Paw Prints Disappearing for Siberia's Amur Tiger.

(From The Moscow Times)

Over the last six years, Yury Dunishenko has walked 12,000 kilometers through the snow. He has been looking for paw prints left by Amur tigers, an endangered species in the Far East Khabarovsk region.

To operate such a large scale monitoring project, Dunishenko and his colleagues from the Khabarovsk Wildlife Management Institute teamed up with a group of experienced local hunters.

Although the unlikely partnership proved successful, its findings were depressing. The number of trails on which tiger prints were found fell from 80 in 1997 to 30 this year, and the amount of prints themselves decreased dramatically. Even more alarming was the fact that the number of tiger cubs dropped from 28.5 percent of the total population in 1997 to just 9.5 percent this …