The tracks suggested some bluffing and blustering on the part of both species, but no actual fighting. In one case, tracks in the snow told the story of a tigress and bear reluctantly sharing a red deer the tigress had killed. The largest brown bears - and we recorded bears with weights up to 800 lbs in the area - would usurp kills from tigers and even track them from kill to kill (meeting those bears when searching for tiger kills is another story for another day!). As the years progressed and we tracked both bears and tigers, the picture of a complex relationship emerged. There were numerous reports of tigers preying on both brown bears and Asiatic black bears, but the relationship, it seems, was not that simple there were also reports of bears killing tigers. ©JOHN GOODRICH/PANTHERAįascinated, I went home and began combing through local literature and speaking with my colleagues on the subject. I collected some samples and vacated the area, hoping Dima would return to finish his meal, which he did, though it took him several days to devour such a large animal. The power and skill required to do that was unimaginable. To my surprise, I found two more entry wounds! I revised my conclusion - Dima had leapt from the bank onto the bear, dispatching her with a single bite to the nape of her neck, almost before she was even aware of his presence (one of his canine teeth had broken prior to our capturing him, hence only three bite wounds).
BEAR KILL TAGR FREE
I concluded the bear had been shot and Dima just took advantage of a free meal, but why hadn’t the hunter claimed such a valuable prize? Then I turned the bear over to inspect the exit would. Her tracks showed that she had ambled along the base of the embankment and seemed to suddenly fall down dead, with no sign of the struggle one would expect from a huge tiger killing a bear nearly his own size. I jumped down to examine the carcass and immediately noted a single, bloody hole in her neck that was clearly an entry wound.
Before me was a large, partially-eaten brown bear sow. And when I looked over the embankment, I was shocked. And there - suddenly, as he approached the edge of a steep embankment, his tracks became spaced very close together. Here - we saw he meandered through a park-like oak forest. I followed his tracks in light patches of early spring snow. He had been moving through an area where people had summer gardens and grazed cattle, so I was having a look around to make sure he wasn’t getting himself into trouble. He was the biggest tiger we would catch in 20 years of research in the area, and at 455 lbs, the circumference of his head was bigger than my waist and the base of his tail was as thick as my thigh.
Goodrich as he brings to light the important conservation implications of these interactions.Ī few decades ago, when I lived and worked in northeast Asia, I was tracking a male tiger named Dima that we had captured and fitted with a radio collar a few months before. After stumbling upon a shocking tiger kill, he recounts how he began to understand the complex relationship between tigers and bears in this challenging environment. John Goodrich transports us to the snowy regions of northeast Asia - the home of wolves, bears, leopards and Siberian tigers. In this blog, Panthera Tiger Program Director Dr.
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