Siberian Tiger

There is no difference: Siberian tiger and Amur tiger are two names for the same animal, and both get the same number of searches. Scientists and conservation groups prefer Amur tiger, because the cat lives around the Amur River basin on the border of Russia and China and has never lived in most of Siberia. In Russia it is often called the Ussuri tiger, after the Ussuri River, and in older books it appears as the Manchurian or Korean tiger, since it once ranged across Manchuria and the whole Korean Peninsula. Its traditional scientific name is Panthera tigris altaica. In 2017 the IUCN Cat Specialist Group merged all mainland Asian tigers into one subspecies, Panthera tigris tigris, so on paper the Amur tiger now shares a subspecies with the Bengal tiger, but it is still treated as its own population and managed separately. Genetic studies show it is very close to the extinct Caspian tiger of Central Asia, and Amur tigers have even been proposed for bringing tigers back to Kazakhstan. The tiger is the national animal of South Korea and a symbol in Russia, where it appears on the coat of arms of Primorsky Krai and the city of Vladivostok.

The Siberian tiger is often called the largest cat on Earth, but the real picture is more modest. Wild adult males caught and weighed by researchers in the Sikhote-Alin mountains averaged roughly 170 to 195 kilograms, and adult females about 118 to 123 kilograms. The heaviest wild Amur tiger weighed by scientists since the 1990s was about 215 kilograms. That makes wild Amur and Bengal tigers very similar in weight, and the title of largest cat is best shared between them. Older reports of wild Siberian tigers of 384 kilograms or more, such as a male said to have been shot in Sikhote-Alin in 1950, were never confirmed, and Guinness notes they may have been exaggerated. Zoo tigers often weigh more because they eat well and move little. In length the Amur tiger is impressive: a big male measures about 2.7 to 3.3 meters from nose to tail tip, with a tail of about a meter, and stands close to a meter tall at the shoulder. Its skull is long and heavy, with canine teeth of about 7 centimeters. The paws are very broad, which spreads the animal's weight on snow, and the ruff of fur on the cheeks and neck makes the head look even bigger in winter.

White Siberian tigers are among the most searched tiger images, but there has never been a confirmed white tiger in the wild Amur population. The white coat comes from a recessive gene that was found in Bengal tigers in India, where the last wild white tiger was shot in 1958. Almost all white tigers in zoos and private facilities descend from a single Bengal tiger called Mohan, caught in 1951, and many were later crossed with Amur tigers to make them bigger. That is why the white tigers sold to the public as Siberian are usually hybrids between Bengal and Amur tigers, often with years of inbreeding behind them. They can look very convincing, especially photographed in snow, but they are not a natural form of the Amur tiger, and they have no place in the wild. Inbreeding to keep the white color has caused crossed eyes, cleft palates, spine problems and early deaths, and accredited zoos in many countries no longer breed them. Wild Amur tigers do vary in color, though: in winter their coats are noticeably paler and yellower than in summer, and some individuals have unusually thin or broken stripes, which researchers use to tell them apart in camera trap photos.

No other tiger lives with winters like the Amur tiger's. In the Sikhote-Alin mountains snow covers the ground for four or five months, and on the coldest nights temperatures can drop below minus 40 °C. Its body is ready for it. The winter coat grows long and dense, much longer than in summer, especially on the belly and neck, and its color turns paler, which helps it blend into a landscape of snow, bare trees and dry grass. A layer of fat up to about 5 centimeters thick on the belly and flanks gives insulation and an energy reserve. The very wide paws, covered in fur between the pads, work like snowshoes, letting the tiger walk on snow where deer sink. Tigers still struggle when the snow gets deep: when it passes about half a meter they move less, follow roads, ridges and the trails of deer and boar, and save energy by resting near a kill for days. Deep snow also helps them, because wild boar and deer tire quickly in it. Researchers in Russia take advantage of winter too: the national tiger census is done by counting and measuring tiger tracks in the snow across the whole range.

Almost all wild Siberian tigers live in Russia's Far East, in Primorsky Krai and the south of Khabarovsk Krai, with a few in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and Amur Oblast. The heart of the range is the Sikhote-Alin mountains, which run along the Sea of Japan coast for about 900 kilometers. There the tiger lives in mixed forests of Korean pine, Mongolian oak, birch, fir and spruce, with river valleys where deer and wild boar gather in winter. Key protected areas include the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve, the Lazovsky Reserve, Bikin National Park, which protects a huge roadless forest of Korean pine, and Land of the Leopard National Park in the southwest, where tigers share the forest with Amur leopards. A second, smaller population lives across the border in China, in the Changbai and Wanda mountains of Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, where the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park was created to protect it. Many of these tigers move back and forth between the two countries. The species once lived in North Korea and South Korea and around Mongolia, but the IUCN lists it as extinct in the Koreas, and in Mongolia only wanderers have ever appeared.

