The special monitoring group consisting of employees of the Khingan Nature Reserve, the hunting supervision department of the Amur Region and the Amur Tiger Centre has received data about the new clusters (long-term habitat areas) of Yelena the tigress.

The information has become available thanks to the stable work of GPS modules embedded in the collars that were put on the predators before releasing them into the wild. Regular checks of the clusters help scientists receive valuable data about the prey of the tigers. Successful hunting and feeding explain why the tigers stay in one area for a long time.

Experts also checked camera traps on the tigress’s main routes and collected a large number of videos with Yelena.

According to the GPS signals, Yelena spent the entire day of 17 March in one of the clusters. When they arrived at the site, researchers found the carcass of an adult male elk, the largest ungulate of the Khingan Nature Reserve.

Pavlik, Yelena’s brother, hunted down his first three-year-old elk three months after his release. Yelena took more time, but her elk was older and larger than Pavlik’s.

Pavlik is currently travelling across the remote areas of the Amur Region. Having spent most of the winter in the Khingan District, in the first days of spring he headed northwest and continues to move in that direction.

“All clusters inspected by experts from the hunting supervision department of the Amur Region confirm that Pavlik has been successfully hunting wild ungulates. In the last cluster, he killed a large boar. Department experts are on high alert and are ‘escorting’ Pavlik, like when a support team assists an athlete making a solo expedition to the North Pole,” said Sergei Aramilev, general director of the Amur Tiger Centre.

According to Aramilev, these measures are necessary to assure locals that the tiger does not pose danger to them.

“These measures are just a sensible precaution, because we are confident in Pavlik’s peaceable disposition,” Sergei Aramilev added.