In the Amur region, a tigress from a rehabilitation center Elena with her cubs was filmed for the first time

A graduate of the Primorsky Tiger Rehabilitation Center, Elena was able to be photographed with her grown-up tiger cubs for the first time using a camera trap in the Amur region, reports the Amur Tiger Center.

Specialists managed to obtain this footage almost a year after it became known that Elena became a mother. The whole family is in good physical shape, and the kittens themselves – “boy” and “girl” – are slightly smaller in size than the mother.

“For almost a year, the tigress appeared several times in front of the staff of the Border Department, they were even able to film her with a quadcopter, but each time the predator was alone and no surveillance devices made it possible to capture her with her cubs. The family bypassed the camera traps and, as if flirting with the researchers, left only traces,” said the director of the Khingan Nature Reserve Vyacheslav Kastrikin.

Having become the mother of tiger cubs, Elena returned the official status of the Amur tiger habitat region to the Amur Region, and she herself became the “founding mother” of a new group of tigers.

“At the end of October, finally, the whole family was captured by a camera trap installed on a field road between the villages of Mikhailovka and Zhuravlevka in the Arkharinsky district. The memory card recorded the passage of the tigress Elena and both of her cubs following her a few seconds later. The tigers passed the camera trap first in one side, and after a short period of time – back,” said Sergei Aramilev, general director of the Amur Tiger Center.

According to experts, the tiger cubs are already almost a year and a half old and will soon have to separate from their mother to begin an independent life.

Tigress Elena was returned to the wild in 2019 after a rehabilitation course along with her “brother” Pavlik. The female immediately settled in the Khingan Nature Reserve; now she very rarely goes beyond its borders. Pavlik did not stay in the protected area after his release; he traveled a lot in search of a permanent habitat, but in September 2020 he was killed by poachers. For this, the court sentenced two residents of the Amur region to five years and two months in a general regime colony each.