TIGERS BETWEEN EMPIRES

TIGERS BETWEEN EMPIRES focuses on the people and tigers of the Siberian Tiger Project, conceived in 1989 as a U.S.-Russian, post-Cold War scientific partnership.

By blending Russian field savvy with Western technology, the team's goal was to capture and release wild Amur tigers in order to learn as much as possible about them. These cats are an endangered and cryptic species; in 1989 only a few hundred were thought to still be slinking through the snowy forests of Northeast Asia. When the project finally kicked off in 1992, however, only weeks after the Soviet Union fell, the purpose of this collaboration took on new meaning. Instead of simply recording tiger ecology, sharing expertise across borders, and supporting tiger population recovery, the team watched as a catastrophe bloomed in the Russian forests, documenting in real time how poaching and unsustainable logging bloodied this already-vulnerable species.

Day-to-day operations of the Project on the ground tiger captures, tracking, and the development of conservation recommendations were led by an American, Dale Miquelle, who was a moose researcher by training, and Zhenya Smirnov, a Russian who had built his scientific career studying rodents. Both would grow into globally-recognized champions of Amur tiger conservation. These scientists conducted dangerous work to collect information on tiger ecology, feed it into wildlife management plans, and collaborate with partners in government to adopt policy in support of tiger protections. Over three decades the project would evolve into the longest-running tiger research initiative anywhere in the world, with a series of innovations that continue to guide tiger conservation today not just in Russia but across the border in China as well, and around all of Asia wherever tigers are found.

Jonathan C. Slaght is the Russia and Northeast Asia coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society, where he manages research projects on endangered species and coordinates avian conservation activities along the East AsiaAustralasian Flyway from the Arctic to the tropics. His annotated translation of Across the Ussuri Kray, by Vladimir Arsenyev, was published in 2016, and his work has been featured by The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC World Service, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, and Audubon magazine, among others. His book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award as well as the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. He lives in Minneapolis.