Tigers and pigs living together? It sounds unusual, but in Thailand a 6-year old tiger is taking care of some piglets as if they were her own.

Saimai lives at a zoo near Bangkok. She has watched the little pigs since she was 2-years old. The tiger, herself, was brought up by a sow.

The piglets are dressed up in tiger outfits for fun, but don’t normally wear the costumes. At the same zoo, a sow nurses her own piglets and two cubs!

Officials at the zoo insist that in Thailand it is common for tigers to nurse pigs and vice versa.

Early this year, when villagers discovered a huge male tiger trapped in an abandoned well in the largest of India’s tiger preserves, they did a remarkable thing: They concocted a handmade rope-and-bamboo ladder, lowered it into the well and set the big cat free.

And when India’s most notorious gang of tiger poachers showed up in the park and began setting traps, an angry band of local forest dwellers, bows and arrows drawn, ambushed and arrested them. Today many are in jail.

Those are rare acts in India, where tigers are disappearing at an astonishing pace.

A century back, India had 40,000 of the emblematic cats. But five years ago the number was down to 3,700, and today scientists say there are fewer than 1,500, most in scattered small reserves.

Poachers, feeding a Chinese market hungry for tiger skins and bone, have cleared some reserves of the big cats. Incursions by land-hungry peasants and their livestock have eaten away at other parks. Armed Maoist rebels have made some reserves impossible to patrol. And India’s government is considering a bill to hand over two-thirds of national tiger-reserve land to landless peasants. But in Nagarjuna Sagar, a sprawling reserve in southeast India, tigers are holding on thanks to an innovative campaign by local conservationists, who have quit trying to evict villagers and extremist rebels from the park and instead won them over to the tiger cause.

Saving tigers “is more about managing people than managing animals,” said K. Thulsi Rao, an assistant state forest officer, head of biodiversity research at the reserve and the mastermind of Nagarjuna Sagar’s people-friendly conservation approach.

“If you address people’s needs, the rest is taken care of,” he said. “When you make people the partners of management, there is really a lot of change.”

Conversing, conserving

Nagarjuna Sagar, split by the mighty Krishna River, doesn’t look much like a traditional wildlife sanctuary. The park, which encompasses more than 1,000 square miles, is home to a massive hydroelectric dam and a popular shrine that draws millions of Hindu pilgrims each year. Heavy traffic plies paved roads cut through the open forestland.

Perhaps most troubling, nearly 120 small villages lie within the boundaries of the hilly park, including 22 settlements in the reserve’s core conservation area, which under Indian law is supposed to be free of human inhabitants.

When Rao arrived at the reserve in 1994, its forests were full of Naxals, India’s homegrown Maoist rebels. The rebels had recently shot dead one of the forest service’s best rangers and had forbidden others from entering the woods.

Villagers in the park, fed up with a government program that paid them only a third of the value of any livestock killed by tigers, were pouring pesticides on livestock carcasses and poisoning the cats.

Neighbors of the reserve, with the approval of the populist Naxals, were leveling large sections of the woods for firewood to sell, selectively felling the forest’s valuable teak trees or bringing in huge herds of cattle to graze. The reserve’s tiger population, which once topped 80, had fallen to fewer than 40.

Rao, who had a background in ecodevelopment efforts, decided the Naxals were the reserve’s biggest problem.

The new forest officer headed into the woods to talk to them, armed only with 600 slides and a presentation on the philosophical merits of conservation. Told by a Naxal leader that the forest service cared more about animals than people, he argued that if the forest disappeared, the people would lose their livelihood and home.

The next day, to everyone’s surprise, the Naxals issued a ban on woodcutting in the park.

Rao also went to visit woodcutter villages outside the reserve, where rangers had long been greeted by men waving axes. Insisting he would listen to their concerns, he discovered that people hated being treated as thieves, struggled to survive on $2 a day as woodcutters and would have preferred farming but had no water for irrigation.

Calling in local non-governmental organizations and raising development funds from India’s government and international bodies like the World Bank, Rao began paying locals $2 a day to replant degraded forest areas in the Krishna River’s water catchment area and helped them rebuild abandoned irrigation channels. He helped villagers plant new cattle-grazing areas outside the reserve and targeted conservation education programs at the area’s most notorious poachers and smugglers.

In the park’s core, he assured 2,000 aboriginal Chenchu forest dwellers that the government no longer wanted to evict them, but preferred to hire them to monitor the cats’ movements. And he and others persuaded the government to boost its compensation for cattle kills to full market value.

