Trailing the Siberian tiger

RUSSIAN biologists tracking tigers normally depend on the usual method of looking for pugs in the snow. But Galina Salkina, a Russian researcher who attended the Global Tiger Forum meet, has developed a novel method. She trains dogs to recognise the scat and pugs of tigers. "This method was commonly used to track down criminals in Moscow," she says. "So I engaged the help of the trainers for my own research."

Russia is also one of the few countries where radiotelemetry is being used to define the ecology of this subspecies.

About a third of Siberia's tigers were killed in 1992, after Russia's borders with China were opened and poachers had easy access to markets there and in Taiwan. More Siberian tigers now live in captivity (about 800) than in the wild. Estimates put the present wild population at about 300-400 tigers in the Russian Far East and about 50 in northeastern China.