Positive change: A tiger walking in Khlong Lan National Park in Thailand’s upper central Khampaeng Phet province. — AFP
In the thick, steamy forests of the country’s west, 20 skittish sambar deer dart from an enclosure into the undergrowth – unaware they may find themselves in the jaws of one of the habitat’s 200 or so endangered tigers.
The release is part of a project run by the government and conservation group WWF to provide tigers with prey to hunt and eat, which has helped the big cat make a remarkable recovery.
The wild tiger population in Thailand’s Western Forest Complex, near the border with Myanmar, has increased almost fivefold in the last 15 years from about 40 in 2007 to between 179 and 223 last year, according to the kingdom’s Department of National Parks (DNP).
It is an uptick that WWF’s Tigers Alive initiative leader Stuart Chapman calls “extraordinary”, especially as no other country in South-East Asia has seen tiger numbers pick up at all.
The DNP and the WWF have been breeding sambar, which are native to Thailand but classed as vulnerable, and releasing them as prey.
Now in its fifth year, the prey release is a “very good activity,” says the DNP’s Chaiya Danpho, as it addresses the ecosystem’s lack of large ungulates for tigers to eat.
Worrapan Phumanee, a research manager for WWF Thailand, says that deer were previously scarce in the area, impacting the tiger population.
But “since starting the project, we’ve seen tigers become regular residents here and successfully breed,” he says.
Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam have all lost their native populations of Indochinese tigers, while Myanmar is thought to have just 23 left in the wild, in large part due to poaching and wildlife trafficking.
Worrapan says prey release programmes – now also happening in Cambodia and Malaysia – are part of wider restoration efforts to “rebuild ecosystems” in South-East Asia, where they have been adapted for local purposes from similar initiatives that have existed for years in Africa.
The breeding and releases also aim to solve the problem of the sambar deer’s own population decline due to hunting, says Worrapan. — AFP
