where the tiger went extinct despite a system of
protected reserves--does not permit some fatal
imbalance to occur before it can be properly
understood.
Gazing
into a nearby cage at a great white tiger, the last of
a celebrated "albino line" from India, we
fell silent for a while, considering that stunted
future in which the mysteries of wild tigers will be
gone and the only tigers left on earth will be these
listless specimens cooped up in zoos. How excited I
would have been, I thought, to have glimpsed one of
those Persian tigers, scowling from the reeds near
Lenkoran on the shore of the Caspian Sea.
