the very first time I saw a tiger was in
a stinking urine-soaked cage in a circus
I could stand three feet away from this
animal which was lying and just kind of
looking at me stank like hell because it
was in this little cage and that was the
first Tiger I ever saw we are right now
located in the Western Ghats one of the
most spectacular wildlife rich
biodiversity areas in the world this
strip of mountains in southwestern India
has the largest tiger population in the
world the largest Asian elephant
population a world and incredible amount
of other biodiversity birds plants
animals this is the place I grew up in
it’s just an incredible place I have
been working here for the past twenty
five years studying Tigers their prey
and their ecology Tigers are now found
only in 7% of their former range from
this perspective Western guards are one
of the last strongholds of the tiger
this is where the Tigers will probably
live forever the Indian government had
in the late 60s officials had developed
a technique called the pod mark census
which involved tracing tracks of Tigers
and trying to recognize each track
uniquely and doing it total count I
tested this in the field and in zoos it
didn’t work so I was very critical of it
and they were one very unhappy with my
criticism of the pugmark sensors but I
also said I need to develop something
that’s better
criticizing a bad method is okay but how
about coming up with a good one the
first step was actually putting the
camera traps out and getting pictures
these automated cameras are tripped by
Tigers themselves and we get these
dramatic pictures of tigers we can
identify each individual from its
stripes I camera trap
at eight thousand square kilometers of
high Tiger density areas this is done
year after year and as a result we have
data on more than 750 Tigers that have
ever lived in this landscape in the last
decade or so you treat your photographs
as samples from a population and using
some statistical modeling you cannot
just say I got 10 Tigers you can say I
got 50 percent of the Tigers that are
out there so suddenly you had a method
that could tell you how many you had
missed camera trapping allows us to very
accurately monitor tiger populations
find out how many there are how their
numbers are changing how many survive
from year to year and how many new new
Tigers are entering the population this
is really critical to know whether your
efforts to save them are succeeding or
failing this this is an audit it’s an
ecological audit the number of tigers
indicates how many prey animals there
are approximately and the prey in turn
indicates that the habitat is doing well
or not so by counting Tigers we are
getting a complete picture of the health
of the ecosystem we don’t think of
Tigers as just saving Tigers it’s about
saving very large landscapes which have
other species besides the tiger because
the future generations have to see
Tigers my granddaughter has to see a
wild tiger sometime so Tiger
conservation is about all this not just
saving one animal in a cage
[Music]
a stinking urine-soaked cage in a circus
I could stand three feet away from this
animal which was lying and just kind of
looking at me stank like hell because it
was in this little cage and that was the
first Tiger I ever saw we are right now
located in the Western Ghats one of the
most spectacular wildlife rich
biodiversity areas in the world this
strip of mountains in southwestern India
has the largest tiger population in the
world the largest Asian elephant
population a world and incredible amount
of other biodiversity birds plants
animals this is the place I grew up in
it’s just an incredible place I have
been working here for the past twenty
five years studying Tigers their prey
and their ecology Tigers are now found
only in 7% of their former range from
this perspective Western guards are one
of the last strongholds of the tiger
this is where the Tigers will probably
live forever the Indian government had
in the late 60s officials had developed
a technique called the pod mark census
which involved tracing tracks of Tigers
and trying to recognize each track
uniquely and doing it total count I
tested this in the field and in zoos it
didn’t work so I was very critical of it
and they were one very unhappy with my
criticism of the pugmark sensors but I
also said I need to develop something
that’s better
criticizing a bad method is okay but how
about coming up with a good one the
first step was actually putting the
camera traps out and getting pictures
these automated cameras are tripped by
Tigers themselves and we get these
dramatic pictures of tigers we can
identify each individual from its
stripes I camera trap
at eight thousand square kilometers of
high Tiger density areas this is done
year after year and as a result we have
data on more than 750 Tigers that have
ever lived in this landscape in the last
decade or so you treat your photographs
as samples from a population and using
some statistical modeling you cannot
just say I got 10 Tigers you can say I
got 50 percent of the Tigers that are
out there so suddenly you had a method
that could tell you how many you had
missed camera trapping allows us to very
accurately monitor tiger populations
find out how many there are how their
numbers are changing how many survive
from year to year and how many new new
Tigers are entering the population this
is really critical to know whether your
efforts to save them are succeeding or
failing this this is an audit it’s an
ecological audit the number of tigers
indicates how many prey animals there
are approximately and the prey in turn
indicates that the habitat is doing well
or not so by counting Tigers we are
getting a complete picture of the health
of the ecosystem we don’t think of
Tigers as just saving Tigers it’s about
saving very large landscapes which have
other species besides the tiger because
the future generations have to see
Tigers my granddaughter has to see a
wild tiger sometime so Tiger
conservation is about all this not just
saving one animal in a cage
[Music]
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