Today, satellite photos show massive regrowth of forest within Nagarjuna Sagar, and large-scale regeneration of grazing land outside the park. The region’s water storage lakes are full for the first time in decades. Tiger poisonings have virtually stopped and political talks with the Naxals are under way.

Sakria Mudavat, 40, a former woodcutter living on the fringes of the reserve, today gets several crops a year of rice, lentils and castor beans from his once-barren land. He earns $125 a month, up from $12.50, enough to put both his children in school.

“We’re very happy now,” said Gamli Bai, 75, a leader of Mudavat’s village. “If anybody comes [to poach], we will stop them.”

Venkataiah, 30, a Chenchu tiger tracker living in a grass and woven bamboo hut deep in the reserve’s teak and crocodile bark forest, also reports seeing tiger cubs on his rounds.

“Slowly, they are increasing,” he says of the big cats, whose numbers today are estimated by rangers to have risen to about 80.

The reserve’s tale is the exception in India, where tiger numbers remain “precariously low,” according to the Sujoy Banerjee of the World Wildlife Federation’s India office. Activists fear the government bill to transfer reserve land to peasants would be a death sentence for wild tigers in the country.

Extending lessons learned at Nagarjuna Sagar may prove difficult given that many of India’s reserves are smaller, even more imperiled and facing crushing pressure from India’s growing population of 1.2 billion.

But learning how to deal with tigers’ human neighbors, everyone agrees, is a crucial step toward saving them.

“Every 10 miles there’s a new problem in tiger conservation,” said John Seidensticker, a leading tiger expert at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park. “You’re never done saving them. You just keep working on it.”

The influential America-based Science magazine published a photo Friday which it claimed to be of a wild South China tiger, which was taken in northwest China.

The magazine quoted Gary Koehler of Washington State’s Department of Fish and Wildlife as saying that “it’s tremendously exciting news, if it can be substantiated”.

The photograph, purporting to be the first sighting of a South China tiger for more than 30 years, has already aroused intensive among Chinese netizens as well as scientists and scholars, after it was released on October 12.

The photo was chosen from 71 digital and film photos, reportedly taken by a local farmer named Zhou Zhenglong in early October in Zhenping County, Shaanxi Province.

There are doubts over its veracity and suggestions that digital technology may have been used to alter the image by netizens and a botanist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). In addiction the international foundation, Save China’s Tigers (SCT), also issued a claim commenting on the alleged spotting of the South China tiger.

The claim said that a tiger needs about 20 square kilometers of habitat for its own survival. Zhenping County has a tiger reserve zone of up to 140 square kilometers, so even if there are tigers, it will only be a very small population.

Tigers, as solitary animals, are not easily spotted by humans. So it would have been extraordinary for Mr. Zhou to spot and photograph the tiger for two days in a row, the claim said.

It also pointed out that tigers are very vigilant animals. When they see strange animals, their first reaction would be to press themselves flat to the ground and prepare for attack or escape. But Zhou’s photos did not show the tiger in such a position.

But forestry officials in Shaanxi have rushed to Mr Zhou’s defense. “The photos were proved genuine by experts of wildlife and photography we have organized to scrutinize them,” Said Sun Chengqian, deputy-director of the provincial forestry department.

Guan Ke, an official with the department’s information office also claimed that he believed that the photos are genuine, judging from his many years’ experience of shooting wildlife in Shaanxi Province.

However, the State Forestry Administration (SFA) urged the public to be more sensible over the authenticity of those photos.

“One single tiger does not necessarily translate into the existence of a group, and whether the photos are true or not does not illustrate the current situation of wild South China tigers,” said Cao Qingrao, spokesman of SFA at a press conference Thursday.

“Disputes over those photos would be a storm in teapot,” said Richard Stone, Asia editor of Science magazine.

Some Chinese scientists also echoed the opinion saying that people should know better than merely arguing about the authenticity of the photos.

“We should be aware that there are many wildlife and plants that should be protected in this area of Shaanxi even if there are no South China tigers,” said Xie Yan, a researcher of tigers with the Institute of Zoology of the CAS.

“To look from a positive point of view, disputes over the authenticity of the photos showed that the public has developed a much greater interest in the conservation of wild animals. It is important to preserve people’s concern about wildlife,” said Xie, adding that local people should be encouraged to protect the biodiversity in the area.

