An annual count of the tiger population and their prey is underway in the Primorye Territory, the most populated area of the Amur tiger’s habitat. Experts from the Department of Wildlife Protection and Protected Areas at the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife Protection of the Primorye Territory are conducting the count with the assistance of workers from the Amur Tiger Centre.

The monitoring sites are located in the Ussuri Nature Reserve, in the Lazovsky, Olginsky, Dalnerechensky, Chuguyevsky and Terneisky districts of the Primorye Territory. Two methods are being used for the job: tiger trails and trail cameras.

The main goal of the annual counts is to find out the number of the Red Data tigers, determine their gender and age composition and analyse the food potential and the quality of the tigers’ habitat.

Alexei Surovy, Deputy Minister of Forestry and Wildlife Protection and Head of the Department of Wildlife Protection and Protected Areas of the Primorye Territory, said that an expert is assigned to each area where he works together with the game keepers of the hunting farms located in the given area.

“During the count, we record not only the trails of tigers but also of hoofed animals such as wild boar, deer, Manchurian wapiti, roe deer and musk deer. We are doing this to determine if the tigers living in this particular place have sufficient food reserves and to set hunting limits for the next season. As of now, the count has been completed on 80 percent of the territory. We plan to finish this job by 1 March and to have analysed the results by April. We can already say that the wild boar population numbers are decreasing, while the number of roe deer is growing,” Alexei Surovy pointed out.

Amur Tiger Centre Director General Sergei Aramilev noted that the annual tiger population count in the indicated areas is conducted to monitor the status of individual groups and the tiger population as a whole so as to be able to promptly adjust environmental protection measures depending on the given situation.

“Although population count based on trails is looked down upon as an obsolete method, we continue using it so we can receive results within a short period of time, whereas trail cameras must remain in place for at least two months to produce any reliable results. It takes between two and five days to count the tiger population in each assigned area. On the other hand, trail cameras provide more information about the gender and age of each group of tigers and will possibly record one tiger more compared to trail surveys. However, both methods yield comparable data. The information collected in the areas where the count has been completed show positive results when it comes to the tiger population and the number of their prey, although the pattern of the hoofed animals has changed due to the African swine fever. Anyway, we have not revealed any negative trends,” Sergei Aramilev said.