Tigers Between Empires: The Journey to Save the Siberian Tiger from Extinction, Jonathan C. Slaght, Allen Lane, £30

How things have changed since the world’s first tiger summit, held in St Petersburg in 2010. Called for by the Russian president Vladimir Putin and World Bank chief Robert Zoellick, also in attendance was prime minister of Nepal Madhav Kumar and prime minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina. In June this year, authorities in Nepal charged Kumar with corruption, and two months later thousands gathered in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, to mark the first anniversary of mass protests that toppled longtime leader Hasina. It hardly needs to be said that Putin’s own standing, at least in the West, has soured immeasurably.

The goal of that summit was to double the number of wild tigers by 2022. In 1900, there were thought to be 100,000 tigers in the world, then they disappeared from Vietnam in 2002, Cambodia in 2007 and Laos in 2013. Today, tigers exist in just seven per cent of the lands they did a century ago.

When it comes to saving them, geopolitics and conservation cannot be separated. That is probably why American wildlife biologist Jonathan C. Slaght chose Tigers Between Empires as the title for his new book, which charts the conservation story of the majestic Amur tiger.

This isn’t Slaght’s first work. He also wrote Owls of the Eastern Ice, based on a years-long quest to track down the highly elusive Blakiston’s fish owl in Russia’s Far East, specifically in Primorye, a remote forested region. It became a surprise bestseller. Tigers Between Empires, takes us back to that territory and to the plight of the Amur tiger (‘paradoxes of grace and violence’) and deep into the complex frontlines of conservation. It is a history of the people who have tried to manage and preserve tiger numbers despite the political polarities of both the home nations of the conservationists, Russia and America, and the lands that the Amur tiger has historically roamed. Before the 1850s, several thousand Amur tigers tracked their prey and bred through vast stretches of northeast Asia, specifically around the basin of the River Amur where Russia, China, and Mongolia meet.

The signing of two particular treaties by Russia and China, in quick succession, brought catastrophe: the Treaty of Aigun in 1858, and the Convention of Peking in 1860. As Slaght writes: ‘These agreements were unequal – Russia gained everything and China nothing – and wedged a political border in the centre of the Amur tiger’s range.’

Afterwards, both the Chinese and Russian empires encouraged people to settle these lands with ‘the Russians eager to consolidate gains on their side and the Chinese keen to stave off further territorial gains on theirs’. Those arriving to the Russian territories hunted tigers, and as immigration rose, tiger numbers dropped. Within four decades the tiger population was at just 30 or so, with the big cats retreating deep into the Sikhote-Alin mountains of the Russian Far East, way out of reach to most hunters. The best place for a tiger is where there is plenty to eat (‘their favourite food, wild boar, prey that can weigh as much as a grand piano and can have tusks like sharpened knives’), and where they will never come into contact with humans.

During times of political upheaval, danger presents itself not just for humans but for wildlife, too. Primorye saw turmoil during the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war. ‘Back then, unscrupulous entrepreneurs had taken advantage of the political uncertainty to cut down the forests around Terney [by the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve] as quickly as they could. They logged vast tracts of enormous and valuable Korean pine, a species that grows forty-five meters tall, lives up to seven hundred years, and is prized as a source of lumber for everything from bridges to furniture. It is also a species essential to the survival of the eco-system: without Korean pine there would be no Amur tigers. The pine nuts from this tree feed badgers, bears, deer, and wild boar. In turn, these species feed tigers…’ Tigers have found themselves under threat time and again by human-drawn borders, and the destruction of their habitats. As Slaght puts it, they’ve been ‘caught in this strange space between two empires – skirting the human-drawn line superimposed over forest and mountain…’

Throughout the book, the detail on tigers when they are living their lives, tracking prey and feasting is vivid and captivating, ‘Each meal is a hard-won prize… only one of every three hunting attempts was successful, and tigers secured kills only once every four or five days… Tigers usually attack from the side or behind, swatting at an ungulate’s hindquarters to slow it down. Then they work their way along the body, using their claws like a climber’s ice ax for traction, to reach then grip the animal’s throat with their jaws.’

When the Soviet Union officially prohibited tiger hunting in 1947, their numbers started to slowly recover and, by the late 1980s, thawing political tensions had ‘cracked a door of opportunity for Amur tiger research in Russia’. Via the Siberian Tiger Project, Russian scientists and American conservationists joined forces to try and save the tigers. Slaght introduces us to the leaders of the Russian side of the collaboration — Dima Pikunov, Igor Nikolayev, and Zhenya Smirnov — the sort of men who would spend months in the forests living with tigers to learn about them. And a whole cast of tigers themselves, such as Lidiya, who raised three litters and was tracked by the Siberian Tiger Project from 1999 to 2006, after which she disappeared at the age of 12, a long life for a tigress in the wild.

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the chaos that was unleashed on the economy meant tigers were being killed again, not least because the then Soviet-Chinese border opened and customs officials were being bribed. As Slaght points out, it was almost impossible to punish the hunters: ‘between 1991 and 2009, a period when hundreds of tigers had been poached in Russia and numerous people had been arrested for the offence, only a single person was found guilty of killing one’.

Wildlife biologist Dale Miquelle, a New Englander, is also central to the story. Miquelle was the lead field representative for the entirety of the Siberian Tiger Project on the American side, and was based in Terney for a decade from 1992 onwards. He has also authored, and co-authored, over 185 scientific publications about Amur tigers and leopards. But fissures in collaboration sometimes thwarted his work. Once he was stopped at the Vladivostok airport’s immigration desk and, despite his valid residency permit, refused entry (‘he received an apology for the “technical error” and was invited back. He understood, however, that things like this did not happen by accident. Someone had tried to get rid of him’).

At the end of the book Miquelle writes his own short essay, acknowledging that the reason the Siberian Tiger Project succeeded was because of passionate conservationists communicating across political divides: ‘In the beginning, it was Maurice Hornocker [who conceived the Siberian Tiger Project and who was named an honorary citizen of Terney] and Yevgeniy Matyushkin [an ecologist who studied Amur tigers] exchanging letters through the 1970s across the Iron Curtain, ignoring political barriers with their mutual admiration of big cats.’

The fate of the Amur tiger — feared, then hunted and finally, hopefully, protected — is unquestionably linked both to human attitudes and international collaboration. And there is ample proof in this book that more than 55,000 square kilometres of protected Amur tiger habitat now exists in northeast Asia — six times greater than when Miquelle first arrived in Terney in 1992. A highly admirable legacy for these remarkable conservationists and the Siberian Tiger Project.