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Amur Tigers
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Great Soul of Siberia.
Bengal tigers have also suffered quite a bit at the hands of humans, but it has made them more aggressive rather than cautious. This may be the result of the tropical climate and the close proximity of tiger and human territories. When facing threats from humans, Bengal tigers prefer confrontation to ambush. And when a tiger is injured and unable to hunt, it becomes even more violent toward humans. The Champawat Tiger became famous for attacking 436 people up and down the India-Nepal border in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A similar tiger appears in Rudyard Kipling's 'The Jungle Book' - a crippled tiger named Shere Khan who tries to eat Mowgli at every opportunity. Perhaps a real crippled tiger had been a model for the fictional one. A hundred years ago, guns were introduced as a revolutionary way to hunt tigers. The tigers were initially as unimpressed with guns as they had been with spears and arrows. They didn't run very far at the sight of hunters, and when pursued, they fought back as they had before. Countless tigers died, and tigers slowly became alert to the dangers of guns. They became conditioned to fear the sound of gunshots and the smell of gunpowder.
From the book, 'Great Soul of Siberia' the author Sooyong Park named the three sub-adult cubs of Bloody Mary - Wolbaek ( White Moon ), Seolbaek ( White Snow ), both female, and their brother, Cheonjibaek ( White Sky ).
... When a tiger hunts a deer, it eats it over the course of two or three days, divided into two or three meals. Each meal takes about an hour. On the first meal of the first day, they rip out the rectum and eat the intestines. They drink the blood and the warm liquid in the intestines. Next, they pull out the fur and begin to eat the rump where the meat is the tastiest. On the second meal of the first day, they eat the remainder of the rump. They flip the deer to maintain symmetry as they eat. We sometimes found deer carcasses in the woods with just one side eaten. Those deer had died of hunger and disease and then been nibbled at by the scavengers of the forest, such as crows, eagles, martens, and racoons. To flip over a deer or a wild boar, a predator has to have the strength of a tiger, leopard, or, at the very least, lynx. On the second day, the tiger eats the back and chest of the deer, and then whatever is left on the third day. There's not much remaining by then, so they lick the meat clean off the bones. If they're still hungry, they'll also eat the scalp and the stomach ( but not it's contents ). When a tiger is eating, it concentrates on finishing off the prey it has caught instead of hunting new prey, even when there is prey nearby. This shows that the Siberian tiger is sensible. not greedy.
Great Soul of Siberia.
I saw a small crowd of people standing in an oak grove on a slope. On this north side of the mountain, the snow was still as dry as frost. On that white snow, Bloody Mary lay in a pool of blood so big and so red it resembled spilled paint. Her eyes wide open and her jaws clamped shut, she was stiff from head to toe. The leaves on the young oaks that surrounded her trembled in the wind. I couldn't hear anything, and my mind went blank. I had a stabbing headache. Bloody Mary's left front paw and shoulder were shredded. That seemed to be the source of the pool of blood. She'd been hit by a shotgun blast. But the real fatal wound was the one in her side. A bullet, probably fired by a Russian army rifle, had entered through her lower right side and exited out her left. The entry wound was only the size of a finger, but the exit wound was as big as a fist. Blood and intestines has spilled out of the hole, turning everything around them red.
Continued from post #346... A crow spotted the carcass and flew over. It sat on a branch above Bloody Mary's body and craned its neck.
"Shoo!" Stefanovich threw a stick at the crow. "There's nothing for you here!" The crow cawed a few times and flew away. In the far corner of the sky, eagles, small as black dots, dove and swooped right back up into the sky, which stretched infinitely. They drew great, overlapping circles in the sky, as free as could be. Spent and weak, Bloody Mary had lain here in the snow. She had kicked the snow with her hind legs and scraped it with her front paws. She must have been kicking right up until her very last breath. The struggle and pain of her last moment were apparent in her wide-open eyes. It wasn't the kind of death that nature brings like a gift of eternal rest at the end of a fruitful life. I stroked her head and whiskers. Her whiskers were soft. I remembered how They'd felt on the back of my hand. I closed her eyes. Tiger tracks circled Bloody Mary's body. One set was small, the other large. It wasn't clear if they had been there when she died or if they'd found her body later, but brother and sister had stayed by their mother's side for a long while. The surrounding area was full of their tracks and there were traces of the two lying in the snow waiting for their mother to wake up. The tracks circling Bloody Mary finally departed. The small paw prints were sometimes superimposed on the large ones. White Sky led and White Snow followed. Their tracks headed straight up the range, then paused on the mountainside. White Snow had lain in the snow like a sphinx, facing her mother on the slope. White Sky's prints circled the sphinx, perhaps urging her to hurry. They had set out again. The tracks disappeared over the range. The siblings had bid their mother goodbye.
