ambush?—barred their way. Perhaps it was the cave lions that stopped
them.
Life in the higher latitudes has always been precarious and, by some
estimates, the Russian Far East has never supported more than a thousand
tigers. Due to the extreme climate and its impact on prey density, large
mammals, in general, are more sparsely distributed in the taiga than in
the tropics. As a result, Amur tigers must occupy far larger territories
than other subspecies in order to meet their needs for prey. In Primorye,
these territories can be so large that, after trying to follow several tigers
on their winter rounds, a pioneering tiger researcher named Lev Kaplanov
speculated in the early 1940s that Amur tigers were simply wanderers.
“The entire winter life of a solitary tiger takes place as a sequence of long
journeys,” wrote Kaplanov, the Amur tiger’s most famous early
advocate.^1 “The tiger is a born nomad.”
The tiger was first classified as a distinct species of cat in 1758. The
subspecies known variously as the Korean, Manchurian, Siberian, Ussuri,
Woolly, or Amur tiger was first designated Felis tigris altaica in 1844.
Since then, the taxonomic scent tree has been marked and marked again,
to the point that this subspecies has been reclassified seven times. The
last man to stake his claim was Nikolai Baikov, a lifetime member of the
Society for Study of the Manchurian Territory, and of the Russian
Academy of Sciences. In his monograph “The Manchurian Tiger,” Baikov
begins by paying homage to the explorer Vladimir Arseniev and to the
novelist Mayne Reid (The Headless Horseman, etc.). He then proceeds to
go out on a limb that both of those brave romantics would have
appreciated: in Baikov’s opinion, the creature he reclassified as Felis
tigris mandshurica was no ordinary tiger but a living fossil—a throwback
to the Pliocene worthy of designation as a distinct species. “Its massive
body and powerful skeletal system are reminiscent of something ancient
and obsolete,” wrote Baikov in 1925.^2 “The Far East representative of the
giant cat is ... extremely close, both in its anatomical structure, and in its
way of life, to the fossil cave tiger, Machairodus, a contemporary of the
cave bear and the wooly mammoth.”