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“One day I’m going to write a book about this.”
Wildlife biologist Jonathan Slaght had heard Dale Miquelle say this 100 times over their 25-year friendship. Miquelle, a tiger conservationist based in Russia’s Far East for more than three decades, had plenty of stories to tell.
But the book never materialized, and in 2021, Slaght finally asked his friend and colleague at the Wildlife Conservation Society if he was ever going to write it. Probably not, Miquelle told him.
“What if I write it instead?” Slaght asked him.
Four years and 512 pages later, “Tigers Between Empires” tells the remarkable story of what Slaght describes as the world’s longest-running tiger research program, the Siberian Tiger Project.
The international collaboration, led by former moose biologist Miquelle and Russian rodent researcher Zhenya Smirnov, saw a team of American scientists provide funding and technology to support the field expertise of Russian conservationists to track and monitor Amur tigers, more popularly known as Siberian tigers.
Weaving together history and folklore, scientific discovery and wilderness adventure, the book is equal parts educational and exhilarating as it transports readers to Russia’s formidable, freezing and remote Far East to save the world’s largest big cat from rampant poaching and logging.
“It’s a story worth telling,” Slaght told CNN in a video call, adding that the project shows “that it is possible for people from different backgrounds to work together and achieve considerable success when their passions are focused on the same target.”
Numbering around 3,000 in the mid-19th century, Russia’s tiger population fell to just 30 animals in the 1930s, writes Slaght.
Despite a remarkable comeback in the second half of the 20th century, due to hunting restrictions and protected reserves, the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 saw an uptick in poaching.
Luckily, the Siberian Tiger Project launched just months later. At the time, radiotelemetry collars to track wildlife were widely used in the US, but had been unavailable to scientists in the Soviet Union. American scientists had no idea how to track or capture tigers, and Russian conservationists didn’t know how to safely sedate and collar the big cats. Together, they would fill in knowledge gaps and uncover the secrets of tiger behavior and biology.
The colorful cast of characters — so many, that the book begins with a list of names and roles — includes several of the 114 tigers captured and released during the project.
“When you have a 30-year data set, the way the Siberian Tiger Project does, when you can track an individual tiger from the first year of his life through to death, the information you can glean — these aren’t anonymous, numbered study animals,” says Slaght.
Olga, the first tiger ever collared by the project, was followed for 13 years, from a juvenile living in her mother’s territory to her death. She became a fixture for both the conservationists and the community: in one passage, a hunter tells Miquelle he didn’t shoot Olga when he saw her in the woods because he recognized her from the collar.
“They quickly become individuals, and I very much wanted to capture that,” Slaght adds.
The data from the radio collars, and later GPS collars, allowed researchers to slowly unravel the secret lives of these elusive predators, including feeding habits, kill rates and range inheritance between families — where a female tiger passes down her established territory to her daughters, creating a lineage of tigers that occupies the same areas. This new-found knowledge on big cat ecology resulted in nearly 200 scientific publications on tigers, leopards and their prey, writes Slaght.
Even with collars, sightings were rare: Olga was only observed in the wild for 15 minutes over 13 years. Without telemetry, Slaght says, “it’s impossible to actually see these animals, to get any sense of what they’re doing.”
Of course, not all the human-tiger interactions in the book are so wholesome.
Data from the project’s first decade showed that 75% of tiger deaths were caused by poaching — a threat that persists today. After the Soviet collapse, Russia’s Far East faced a prolonged economic crisis: poverty drove hunting not only of tigers for trade but of prey species like deer for food.
The “struggle” of being a tiger — the constant threat of poaching and the endless hunt for the next meal — surprised Slaght: “People have this idea of tigers as these big, graceful creatures. You see pictures of them sitting around, licking themselves, just having a nice time. But it’s tough. They have short, violent lives.”
Over its first two decades, the project pioneered non-lethal tiger snaring methods that would be replicated by conservationists and scientists in tiger ranges across Asia, and data gathered from the Siberian Tiger Project’s population surveys supported recommendations for new reserve areas, which ultimately doubled the amount of land previously protected.
From 2010, though, the book notes that foreign organizations were under greater suspicion from the Russian government, and the Siberian Tiger Project — backed by the US-headquartered Wildlife Conservation Society — had lost much of its influence by 2016. (Miquelle even found himself temporarily refused entry to Russia in 2013, writes Slaght, an incident that signaled eroding relationships.)
This worsened after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when many foreign NGOs, including WWF and Greenpeace, were banned from operating in the country; and after 30 years living in Russia’s Far East, Miquelle returned to the US permanently.
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In 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed the country’s tiger numbers had nearly doubled since 2010, from 390 adults to 750 individuals. But the latest figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), also published in 2022, estimate the adult population to be between 265 and 486, which it considers stable.
The lack of transparency around the recent Russian census methodology and ongoing conservation efforts risks undermining the progress made, says Slaght. However, he’s heartened to see that both the Russian and Chinese governments are interested in tiger conservation and are engaging in cross-border collaborations, pointing to the Land of Big Cats, a transborder reserve that joins national parks in both countries, as a positive move for tiger habitat protection.
“They’re looking at the population as a whole, which is exactly what needs to be done for conservation to be impactful,” he adds.
While Slaght never worked with the Siberian Tiger Project, he has his own personal attachment to it. After completing his undergraduate in Russian language, Slaght served in the Peace Corps, and was based in the village of Terney — the headquarters of the Siberian Tiger Project.
He was one of three foreigners in the village — the others being Miquelle and John Goodrich, one of the project managers, who he quickly befriended and frequently joined on fieldwork.
“I’d be in my kitchen on a Saturday morning, and I’d hear a truck outside, and it was John. He’s like, ‘Do you want to go in a helicopter and try to catch a tiger?’” recalls Slaght.
These early adventures inspired him to study conservation biology, and saw him return to Russia’s Far East for his own studies on Blakiston’s fish owl, the subject of his first book, the award-winning “Owls of the Eastern Ice.”
Miquelle says this book’s success and Slaght’s skill as a writer ultimately convinced him to let someone else tell the story. Slaght spent hours interviewing Miquelle, who also provided access to his detailed daily journals.
“Jon has done an amazing job of bringing our project to life,” Miquelle told CNN in an email.
“I especially enjoy reading the earlier chapters about our first years. That first year was no doubt the most difficult in my life, but it was also one I cherish the most. The excitement of being in a new place, the incredibly difficult tasks in front of us, and ultimately the successes we were able to achieve were all so memorable – it’s just great to see them in print.”
Slaght describes the book as an ode to conservation fieldwork and a region he loves — and a reminder not to take the natural world for granted.
“One thing I don’t want people to take away from the book is that this is a solved conservation problem. It’s not,” says Slaght. “It’s a conservation success story, but constant vigilance is needed. These cats barely crawled back from the edge of extinction. It needs to be constantly monitored to make sure it doesn’t get out of control again.”