Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China

A Chicago Tribune Most-Anticipated Book of the Season

The thrilling saga of the great Amur tiger and the scientists who came together, across the world, to save it.

The forests of northeast Asia are home to a marvelous range of animals--fish owls and brown bears, musk deer and moose, wolves and raccoon dogs, leopards and tigers. But by the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred tigers stepped quietly through the snow of the Amur River basin. Soon, the Soviet Union fell, bringing catastrophe; without the careful oversight of a central authority, poaching and logging took a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species.

Just as these changes arrived, scientists came together to found the Siberian Tiger Project. Led by Dale Miquelle, a moose researcher, and Zhenya Smirnov, a mouse biologist, the team captured and released more than 114 tigers over three decades. They witnessed mating rituals and fights, hunting and feeding, the ceding and taking of territory, the creation of families.

Within these pages, characters--both feline and human--come fully alive as we travel with them through the quiet and changing forests of Amur. We travel across time, too, as the fate of the species has been shaped by the history and politics of empires--such as the Qing dynasty’s Willow Palisade, which once slowed human settlement, or the later introduction of roads through Russian reserves. The Siberian Tiger Project became the longest-running tiger research initiative; its work continues to guide conservationists today. Jonathan C. Slaght’s Tigers Between Empires is the thrilling saga of the great Amur tiger and the scientists who came together, across the world, to save it.

Jonathan C. Slaght is the author of Owls of the Eastern Ice, which won the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. He is the regional director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Temperate Asia Program, overseeing programs in China, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, and projects in Russia and Central Asia. He published an annotated translation of Across the Ussuri Kray by Vladimir Arsenyev and cotranslated Winter Ecology of the Amur Tiger by Anatoliy Yudakov and Igor Nikolayev. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC World Service, NPR, and Scientific American. He lives in Minneapolis.