Two Orphaned Siberian Tigers Reunite as Mates After a 120-Mile Trek Through Russian Wilderness

In deepest Siberia, where winds blow cold and poachers reduce wild animals to the brink of extinction, an unlikely tale of tiger romance is warming hearts and reinvigorating faith in species reintroduction.

Boris and Svetlaya—the two amorous Amur tigers in question—come from similar circumstances. Both were orphaned at a young age in the Sikhote-Alin mountains, where most of the massive cats also known as Siberian tigers live. Each was rescued at just a few months old in 2014 and taken into the same conservation program, where tigers are raised with minimal human contact. And, once they turned 18 months old, they were both released, more than 100 miles apart. The distance was meant to increase the species’ range in the Pri-Amur region on Russia’s far eastern Pacific coast.

Then, in “an unlikely love story” that took place more than a year after their release, Boris trekked 120 miles, “almost in a straight line,” and reunited with Svetlaya, Anthony Ham reports for the New York Times. Six months later, the star-crossed Siberians welcomed a litter of cubs. 

Boris and Svetlaya are the latest successes in an ongoing effort to reinvigorate the skimpy, endangered population of tigers in the borderlands between Russia and China to its once vibrant state. A study published in November in The Journal of Wildlife Management tracked how six orphaned Amur tiger cubs, including Boris and Svetlaya, fared through a rehabilitation program that aimed to minimize human interaction and maximize the chances that the tigers could one day successfully re-enter the wilds where their species once thrived.

On the whole, human-tiger conflict, poaching and habitat destruction are largely to blame for the big cats’ declining population. Only between 485 and 750 tigers still live in Russia, according to the Times. In a statement, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which led the study, reports that tigers exist only in an estimated 8 percent of their historic range.

Poaching is “the primary source of mortality for Amur tigers,” write the authors of the study. When a mother tiger stands her ground to protect herself and her cubs against humans, she makes herself more vulnerable to the poacher’s rifle. Orphans like Boris, Svetlaya and the four others included in the study, are common as a result. But a study published last year estimates there are more than 270,000 square miles in the tigers’ traditional habitat range that are empty of the big cats. Under the right set of conditions, scientists suggest, orphaned tigers could be raised correctly to repopulate these areas and drastically increase the species’ range.

In the rehabilitation program that counts Boris and Svetlaya among its alumni, researchers feed the cubs almost exclusively wild game. Within a few months, the young tigers have to hunt live prey released into their enclosures, starting with domestic rabbits and pheasants and gradually progressing to wild boar and sika deer.

Learning how to hunt is a vexing but necessary struggle for the young tigers. “It was like a kid trying to figure out a puzzle,” Dale Miquelle, an American tiger researcher based in Russia, told Matthew Shaer of Smithsonian magazine back in 2015, when the reintroduction program was in its early, experimental days.

Miquelle, now the lead author of the new research paper and director of the WCS in Russia, affirmed that these hunting drills worked once the cubs were released into the wild. “Basically, the data demonstrated that orphaned cubs, raised in captivity and released, were just as good as wild tigers at hunting, targeting the same types of wild prey, and very rarely killing livestock,” he says in the WCS statement.

Only one cub did not succeed in that task. Upon release, he crossed into China and went on a domestic goat-killing spree. Once he wandered back to Russia, scientists recaptured him and sent him to a captive-breeding program in a zoo. He will spend his days without the privileges and struggles of freedom in the Siberian wild.

But that errant tiger might be the exception that proves the rule. The five other tigers who were tracked in detail (as well as eight more that were not as intensively studied) have produced at least six litters of cubs and made 132 kills of prey that is more appropriate than Chinese goats.

As for Boris and Svetlaya, their determination might be exactly what their species needs to make an unlikely comeback.

“This study represents a tantalizing new development in expanding the ‘toolbox’ for conservationists to return tigers to those parts of Asia where they have been lost,” Luke Hunter, the executive director of the big cats program at the WCS, says in the statement. “The team was scrupulous in preparing young cubs for life in the wild, especially in ensuring they did not habituate to humans. Their careful approach succeeded and paves the way for more reintroduction attempts—not only of tigers, but of other big cats as well.”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.