Great Soul of Siberia.
Suddenly, a face emerged from the nut pine five to six meters in front of me. I stared blankly as the contours of the face became clear. Its eyes were so deep, they looked like they were burning from the inside. It was a tiger. The tiger stood very still with its eyes on me. I couldn't make a sound - or rather, I didn't dare. I couldn't even lift the camera hanging around my neck. The slightest move would prompt an attack. The tiger's head was enormous and its bone structure impressive. Its ruff was thick and its size was like nothing I'd ever seen. I knew instinctively that this was Khajain, the Great King, the spirit of the Sikhote-Alin Range. His eyes were at once aloof and piercing, and they were focused only on me. The look in his eyes wasn't one of someone who was caught, but someone who had come to see. We stared at each other for a long time. He twitched his lips ever so slightly. It was an unspoken warning not to do anything foolish. That one twitch of the lip drained the last stores of energy I had left in my body. Khajain slowly walked out from behind the nut pine. I could now see his entire magnificent form from head to tail. As he slowly followed a diagonal trajectory from the nut pine to the mountain path, he did not once take his eyes off me. I still couldn't move a muscle, but I kept my eyes locked on his as though everything was fine. His gaze squarely on me, I felt psychologically paralyzed, and the tension sent shooting pains all over my body as though I were being stabbed with needles all over.
Post #348 continued... What I'd felt at that moment was a distance. A distance that needed to be maintained, neither shortened nor lengthened. I'd instinctively felt that the tiger was maintaining a certain distance and that I should, too. After that, a voice from deep within me had reverberated: "Don't make any sudden moves. Exercise self-control." If I stuck to these rules, the tiger and I could safely go our separate ways. If I didn't, I would be attacked.
After the tiger had gone and I regained my mental facilities, there was one question on my mind. How did Khajain feel about our encounter? In Rudyard Kipling's 'The Jungle Book', Mowgli, the child raised by wolves, holds power in his gaze. When Mowgli stares down a pack of wolves, none of them can look back at him. Even the black panther, Mowgli's best friend, can't look him straight in the eye. This is because Mowgli's eyes are human. The human eye can perceive an object only when the focus sits precisely at the center of the retina. In other words, to look at something, one must look straight at it. Most mammals, on the other hand, can see objects very clearly even from the corners of their eyes. This means that, except under extraordinary circumstances usually related to hunting, they don't have to look directly at something to focus on it. So when animals see other animals staring straight at them, they take this to mean they are being hunted. This, it goes without saying, makes them very nervous. The feeling is all the more intensified when it's a human eye staring them down. Khajain must have felt something similar when we'd made eye contact. But he was able to meet my eyes, and his own gaze over-powered mine. He must have read the slight tremor of fear on my face, too. His gaze was cool but at the same time penetrating. I would expect no less from the Great King of Ussuri. 
Male Amur Tiger caught with camera trap in Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve, Russia. Taken from WWF Tigers FB page.
 *This image is copyright of its original author
  *This image is copyright of its original author tiger cubs from Ussuri reserv
Beyond the Ural Mountains - Translated by Michael Heron - 1956.
I asked Vandaga how many tigers he had killed during his years spent wandering in the taiga. The old man did not answer at first. He muttered something unintelligible and began to count on his fingers. He had great difficulty in working it out. This is where a sportsman often make themselves look ridiculous. They write down when and where they shot a snipe, a woodcock, or a greedy teal and often the description of such a shoot does not even fill a whole page. Vandaga, on the other hand, was quite indifferent about all his past exploits; he only remembered the most important events of his hunting life. He had been hunting for over forty-six years. Every year he shot one or two tigers, in good years five or six adult animals and a like number of cubs. I took an average and multiplied it by forty-five. If a Frenchman or an Englishman goes to India or Africa and shoots five lions or tigers with the help of native hunters and beaters, he's a hero. Articles are written about him in the newspapers, the newsreels feature him and hunting clubs are named after him.
Beyond the Ural Mountains...
