Amur tigers Pavlik and Yelena, released from the Primorye rehabilitation centre in the Amur taiga this May, are spending their third month in the reserve and proving quite successful in hunting large prey.

Their traditional diet includes boar, wapitis, roe deer and badgers. The reserve’s employees found an elk carcass several days ago and the tigers also eat wolves.

“We can say that Pavlik and Yelena have sampled the entire range of hooved animals living in the reserve. The fact that they hunt large prey shows that the tigers are quite ready for life in the wild,” said Sergei Aramilev, general director of the Amur Tiger Centre.

Vyacheslav Kastrikin, deputy director for research at the Khingan Nature Reserve, said that the tigers kept away from each other.

“Yelena has never left the reserve since the release. At the very beginning, the male went as far as a couple of kilometres outside the reserve, but then returned. He has been showing no interest in long walks for two months now. Both of them have their own routes,” Vyacheslav Kastrikin explained.

At the present time, experts are continuing to track the tigers via GPS collars. According to the scientists, the predators will have to establish their hunting zones by winter. After that, experts will set camera traps near where they live.

Back in February 2018, the six-month-old cubs Pavlik and Yelena were taken into captivity together with their mother. The tigress was captured because she hunted dogs near villages, and, unlike her cubs, the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources found her potentially dangerous to humans and decided to send her to a zoo in the Krasnoyarsk Territory.