The tigress from Lazo, released into the wild with Saikhan in the Jewish Autonomous Region in the spring of 2018, has recently become a mum for the first time. Signals from her GPS collar show that she has given birth and is raising her cubs in a den.

“The signals from the tigress’s tracking collar show that she has been staying in one place for almost three months. Sometimes she leaves to hunt, but always comes back to the same place. At first it was one spot, now a different one, 200 metres away from the first. Thanks to this data, we can say that the tigress has given birth for the first time and is staying in the den with her cubs. When the cubs begin to follow their mother (which usually happens when they are three months old) and the family leaves this place, experts will examine the den,” said Sergei Aramilev, general director of the Amur Tiger Centre.

If the information about the tigress giving birth is confirmed, this will be a great success for the programme to restore the tiger population in its historical range.

Specialists believe that there are 13-15 tigers living in the Jewish Autonomous Region. The number of tigers in the region has seen a stable increase as a result of periodic releases of reintroduced tigers there.