Vandaga recalled that his relatives had expelled him from the tribe. The Nanai call the tiger amba, the Udege kutymafa. In olden times the two tribes hardly ever hunted this wild beast, which they revered as sacred. Tigers lived close to human settlements, ate a good half of the musk-deer caught in the traps, carried off dogs and robbed the stocks of frozen fish. As a young lad Vandaga was scared of aiming his gun at a striped cat, for he believed that a hunter would be visited by misfortune as a punishment for attacking a tiger. But once, after the first snows, a tiger broke into the nomads' camp at dawn and carried off Vandaga's favorite dog. Then he saw red and followed the wild beast's tracks. The tiger was cowardly; when he heard the footsteps of a human being, he left his prey and hid. The young hunter stood by the body of his dog for a long time, crying and cursing. His grief drove him to make a bold decision. He put his loaded gun down beside the dog with a cord attached to the trigger and went back to camp. "If the tiger is a sacred animal," he reasoned, "the gun will not fire when he touches the cord tied to the trigger with his chest. But if it fires, the tiger is a forest thief who must be destroyed." All night long Vandaga dreamed that the tiger had broken his gun in a rage. What would he go hunting with then? In the morning he was almost beside himself with excitement when he visited the spot where his loaded weapon was tied to the dog. The tiger lay stretched out in the snow.  (04-11-2014, 11:28 PM)GuateGojira Wrote: Tiger vs Bear in the Russian Far East: Thanks a lot Peter, very good information (04-22-2014, 02:23 AM)GuateGojira Wrote: Here is the comparative images of three large Amur tiger skulls. The two from the wild are the largest recorded; I did not include that one from Baikov as the picture of the skull was not from the side view, but it was just 6 mm shorter than the largest one. The captive skull is prety large, but other captive specimens probably develop even longer specimens.Bone Clones Siberian Tiger replica skull
About post #355 - W.J. Jankowski (in Mazak, 1983) shot a very large (11.6 'over curves' and about 300 kg.) male tiger in Heilongjiang (north-eastern China) in July 1943. Very close to the tiger, Jankowski found the remains (head and paws) of a 'very large' male brown bear which had been killed and eaten by the tiger some days before he was shot (unpublished letter, dated May 8, 1970). This report, however, was never mentioned by researchers and both Jankowski and Mazak, apart from a photograph of the tiger and the letter mentioned, did not provide crucial details on the bear. Too detailed to dismiss and too meagre to accept, one could conclude.
It is my understanding that this W.J. Jankowski was not highly accepted by the scientific community of his day. After killing a very large tiger, he finds that the tiger had been feeding on the carcass of a large male grizzly; with only the head and a single paw remaining recognizable. This tells me that this carcass had been fed upon for a lengthy period of time. Considering that the two biggest killers of mature male grizzly is either another grizzly or a hunter's bullet, it is ( imo ) quite possible that this tiger simply discovered the bear's carcass. To say the least, to lay claim that the tiger killed the bear is jumping to conclusions. Also, to say that in the Russian Far East that the tiger dominates the grizzly is a bit misleading. Certainly, being full-time predators, tigers kill more bears than the other way around. However, a very small percentage of these bear-victims are mature adult females and far less if any chosen as prey are full-grown males. As Guate Gojira pointed out, normally, full grown males of both species tend to avoid each other. This is because neither the tiger nor the grizzly can be hailed as the lord of a region inhabited by both. I feel also, as Peter has mentioned on more than one occasion, that tigers and grizzlies are hostile towards each other. During his growing-up years, a young grizzly must walk in fear of tigers. Once the bear becomes a fully-matured male he will simply have a strong dislike of the big cat. Perhaps the tiger feels just as strongly an anger towards the grizzly; the only beast in the taiga that he cannot easily overpower.  (03-05-2017, 04:49 PM)brotherbear Wrote: About post #355 - W.J. Jankowski (in Mazak, 1983) shot a very large (11.6 'over curves' and about 300 kg.) male tiger in Heilongjiang (north-eastern China) in July 1943. Very close to the tiger, Jankowski found the remains (head and paws) of a 'very large' male brown bear which had been killed and eaten by the tiger some days before he was shot (unpublished letter, dated May 8, 1970). This report, however, was never mentioned by researchers and both Jankowski and Mazak, apart from a photograph of the tiger and the letter mentioned, did not provide crucial details on the bear. Too detailed to dismiss and too meagre to accept, one could conclude. I totally agree. Well said @ Regarding that bear and tiger incident. Is it possible it could be a hibernating bear ??? I feel there should be more research done on this interesting and unpredictable encounters. I know its very tough and hard. But IMO its worth the effort. |
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