Tigers on Top of the World

There are tigers living on top of the world and this is terrific news.  Wild tiger populations are dwindling and there

has not been much good news to report about any of the remaining 5 subspecies of tigers that share our world, but recently a “lost” population of tigers has been filmed living at a higher altitude in the Himalayas than was previously thought that tigers could survive.

Tigers have been known to live in the Himalayan foothills of Bhutan, but when Bhutanese villagers reported that tigers were living as high as 13,000 ft (4000 m), Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, the President of Panthera,  decided to  investigate.   Dr. Rabinowitz, along with BBC Wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan travelled to Bhutan in search of the mountain tigers.  After treking up the mountain, Buchanan set up a series of camera traps that would capture any animal that passed by.  The Panthera team left camera traps as high as 4100 meters, a level where trees begin to struggle for survival.

Three months later, Gordon returned to his camera traps to see what animals had passed by. Incredibly, the cameras shot footage of two wild tigers, one male and one female.  These images are the first known footage of tigers in the remote mountains of Bhutan and the first concrete evidence that tigers are capable of living at that altitude. This is the only place on earth known to have tigers, leopards and snow leopards all sharing the same valley.

The big male tiger was captured on  camera  scent-marking at 4,100m. This supports that the tiger pair are living within this territory and not just roaming through. The female tiger was captured on camera lactating, indicating the tigers are breeding at the high altitude. Other cameras showed tigers living at the lower 3,000 m altitude.

When Gordon saw the images of the tigers on the camera traps he was moved to tears of joy.  You can see and even feel the excitement and happiness that exudes from Gordon in this video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKNXL8cBlTI[/youtube]

It is super exciting isn’t it?  I found myself getting a little teary eyed myself at this fantastic news about our big cat cousins.  And even more exciting is that this discovery that tigers are living at high altitudes in Bhutan may make the expansion of a “tiger corridor”  possible.  A “tiger corridor” is the conservation method of connecting surviving isolated and fragmented tiger populations, so that  the tigers can move freely between populations allowing them to breed more widely, strengthening their genetic diversity.  The corridors also bring refuge to the tigers from encroaching human settlements.

Panthera’s  Tiger Corridor Initiative wishes to establish a tiger corridor that will extend along the foothills of the Himalayas from Nepal into Bhutan and northern India, then through to Myanmar. Ultimately,  this corridor would be connected to another corridor expanding through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia all the way to Malaysia.

The remote area of Bhutan could serve as a tiger nursery where tigers could breed  and then disperse to re-populate forests of some of the surrounding countries.

Super Hurrah just doesn’t seem adequate for news of this magnitude!  I thought you would like to share in this moment of joy  in celebration of our big cat tiger cousins.