Experts from the Tiger Centre and the Jewish Autonomous Region’s Hunting Supervision Department have recently collected data from camera traps installed in the taiga, where a group of tigers that includes two reintroduced females – Filippa and the tigress from Lazo – live. This research was carried out with the support of the Amur Tiger Centre.

Tiger Centre director Viktor Kuzmenko reported that this time camera traps had not captured images of Filippa, but had spotted new tigers in the region.

“Unfortunately, this time around we captured no images of Filippa. There are two possible reasons for this: either she is hiding out with cubs in her lair and does not move about much, or many camera traps were knocked down by bears, turning them away from scent-marked trees,” Kuzmenko said. “It is encouraging to see the tigress from Lazo; the footage shows that she is in great shape, which means she is eating well. We are also glad to see a new male tiger, one of Zolushka’s cubs, in the Pompeyevka River basin. It is safe to say that the tiger population in the Jewish Autonomous Region is stable and growing steadily.”

Each monitoring expedition yields encouraging data on tigers living in this region, said Yury Lapin, Director of the Directorate for Wildlife and Protected Areas Conservation in the Jewish Autonomous Region.

“We see that they live comfortably, hunt regularly and eat well; there are favourable conditions for mating, which means the population will increase in the future,” Lapin said. “All this indicates that the efforts to restore the Amur tiger population in the region that we make in close cooperation with other organisations are not in vain and are reaching their objectives.”

According to experts, there are 13 to 15 Amur tigers currently residing in the Jewish Autonomous Region. The tiger population grew as a result of efforts to reintroduce tigers in the region so that they could form a stable group on the border of their historical range.. In different years, three Amur tigers were released in the region; the Amur tigress Filippa, the female tiger from Lazo and the male tiger Saikhan.

In 2014, the male tiger Boris released in the Amur Region by Russian President Vladimir Putin joined the Jewish Autonomous Region’s tiger group. Later Boris moved to a neighbouring region and met the reintroduced tigress Svetlaya; the two became a couple. In January 2019, experts examined the tigers’ territory and recorded that the couple shares the area with two cubs.

“It is a new milestone in the history of restoring the Amur tiger population in the Jewish Autonomous Region,” said Sergei Aramilev, general director of the Amur Tiger Centre. “The two separate areas (with centres in the Bastak Nature Reserve and the Zhuravliny Nature Sanctuary) where we have been releasing rehabilitated tigers for the past several years were united by tigress Zolushka’s cub. Even though today this tiger is only maturing, in the future, perhaps, he will choose Filippa or the tigress from Lazo as his mate.”