Protected Tigers, Burning Bright

By Dr.Fourkan Ali

Tigers have delivered a bit of holiday cheer: populations are on the upswing, it turns out, in some protected areas in India and Thailand. In a field often dominated by news of felled forests and population declines, wildlife conservationists have taken heart from this development, while noting that tigers have a long, long way to go if they are to claw their way off the endangered species list.

“If the conditions are right, tiger populations can recover, though there’s still plenty of challenges,” said Cristián Samper, the president and chief executive of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “I think the encouraging news is that we now know it can work.”

At the start of the 20th century, tigers numbered around 100,000 and occupied forests from Turkey to Russia to Indonesia. Today around 3,200 wild tigers occupy just 6 percent of their historic range as a result of habitat destruction, retaliatory killings and poaching for the illegal wildlife trade. “We’ve reached a point where tigers are so much in danger of being lost that we suddenly value them and realize how important it is to hold on to them,” said John Robinson, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s chief conservation officer.

The Wildlife Conservation Society first homed in on the tiger problem in the 1960s, starting with India. Thanks in part to a strong commitment from the Indian government, tigers in the Western Ghats region of Karnataka State have quadrupled in number over the past 30 years, with 250 to 300 of the large cats currently living in the area.

The organization monitors the tigers with camera traps, using unique stripe patterns to identify individual animals and monitoring the abundance of tiger prey as well. (Prior to the advent of camera traps, researchers estimated tiger numbers by counting their tracks). The government provides support for keeping poachers at bay and managing conflicts with humans.

“The underlying factor in the few successes we’ve seen is when the government takes a real interest,” said Alan Rabinowitz, chief executive of the conservation organization Panthera, one of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s collaborative partners. “An N.G.O. along can’t accomplish this alone — the government really has to step up and put in its own law enforcement resources.”

With lessons from the Western Ghats in hand, the conservation organization began expanding its tiger program to include India’s Bhadra and Kudremukh tiger reserves, which have since seen around 50 percent increases in tiger populations. Conservationists also set up shop in Thailand’s Huai Kha Kaeng wildlife sanctuary, where tiger poaching had reached epidemic proportions as a result of black market demand for the animals’ bones, reproductive organs, pelts and meat.

The Thai government bolstered enforcement and anti-poaching patrols as the scientists outfitted the area with camera traps. Last February, those traps proved useful not just for monitoring tiger populations but also for providing evidence in court that tiger poachers took their illegal prey from the sanctuary. Today, around 50 tigers roam that forest.

But not all tigers can be saved. In Vietnam and Cambodia, for example, conservationists have largely written tigers off as a lost cause; tiger numbers in Myanmar and Laos are steadily decreasing.

Rather than trying to protect every remaining individual tiger from the varied problems that threaten to wipe out the species, the Wildlife Conservation Society decided to focus on so-called “source sites,” or areas where at least 25 breeding females live. So far, the organization has identified 42 such sites in India, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Russia and northern China, and it is working in 24 of them. “These are areas where we have a realistic chance of protecting tigers,” Dr. Robinson said. “This enables us to focus our attention.”

To undertake protective measures in all 42 sites would require an investment of around $95 million annually. Half of that money is in place as a result of governmental support and fund-raising by nongovernmental organizations, but funds are lacking for further expansion. “Basically, we need to ramp up our financial support for law enforcement, tiger monitoring and addressing wildlife trade issues within countries,” Dr. Robinson said. “If we could put those pieces in place, we could turn things around for tigers.”

For now, however, conservationists are celebrating the small victories.

“Things are not good in the tiger world, but they’re better than they were,” Dr. Rabinowitz said. “Some tigers are going to blink out, but there’s still a lot of hope for saving them in some really wild areas.”

An earlier version of this post misstated the number of tigers thought to dwell in the Western Ghats region of Karnataka State in India. It is 250 to 300, not 600. The post also misidentified the sites where the Wildlife Conservation Society more recently began introducing its tiger program. They are the Bhadra and Kudremukh tiger reserves, not the Nagarahole and Bandipur national parks, where the conservation program started earlier.