Back in the 1960s and 1970s, we did basic, and some would now say old-fashioned, natural history. There was no satellite imagery available to us to delineate suitable habitat. Radiotelemetry was primitive, though we did collar jaguars and trace their movements. We had no automatic infrared cameras to photograph any passing creature. To recognize a tiger with certainty, I looked closely at the stripe pattern of its face. I picked apart scats to determine what cats had eaten, followed their tracks in dust or snow to plot the extent of their travels, and examined each kill to find out its age and sex. Conservation depends on such information.
At the time I did not think that wilderness would so quickly become exhaustible. The human population has more than doubled since then, forests have given way to fields, and livestock herds have replaced wildlife on rangelands.
Lions, once so abundant, are vanishing outside of reserves. Shot, poisoned, and snared by pastoralists and farmers, partly because they kill cattle and occasionally a person, lions may ultimately survive only in protected reserves. Tigers now occupy roughly 7 percent of their former range. Fewer than 4,000 may be left in the wild, whereas, by sad contrast, China and the United States are thought to have some 5,000 each in captivity.
Tigers and leopards in Asia are threatened by networks of poachers that supply the East, particularly China, with skins, as well as bones and other body parts with supposed medicinal value. No wonder two of India's reserves, Sariska and Panna, lost all their tigers under the eyes of a complacent and unmotivated guard force.
I once followed the lone track of a rare Asiatic cheetah across its last home in the desert of central Iran. How can the world stand idly by while natural treasures such as this vanish, country by country?
When I began fieldwork, it was with the aim not only of studying a species but also of promoting its safety within a protected area. Both such efforts remain essential. But I have had to change my mind-set. Most countries now lack the space to set aside large new areas to support a population of, let us say, 200 snow leopards or tigers. Most existing reserves are small, able to sustain only a few of the great cats—and these may become extinct due to inbreeding, disease, or some accidental event. And as ecosystems shift with climate change, animals will have to adapt, migrate, or die. Read the full report here.
Source: by George B. Schaller, Photograph by Steve Winter, National Geographic, December 2011.
