As part of WWF’s Year of the Tiger, a collaboration has been launched between Sweden and Russia in which information is shared regarding the secrets of success for raising numbers of prey animals for Amur tigers.

Desperate Times

Human encroachment on traditional tiger habitats does not just reduce numbers of the big cats directly, but the problems the predators face are exacerbated by a reduction in the animals they would normally prey upon.

The effect of this is that many tigers struggle to find food and can either die of starvation or be forced to enter into local villages in order to prey upon domesticated livestock. Tigers that do this are often shot or beaten to death, while efforts to conserve the creatures can be harmed as villagers begin to perceive them as a pest and so are not motivated to help protect them.

From Sweden With Love

In order to reverse this trend, the managers of four sustainable hunting estates in Russia recently joined leaders from WWF-Russia’s Amur branch on a special trip to Sweden to learn how to increase the number of prey in their areas.

Sharing Methods

The Russian team visited hunting estates in the north and east of Sweden. Their Swedish counterparts shared methods on how they increased populations of ungulates, including roe deer, wild boar, fallow deer, reindeer and elk. The Amur tiger’s main prey in the Russian Far East are roe deer, red deer, sika deer, and wild boar.

New Approach

Already, the hunting estate managers have begun changing their approach to raising prey. They are now installing new types of feeders and using different kinds of forage.

Admiration

WWF plans to organize a series of seminars to share the findings of the trip with other hunting estates in Primorskii and Khabarovskii Provinces, which are interested in conservation of wild Pavel Fomenko, biodiversity conservation program coordinator at WWF-Russia’s Amur branch, explained his admiration for the scope of the Swedish wildlife support network, “One of the strongest impressions for me is that game management in Sweden is very democratic – all people regardless of their social or financial status are involved into this process.”

WWF Year of the Tiger

Measures such as these will be critical if WWF’s Year of the Tiger campaign, which seeks to double the number of tigers in the wild by the next Year of the Tiger in 2022, is to be successful. Scientists say that there is enough habitat across Asia to support tens of thousands of tigers, and if these big cats have enough space and prey and are protected from poachers, then their numbers will increase.

While the efforts to protect the animals from poachers often require the devotion of considerable time and resources, the new techniques the hunting estate managers have learnt could have significant effects compared to the difficulty of deployment. If repeated in a number of areas it could well contribute to an ultimately successful conservation scheme.