Chasing the big cats
Nicholas Reid falls for the charms of the Siberian tiger and the documentary maker who stalks them.
Tigers are cats, which means they are very good at hunting, stealth, and being affectionate to their offspring until their offspring are old enough to look after themselves.
Then they become solitary beasts.
Tigers are also very good at selfpreservation, which makes it hard for somebody like Sooyong Park, a South Korean filmmaker whose specialty is nature-wildlife documentaries.
Over 20 years, Sooyong Park tracked the great Siberian tiger, hoping to record its mating, nurturing, and hunting habits. The great Siberian tiger is a formidable creature. It is much larger than the Bengal tiger. When an adult male stands on its hind legs and sharpens its claws on a tree, it leaves gouged marks over three metres up the trunk.
The great Siberian tiger is also very intelligent. Though it has been hunted almost to extinction, it has learnt how to destroy traps and snares that people have set for it.
And that includes the little selftriggering cameras Sooyong Park set up at various locations in the hope of photographing the animals as they passed on their incredibly long treks.
So how did Park get to make his film on Siberian tigers? By digging a deep bunker, camouflaged and protected, and setting up his cameras as he waited and waited and waited through many months for tigers to appear.
All cats have a much keener sense of smell than human beings. To protect himself from wary tigers, Park subsisted on food that gave off as little smell as possible and he bagged his own excrement. And finally, after all this extreme patience, he was rewarded with the shots he wanted, even if one female tiger, ‘‘Bloody Mary’’, did have a go at his hideaway.
The Great Soul of Siberia isa book that leaves you in awe of the intelligence of two animals – the tiger and the human being. Both can bide their time and both can learn by experience. Immature male tigers leave their territory-marking urine splashes on rocks by the seashore, not considering that the tide will wash them away. Adult male tigers are not so wasteful.
As the book’s photographs reveal, however, when it comes to physical beauty there is no contest between human being and tiger. The tiger wins paws down.