Chinese zoologists are preparing an expedition to determine the possible existence of the “extinct” wild South China tiger in Shaanxi Province. But the SFA ruled out the possibility of offering a reward for taking pictures of the wild cat for fear of disturbing them if they actually exist.”

Two cuddly balls of fur currently hiding out at the Buffalo Zoo represent new hope for survival of the Amur tiger, whose fast-disappearing natural population is centered in the Russian Far East, half a world away.

The unnamed cubs, a male and a female, arrived late Oct. 6 or early Oct. 7, weighing in at about 2 pounds each, and are being attended to by their mother, Sungari, in a holding area out of public view, the zoo said.

It will be at least three months before the youngsters — the first tigers born at the zoo in nearly 20 years — will debut in the outdoor exhibit divided between Amur tigers and African lions.

Their births, the zoo said, were “a huge success” for the local breeding program and perhaps a harbinger of better times ahead for the critically endangered Amurs. They were called Siberian tigers before their main habitat receded to the Amur River Valley. They have not had much good news to purr about in recent times.

Just 350 to 450 are believed to remain in the wild, including a handful in North China, Manchuria and North Korea — leaving the subspecies’ long-term survival primarily in the hands of the world’s zoos.

The breeding of the Buffalo cubs’ parents, Sungari and Toma, was recommended under an Association of Zoos and Aquariums Species Survival Plan, designed to maintain a healthy and stable captive population of the animals.

The global plan started in 1982 with 83 captive Amurs and now includes about 160, making it the most extensively bred tiger subspecies. It is estimated that there are currently no more than around 255 tigers from three different subspecies in the captive breeding plan.

Over the years, the zoo has kept other tiger species, including Bengals and Sumatrans, but since the lion and tiger habitat was built in the 1980s, the collection has been limited to Amurs — the largest of tigers, weighing as much as 400 pounds in adulthood.

The last cubs born here, in 1988, were the male Tevye, who died in 2005, and the female Chava, who died in 2000.

Sungari, the new cubs’ mother, was born in 2003 at the Philadelphia Zoo. The father, Toma, was born in 2001 at the Toronto Zoo.

China — A farmer named Zhou Zhenglong came home with a reporter on the afternoon of October 19 to show his negatives from pictures of a South China tiger taken by the farmer several days ago near a cliff in Zhenping County, Shaanxi Province, according to the Shanghai Morning Post.

Zhou asked for 800 yuan to display his negatives. He took the photographic plates from a small plastic bag, but he did not unwind all of them. The farmer pointed to the negatives while describing what the tiger looked like. The negatives were entirely black. Zhou said that they contained photographic images of a South China tiger, an endangered tiger subspecies believed to have been extinct in the wild for more than 30 years.

“No one can doubt these photos of the tiger,” Zhou said. Pictures of this endangered species have sparked controversy as long as they have been released. Some people suspect that many of the released pictures had been tampered with using digital technologies and photographic experts have been asked to identify these photos in order to reach a more authoritative conclusion.

The farmer hoped that his negatives would bring him a fortune. “I will decorate my house if I earn a lot of money,” Zhou said. He also confirmed that he would like to let people know his phone number in order to sell the negatives. Zhou has been awarded 20,000 yuan (US$2,666) as a reward for finding the tiger by the Shaanxi forestry authorities.

It seems that Australia’s thylacine, often known as the Tasmanian Tiger may have survived far longer than naturalists previously thought. The thylacine (a marsupial predator) was hunted to extinction in Tasmania. The last wild specimen is believed to have been killed in 1918. The last known captive thylacine died in Hobart Zoo, Tasmania in 1930.

But new research seems to suggest that wild thylacines survived well into the 1950s and 60s. Samples of faeces rumoured to be from a thylacine had been preserved in a Tasmanian museum.
Click here to find out more!

Scientists hope that DNA analysis will prove that the thylacine survived for longer than thought. It is especially encouraging evidence for the devoted cryptozoologists (who study new and rediscovered animals) who hope that the thylacine may have survived to the present day.

Every year there are numerous sightings of what witnesses believe to be living thylacines.

The Amur tiger cubs at the Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium are celebrating their first birthday today.

Mara now weighs 160 pounds while her brother, Petya, is 180 pounds.

Their birthday cakes were made from boxes filled with their favorite treats.

Amur tigers are an endangered species.

Mara and Petya were just about 14 pounds during their big media debut on October 3, 2006.

