CRI听力:China Tiger

The world's largest living cat once dominated the forests of Northeastern China and Siberia in the far-eastern corner of Russia. But the number Amur tigers has been decimated due to poaching and habitat destruction.

The population of these magnificent creatures, also known as Siberian tigers, declined to critical levels in the1960s. Since then numbers have picked up and around 450 individuals have been registered, mostly in South Eastern Russia.

But Joseph Vattakaven, an advisor in tiger conservation working for WWF's Tiger Alive Initiative says judging by this rare footage captured by WWF surveillance cameras at the end of 2013, the tigers are making a comeback. As are their feline cousins, the Amur leopard.

"I think this is a female red deer because we don't see the head or the antlers. Because usually they would never eat the antlers. And this is one of the best (types of) prey for the tiger because if it eats the deer, it might weigh more than 100 kilos or 120 kilos so that kill will last for 2 to 3 days."

In a programme that took off in 2012, the World Wildlife Fund and the country's State Forestry Administration have been breeding and introducing ungulate species such as the red deer in protected areas of North Eastern China. Vattakaven explains.

"The red deer is a very important prey species here in this landscape and it's perhaps the most preferred prey species by a tiger, because it's a large deer, compared to a sika deer and roe deer."

The team hopes that the introduced prey will be enough to feed the existing populations and even prompt a much-needed reproduction boom in the Chinese side of the territory.

While the Russian forests north of the Amur river are home to around 200 Siberian tigers, according to WWF, only between 18 to 22 of them live in the wild in China mostly along the Heilongjiang river. Vattakaven says:

"We know that there are about 200 hundred tigers in Russia, the Amur tigers, but maybe only 20 tigers in China. But there is habitat for the tigers in China. So the programme is meant to improve the habitat, to improve the prey. It's a very critical component of the tiger recovery programme, because if the tigers in Russia and tigers in China are to increase, the best potential area is in China."

The aim, in the long run, is to establish an eco-corridor and suitable permanent habitat for the Amur tigers in Russia to migrate into China.

Only that way, experts say, it would be possible to increase reproduction rates and, eventually, double the number of Amur tigers by 2022, the next Year of the Tiger.

For CRI, I am Li Dong.