“WE HAVE a saying here: if you see a tiger, you see your death. Death will be coming very soon.”
Pavel Fomenko is living proof that this is just a saying – but only just. He has been working for 30 years to conserve Siberian tigers in Russia’s far east. But his most recent direct encounter was almost his last.
In March, Fomenko was attending to a female tiger at a wildlife rehabilitation centre in Alekseevka, in Russia’s wild and remote Primorsky province. The tiger had been captured in a village after killing dogs to feed her cubs. It was what conservationists call a “conflict tiger” – one in danger of being killed by humans. “Such a tiger should be caught and put in a rehabilitation centre,” Fomenko tells me on the phone from WWF Russia’s office in Vladivostok, where he is . “This tiger was put in the centre and later she had to be vaccinated. During the vaccination, an accident took place.”
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That, it turns out as he continues his story, is an understatement. The tiger was in a wire enclosure. When Fomenko approached, it lunged at him. The wire fence was rusty and the tiger burst straight through. “It was three bites, one on the left shoulder and two on the face. I fell. She probably thought I was dead, I don’t know what was in her mind. She ran towards the opposite side of the enclosure, but I understood she might come back. So I found the strength to climb over the 6-metre-high fence and fell on the opposite side.”
Fomenko still finds it hard to talk after reconstructive surgery to his jaw and cheekbone. Yulia, his wife and deputy head of communication at WWF Russia, takes up the story. “He thought that it was death,” she says. “People often say that when you see death, all of your life is scrolling in your head. He had no time for this. He told me he had no other thoughts than one name, Igor, the name of his son.”
But his is a rare conservation success story. When Fomenko joined WWF 30 years ago, there were only about 350 Siberian tigers, also called Amur tigers, in the wild. He realised part of the problem was that hunters were killing the tigers’ prey animals, so he began talking to local hunting clubs to persuade them to set sustainable targets. He also set about creating a network of anti-poaching groups. “He is one of the best experts on anti-poaching work,” says Yury Darman, a senior adviser to WWF Russia.
Taiga, taiga
Today there are around 540 tigers, close to the maximum that can be sustained in the region without serious conflict with humans. In recent years, tiger conservation has become a matter of patriotic pride, Fomenko tells me. Russian president Vladimir Putin reportedly takes a close personal interest. But the comeback wouldn’t have been possible without Fomenko and his team of around 200 professional conservationists, who protect an area greater than 1.3 million square kilometres.
Before his accident, Fomenko spent up to half the year living in cabins in the taiga forests, monitoring the tigers and patrolling for poachers. Each day began by lighting the stove, collecting water from a river to make tea, then attempting to start his vehicle. On the many days it was too cold to get the engine going, he would set out on foot with a rifle and a dog. Between November and March, the temperature rarely rises above freezing and can drop to -40°C at night. But he loved it. “Out in the woods, life is better than in the city.”
Actual encounters with tigers are rare. “If the tiger is healthy, he shouldn’t be seen by a human. If a human sees a tiger, there is something wrong with this tiger. So it is not good to see a tiger in the forest.” He and his team use indirect methods to estimate the population, such as footprints, camera traps and sampling DNA from scat and hairs.
But the dozen or so sightings Fomenko has made in three decades make him perhaps the most experienced Siberian tiger spotter in the world. “Professional hunters might spend 40 years in the forest and never see a tiger, though they live side by side. You’re being watched by tigers all the time.”
In contrast, encounters with poachers and the tools of their trade are maddeningly common. “We don’t know how many poachers are in Primorsky forest; a huge amount. Annually we catch around 2000,” he says. “They kill around 40 tigers every year.” In fact, he says, any one of the 100,000 people who regularly hunt in the forest is a potential tiger poacher. The pelt and body parts of a tiger are worth up to $100,000 on the black market.
“It is not good to see a tiger in the forest. If you see a tiger there is something wrong”
He also frequently comes across mechanical traps that slam their jaws shut on the legs of any creature unfortunate enough to step on them. One of the last cases he worked on before his accident was a female tiger that died of starvation after gnawing off her own paw to escape a trap.
When not in the forest, he worked at the Animal Diseases Laboratory in Ussuriysk, assisting sick or wounded tigers, examining dead ones to determine if poachers were responsible and gathering evidence for possible prosecutions. Russia’s poaching laws have recently been stiffened and are being enforced more strongly, he says. Convicted poachers are punished with up to seven years in jail and a huge fine. As a result, poaching is in decline, says Fomenko.
He always knew his chosen line of work was dangerous. “I know some people who survived a tiger attack, and also some people who did not,” says Fomenko. He does not elaborate.
After the attack, his colleagues managed to get him to a hospital, where he spent weeks in intensive care. Fomenko told The Siberian Times that it was merely the ““, but according to Yulia “he was pretty lucky not to be killed, he lost a lot of blood”. He returned home and was able to , but is still badly injured.
The attack damaged his right eye, robbed him of hearing in one ear and severed the facial nerve, meaning he has lost the use of several muscles in his face. He recently had surgery to implant a nerve from elsewhere to take its place. “The surgery went well,” says Yulia. But it will be six months or more before they know whether the nerve is working.
The Siberian tigers are in a rather better position. Numbers are stable and Fomenko says he is confident that they now have a promising future.
This article appeared in print under the headline “The tiger who came for me”
