Phil Druker/ Department of English/ UI
MY TRAVELS WITH THE HORNOCKER ... 07/13/2000 Lewiston Tribune Category: Local/Regional Published: 07/13/2000 Page: 1C Keywords: Hornocker Wildlife Institute Caption: Phil Druker My travels with the Hornocker Wildlife Insititute may be over Byline: Phil Druker The Hornocker Wildlife Institute recently left Moscow and moved to Bozeman, Montana. In honor of great work it has done studying large carnivores -- especially large cats -- in Idaho and around the world, I'm presenting this account of a trip I took to the Russian Far East in 1997, when I had the chance to visit the main Siberian tiger preserve. Log trucks roar past trailing clouds of dust as we drive along looking for tracks alongside the road. We see plenty of deer and elk tracks, but that's not what we're after. We are looking for the tracks of the Siberian tiger, the world's largest cat. John Goodrich sees some tracks, so his wife Linda Kerley stops the van. As Field Coordinators for the Siberian Tiger Project, John and Linda have lived and worked in the Russian Far East for five years now, so they're expert at spotting tiger tracks. Sure enough, in the soft dirt by the road are cat tracks -- big cat tracks, 7-inch-wide cat tracks. John says it's probably Genny, a 400-pound male. Linda notes the tracks can't be more than a day old given the rain that fell the previous night. My eyes are wide now with anticipation. Using a tracking radio with a directional antenna, John, picks up a radio collar signal from Katya, Genny's mate. Three years ago, they placed a radio collar on Katya. Now, the slow beep of the radio signal shows she is resting about a half mile east of the road. John says she has a den there with at least one cub. "I suppose I should look for orange," I suggest, but Linda tells me, "watch for the white that circles the tigers ' eyes." Economic and political changes in Russia have put extensive pressure on Siberian tigers in the form of poaching and habitat loss from logging. A tiger carcass can fetch more than $10,000, which is far more than most people in the area can make in years of working in the woods, farming, or trapping. In 1991, the Hornocker Wildlife Institute, along with Russian scientists, began The Siberian Tiger Project. Its goals include collecting data on the tigers and coordinating a plan to save the remaining 400 tigers from extinction Since then, they have radio-collared 16 tigers, enabling wildlife biologists to determine that the tigers have huge, 40-square-mile home ranges. In contrast, the Bengal tiger of India, the Siberian tiger's closest living relative, has a home range of just 3 square miles. Tiger cubs, biologists have discovered, leave their mother at a surprisingly early age for large mammals: just 14 to 16 months. Armed with this new information, they hope to figure out the best way to preserve the tiger population. The next day, John and I hike through the dense forest of maples, birch, elm, cottonwood, pine, fir, and tamarack. It's a hot July day, maybe 90 degrees, and muggy. The bugs are thick: mosquitoes, no-see-ums, and immense horseflies. I pull a dozen ticks from my pants. They can carry encephalitis and Lyme disease. As I follow John, I pretend he will spot either variety of pit viper inhabiting these woods before I step on one. We both carry pepper spray canisters in case we encounter a tiger or a brown bear. Tigers killed five people in the area during the last couple years. Some were killed while trying to poach tigers. Injured tigers attacked others. With its bugs, snakes, brown bears and tigers, I decide this is not a friendly place. As we walk, I practice pulling my canister of pepper spray out of my pocket. In a vast meadow with waist-high grass, flocks of finches, warblers, and buntings surround us. A roe deer bolts from a thicket the grass, and I catch glimpses of his tall antlers and spotted sides. Then, as we walk along the shore of a freshwater lake, we notice a pair of sea eagles in the birch trees across the lake. Wondering if a tiger or a brown bear left remnants of a kill, we decide to hike the half mile around the lake. There, we find the ground churned by wild boars. Stopping at a large birch, John points to scratch marks and a dark spot on the tree, a tiger's scent mark. He sniffs the spot, says it smells pretty fresh, and invites me to check it out. I dubiously put my nose to the tree and am surprised by a sweet pine smell. Finding no other sign of , we head for the Sea of Japan, just another half mile through the forest. A sand beach and a strong sea breeze greet us. Tiger tracks line the sand near the shore. Seals and cormorants rest on rocks in the sea. To the east, the forest of the Sikhote-Alin Preserve and its rolling mountains rise through the haze to their 5000 foot crest some 30 miles inland. I ask John if he thinks the tigers will survive. He says they should as long as the Russian government is able to keep poaching to a minimum and protect the Sikhote-Alin Preserve, the heart of Siberian tiger habitat. For its part, the Hornocker Wildlife Institute has helped the Russian government allocate more land to the reserve. But tigers require more land than can be protected by reserves. So the Hornocker Institute is helping the Russian government to establish land-use management practices on non-reserve land that will ensure the tiger's survival. And along with an education project aimed at helping Russians living in the region to understand the importance of preserving the tigers in the wild, the institute compensates farmers when they loose cattle or horses to tigers. When I to ask what my chances of seeing a tiger are, John says that during the previous month, a young male tiger hung around the outskirts of town less than a mile from where I was staying. While in Russia, I never saw a tiger. But for months after that trip, I dreamed of big cat prints in the sand and a shock of white tiger fur lurking in the dense brush of the Russian Far East.