120 Miles of Russian Forest Couldn’t Keep These Two Tigers Apart
Boris and Svetlaya were raised together as orphaned cubs, and then reintroduced to the wild separately. But Boris went on a trek that surprised the researchers who were monitoring him.
When Russian scientists released a pair of orphaned Amur tiger cubs into the wild in a remote corner of Russia’s far east in 2014, they were trying to save a species. While the tigers, sometimes called Siberian tigers and the world’s largest big cat, remain endangered, the scientists created something else: an unlikely love story.
The cubs, Boris and Svetlaya, had been rescued from the wild as unrelated 3- to 5-month-old cubs in the Sikhote-Alin mountains, the animal’s main stronghold. They grew up in captivity and were released at 18 months old. The cats were separated by more than 100 miles apart with the goal of expanding the distribution of released tigers as much as possible in the Pri-Amur region along Russia’s border with China.
The scientists tracked the cubs until, more than a year after their release, something strange happened: Boris walked over 120 miles, almost in a straight line, to where Svetlaya had made a home.
