Away from the madness of the world, a stunning ultra-rare Siberian tiger pauses in a quiet forest in this jaw-dropping picture.
This incredible picture was captured in December 2021 by wildlife photographer Sascha Fonseca using a hidden camera trap.
Fonseca had set up the camera trap carefully in the forests of Russia’s Far East so as to capture one of the endangered cats.
“A male Siberian tiger passed by my camera trap,“ said Fonseca, who hails from Germany. “It turned out that it’s an unknown male which had not been documented yet. So, the researchers I worked with during my camera-trap project invited me to give him a name.”
While thinking of a name for the tiger, Fonseca noticed a unique marking on the animal and this is how a name appeared in his head.
“We agreed on ‘Leo’ because of the distinctive L pattern on his left cheekbone, and after the famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy,” he said.
The Siberian tiger is a species that is mainly found in the Far East of Russia, the Northeast of China, and North Korea. It is also known as “Amur,” “Korean,” “Manchurian,” and “Ussurian” tiger.
This tiger species was once common in northeast Asia. However, due to widespread poaching of both the Siberian tigers and the prey animals it feeds on, this animal has been pushed to the brink of extinction.
Fonseca said that the “very fact that there are wild Amur tigers in the world today is something of a miracle. Only 3–4 percent of the area of an Amur tiger’s range is protected by wildlife reserves and national parks.”
“Habitat loss, logging and mining, poaching, hunting, and a shrinking gene pool—the world’s largest cat clings to existence amidst a large number of interconnected problems,” he added.
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