Rare sighting of new Indochinese tiger in Myanmar released for Global Tiger Day by Fauna & Flora nature conservation charity
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To celebrate Global Tiger Day, the international nature conservation charity Fauna & Flora has released footage of a previously unseen Indochinese tiger in southern Myanmar – of which there are just 22 left in the country – in the Ywarhilu area of Bokepyin township.
During a survey conducted by the charity’s conservationists in Myanmar – alongside the Chaung Nyauk Pyan Village conservation group – the tiger was spotted on camera.
‘Individual tigers are identifiable due to their unique stripe pattern, and it is fantastic to have detected a tiger we have not previously seen before roaming in the wild,’ said Acting Programme Manager of Fauna & Flora, Saw Soe Aung.
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‘Unfortunately, this tiger sighting is rarer than we would like. The future of this species is under grave threat, and urgent action is needed to secure its survival,’ Soe Aung continued.
Classified as endangered on the IUCN’s Red List, there are an estimated 196 Indochinese tigers left in the wild in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Several factors have plummeted their population in the past – war in the region where they lived; being hunted for their bones and traded for weapons; and soldiers consuming the meat of tiger prey, so that the Indochinese tigers were unable to survive without an adequate diet.
To protect the remaining population – which is threatened by the continual demand for tiger parts in traditional Asian medicine, as well as illegal poaching – Fauna & Flora are implementing conservation activities with local communities, alongside the support of the UK Government and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
These include awareness raising, camera trap surveys – used in order to estimate the population of tigers and their prey – and the development of local livelihoods outside of natural resource extraction.
Global Tiger Day, celebrated yearly on 29 July, was founded in 2010 after 13 tiger-range countries came together to create a goal of doubling the global tiger population by 2022, and seeks to raise awareness of tiger conservation across the world.