According to the Pittsburgh Zoo’s website, female tigers can weigh as much as 350-pounds – while males can tip the scales at 675-pounds!

Watch the tiger cubs live

Like all other rare and endangered non-domesticated animals, baby White Tigers require extremely species-specific nutrition and care. They, require feeding every 2 hours, 24 hours a day for the first 3 weeks of their life.

The mother of these tiger cubs in El-Mahdia, Tunisia refuses to feed them or doesn’t have enough milk. Local veterinary authorities came up with the idea of entrusting a dog with the delicate mission. Leaving only one cub to its mother, two cubs were introduced to a local dog. The dog responded and soon took the cubs as her own.

The Bengal Tiger or Royal Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris) is a subspecies of tiger primarily found in Bangladesh and India and also in Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and in the south of Tibet. It is the most common tiger subspecies, and lives in a variety of habitats, including grasslands, subtropical and tropical rainforests, scrub forests, wet and dry deciduous forests and mangroves. Its fur is orange-brown with black stripes, although there is a mutation that sometimes produces white tigers. It is the national animal of both Bangladesh and India.

There are only 4000 white tigers in their natural habitat and 200 in captivity.

It’s a reality show with a difference. On a visit to Chhatbir zoo the last thing you expect to see is a man atop a tree whistling away to glory, a wildlife guard making loud, strange noises and another one busy beating a drum.

No, it’s not even an effort to recreate a tiger hunting scene from yesteryears. In fact, what greets visitors at the zoo is wildlife authorities pulling off every trick in the animal management book to lure a 11-month-old white tiger to go back to its enclosure.

The tiger is one of the two such cats brought from Delhi zoo some days back and released from captivity on Saturday morning, and has since then been playing hide and seek with zoo keepers.

Probably, it’s trying to convey something — the weather, the living place, or maybe just a day or two of solitude.

Whatever be, zoo officials, after losing a few from the tribe recently, are now too fond of the cat to leave it alone.

On Monday, they tried to push the female tigress near the wire mesh and grills of the locked enclosure, hoping that it may at least respond to feminine sweet-talking.

Field director Dharmender Kumar and zoo warden Neeraj Gupta seemed the most worried of all, finding it difficult to chose from options being suggested by all except those inside cages.

Recent criticism for showing negligent in handling the felines in captivity too proved a hindrance as officials dared not touch any tranquilliser or any other medical aid, fearing the worst.

The official reason, however, remained: “It is only a child enjoying all those mood swings.”

Poachers seeking to bag a Royal Bengal tiger in the Sunderbans reserve are encountering a unique new security measure to keep them away: hundreds of crocodiles that have been released in the mangrove forest.

Originally brought into the reserve in the late 1990s for breeding, the crocodiles are having the unintended beneficial effect of scaring away poachers from the forest - home to the largest wild population of Royal Bengal tigers.

“With tigers on land and the crocodile in water, the fear factor does work,” divisional Forest Officer Rathin Banerjee said Tuesday.

During winter months, the crocs often come out of the cold water and lie in the jungle path of the poachers.

Nearly 400 crocodiles, bred in captivity over the years, have been released in the reserve, Banerjee said. A 2004 census said more than 270 tigers were roaming the reserve in West Bengal state, bordering Bangladesh.

“The use of crocodiles is one of the measures to save the wildlife there from poachers,” said V.K. Yadav, a forest conservator.

Conservationist Ranjit Mitra said it was difficult to say how many tigers have been killed by poachers in the past five years, “but it will run into dozens.”

Another conversationist called the idea of using crocs “novel.”

“It is surely a novel idea, but this can be one of the measures to check poaching,” said Animesh Basu of the Himalayan Nature and Adventure Foundation, a local non-governmental organization.

The state Forest Department was assessing the effectiveness of the new measure.

“It is not like you count how many hens you had and how many have been taken away by the jackals at night,” Yadav said. “Here the idea is to ensure that there is no unusual change in the demography,” Yadav said referring to major species of animals in the Sunderbans.

India’s border guards also have set up camps in the area to guard against the poachers.

“We are trying our best,” Yadav said.

Preliminary results of a recent exhaustive study of tiger habitats found that the population in some Indian states may be nearly 65 percent smaller than experts had thought.

Conservationists said the early results indicated the most recent tiger census - which found about 3,500 tigers - was far too optimistic. The study was conducted in the past two years by the government-run Wildlife Institute of India.