A camera in the Utyos Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in the Khabarovsk Territory has recorded a young tigress visiting the enclosure that holds the Amur tiger Zhorik. The centre staff had regularly seen the female tiger’s paw prints, but she was caught on camera for the first time.

The video shows Zhorik stretching out in the enclosure towards the female, sensing her arrival, while she carefully walks around the cage and stops. Then the wild cats just look at each other for some time. Scientists said the female lives in the local Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve.

“For us, this is an ordinary story – we have the nature reserve here with many tigers, who are just hard to record on camera,” said Eduard Kruglov, director of Utyos. “Apart from Zhorik, we now have two wild tigers in enclosures, a male and a female, and two tigresses from the wild often come to see them. One is a young tigress, only three years old, and the second is older, five years old. They come here regularly, once a week or every 10 days, but they never come close to the enclosures, normally 10-15 metres, rarely two metres close.”

Zhorik has been living at the Utyos centre since 2010. He ended up here after a jaw injury he had sustained in a travelling circus. The tiger underwent several surgeries but is still missing some soft tissue on his cheek, which is why the predator cannot eat normally and go back into the wild.