Logging plans will leave rare and endangered Sumatran tigers homeless

by Steve Ragan - May 9 2011, 07:30

On Monday, WWF warned that loggers who plan to clear an Indonesian forest will leave the endangered tigers that live there homeless or worse. They are urging a subsidiary of Barito Timber Pacific, as well as the Indonesian government and the Sinar Mas Group to protect the forests where the tigers live.

There are an estimated 400 critically endangered Sumatran tigers left in the wild. So when WWF captured footage of a mother and her cubs playing, it was a rare event indeed.

“Our team was thrilled to discover 47 tiger images in our camera traps, from which we identified six unique individuals,” said Karmila Parakkasi, who leads WWF’s tiger research team in Sumatra.

Parakkasi added that the discovery was the highest number of tigers and tiger images obtained in the first month of sampling, but the results from the second month were even more impressive – two tiger families, with another six tigers.

“What’s unclear is whether we found so many tigers because we’re getting better at locating our cameras or because the tigers’ habitat is shrinking so rapidly here that they are being forced into sharing smaller and smaller bits of forests.”

The forest where the images and video were taken is set for clearing by the pulp and paper industry, despite being designated as a conservation landscape. The area, known as Bukit Tigapuluh, or “Thirty Hills”, is located in Riau and Jambi provinces in Central Sumatra.

According to WWF, the subspecies of tiger inhabits montane forests, the remaining blocks of the Sumatra Island’s lowland forest, peat swamps, and freshwater swamp forests. It is estimated that Sumatra has approximately 130,000 km2 of remaining habitat for tigers, only one-third of which has some form of protection from development and logging.

The Sumatran tiger and the other five surviving tiger subspecies – the Amur, Malayan, Bengal, Indochinese and South China – number as few as 3,200. WWF is working to build the political, financial and public support to double the number of tigers in the wild by 2022.

Video footage is here. If you want to learn more about WWF's efforts to help save the tigers, and what you can do to support them, go here.

 

 

IMG: © Tiger Survey Team / WWF Indonesia

Around the Web