Russian and American big cat biologists took place around a campfire in
Idaho. The Americans were doing cutting-edge research on mountain
lions using radio collars to track their movements, and one of the
Russians suggested they collaborate on a similar study of Amur tigers. In
January 1990, two researchers from the Idaho-based Hornocker Wildlife
Institute paid their first visit to the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik, a 1,500-
square-mile biosphere reserve on the Pacific slope of the Sikhote-Alin
mountain range.
The Americans were deeply moved by what they saw and, two years
later, in February 1992, at virtually the same moment that Amur tigers
began dying in numbers not seen since the early twentieth century, the
Wildlife Conservation Society’s Siberian Tiger Project was launched.
Dale Miquelle, a former moose researcher who had just come off a one-
year tiger project in Nepal, was there at the outset and he has never left.
In 1995, he was joined by John Goodrich and, together with their Russian
colleagues, they have been tracking, trapping, and radio-collaring tigers
in the Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik ever since. As a result, a much more
complete picture of the behavior, habits, and long-term needs of the
Amur tiger has emerged; chief among the latter is better protection: over
the years, a number of the project’s collared tigers have been killed by
poachers, in spite of the fact that they reside in a protected area. The
Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik is considered one of the Amur tiger’s key
breeding grounds and, because of this, one of the six Inspection Tiger
teams was based there.
Vladimir Schetinin assigned Trush to lead the Bikin unit, whose territory
encompassed the northwest corner of Primorye, including the confluence
of the Bikin and Ussuri rivers. It was a good fit because Trush had
already lived and hunted in the area for five years. He and his wife,
Lyubov (Love), still make their home in Luchegorsk, a mining town of
twenty thousand, and a “four-minute” stop on the Trans-Siberian