Camera traps in Bikin National Park registered 26 Amur tigers

“Thanks to the support of our partners – WWF Russia and the Amur Tiger Center, the preparation for camera trap monitoring has been launched since the first days of the Park’s functioning. The first camera traps were set up in the beginning of 2017, that time we registered 10 tigers – 5 females and 5 males, however the large scale photo monitoring was conducted for the first time in winter 2017-2018, - comments Alexei Kudryavtsev, the head of Bikin National Park. – Photo monitoring was carried out by local hunters out of the Park’s staff on their family lands, and became one of the directions on attraction of local people to the work of the national park. Thanks to the hunting skills and well mounted camera traps almost all tigers living on the territory of 2000 square kilometers were registered. We are happy to receive this information. The results allow to estimate the tiger numbers on the Park’s territory and take necessary protection measures.”

«We received a massive portion of the material, examined and processed it manually. Indeed, the analysis of the images is very time consuming, - comments Vladimir Popov, senior staff of science department of the Bikin National Park. – Finally, we managed to identify 26 tigers within our monitoring plot. They are 10 males and 10 females – two of them with the cubs (totally 6 cubs in two litters). The most remarkable fact is that one tigress has four cubs which happens quite rarely, and testifies that the tiger group feels safe and secured in the Park. Some of the images impressed a lot, for instance, the photo with a tigress and two cubs dining with a boar killed earlier by the male tiger. The right choice of the place for mounting the camera trap helped to get a number of nice images, for example, with Nepal martens and the tiger having a rest right in front of the camera.”

«The Amur tiger census on its entire home range is very complex and expensive work which cannot be conducted very often. That’s why annual monitoring over tiger population status is critically important. The implementation of new technologies allows to estimate the number and density of predators by certain standards and therefore to avoid subjective assessment of the experts. Such monitoring makes it possible to keep an eye over the dynamics in main indicators of the population status and reveals the efficiency of protection measures. – comments Alexey Kostyria, rare species conservation unit at WWF Russia Amur branch.