Siberian tigers live on large hoofed animals, and in the Russian Far East two species make up most of their diet: red deer, called izubr locally, and wild boar. Sika deer are important in the south, especially near the coast, and roe deer, moose and musk deer are also taken. The Amur tiger is also one of the few predators that regularly kills bears. Asiatic black bears and smaller brown bears are ambushed in spring, autumn or even in their winter dens, and bears can make up a noticeable share of the diet in some areas, although large brown bears sometimes steal tiger kills or even kill tigers. When large prey is scarce, tigers eat badgers, raccoon dogs, hares, fish and, near villages, dogs and livestock. Like all tigers they hunt by stealth, creeping close under cover and then rushing over a short distance. After a successful hunt a tiger stays near the carcass for several days, eating and resting, and a large deer can feed it for close to a week. Because prey is spread thin in these cold forests, the tiger depends on wild boar and deer numbers; when African swine fever killed many wild boar after 2019, it became a real worry for the tigers and a reason to limit hunting of their prey.

Siberian tigers live alone and need more space than any other tiger, because prey is so spread out in the northern forests. Radio collar studies in Sikhote-Alin found that females use home ranges of roughly 400 to 500 square kilometers, while males cover 1,000 square kilometers or more, each overlapping the ranges of several females. That is several times the size of a tiger's range in India. Tigers mark their areas by spraying urine on trees and rocks, scraping the ground, clawing bark and rubbing their cheeks on trunks, and these signs tell other tigers who is around, their sex and whether a female is ready to mate. Young tigers leave their mother at around one and a half to two years, and young males may travel hundreds of kilometers looking for a territory of their own; some have crossed into China, and tigers released after rehabilitation have been tracked moving into areas where tigers had been absent for decades. Amur tigers are most active at dawn, dusk and night but move by day too, and in a day they often walk 10 to 20 kilometers. They are quiet animals that people almost never see, and most of what is known about them comes from collars, camera traps and tracks in the snow.

Amur tigers can mate at any time of year, but most cubs in the wild are born from spring to summer, which gives them the warm months to grow before their first winter. After a pregnancy of about 103 to 105 days, the female gives birth to usually two to four cubs in a sheltered den, such as a rock crevice, a hollow under fallen trees or dense thicket. Cubs weigh about one kilogram at birth and are blind for the first week or two. The mother raises them alone and has to leave them for long periods to hunt, which is when they are most at risk. A long study of radio collared females in the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve found that wild tigresses usually give birth for the first time at about four years old and have a litter roughly every two years. The cubs follow their mother on hunts from a few months old, learn to kill by practicing on her prey, and stay with her until they are about 18 months to two years old. Their first winter is the hardest test. In China, where tigers had nearly vanished, camera traps in the national park filmed a wild tigress raising five cubs in 2025, a sign that the population there is now breeding and growing.

Today there are roughly 800 Siberian tigers in the wild. Russia's last full census, carried out in the winter of 2021 to 2022 across more than 180,000 square kilometers by reading tracks in the snow, counted at least 750 tigers including cubs. It was done three years early because African swine fever had hit the wild boar the tigers depend on. The trend is clearly upward: the 2005 census found about 450 tigers and the 2015 census 523 to 540. In China, the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park reported 72 wild tigers in 2026, up from 27 when the park was planned in 2017, though many of them have territories that cross into Russia, so the two counts overlap somewhat. All this is a huge recovery from the low point around 1940, when the zoologist Lev Kaplanov estimated only 20 to 30 tigers left in Russia. The IUCN does not assess the Amur tiger separately. Its figure for the whole tiger species is 2,608 to 3,905 mature, breeding age tigers, which shows that Amur tigers are a small part of the world's tigers. Most of them are not counted as breeding adults either, since cubs and young tigers are included in the Russian total.

The Siberian tiger is not extinct, but it is endangered. The tiger species is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List, in an assessment made in December 2021 and published in 2022, and that status covers the Amur tiger. Its story is one of the great comebacks in conservation. By the 1930s, hunting, the capture of cubs for zoos and the clearing of forests had almost wiped it out. In 1947 the Soviet Union banned tiger hunting, and the capture of cubs was later restricted. The population grew slowly through the second half of the century, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 poaching for skins and bones exploded, and dozens of tigers were killed each year until anti poaching teams, many supported by international groups, brought it under control. In 2013 Russia created the Amur Tiger Center, and new protected areas such as Land of the Leopard and Bikin National Park were added. China banned the domestic trade in tiger bone in 1993 and created its tiger and leopard national park in 2021. The threats have not disappeared: poaching, logging and new roads, the loss of wild boar to disease, canine distemper caught from village dogs, and conflict with people all still take tigers every year.

Siberian tigers can kill people, but attacks are rare, and the Amur tiger has a reputation for avoiding humans even though hunters, loggers and mushroom pickers share its forests. Most dangerous encounters in Russia's Far East involve a tiger that is wounded, old, starving or provoked, often by a poacher, or a tiger surprised at close range. The best known case happened in December 1997 in the Bikin River valley, where a tiger that had been shot and wounded by a poacher stalked and killed him and later another man; the story was told in the book The Tiger by John Vaillant. Problems are more common in hard winters, when hungry tigers come into villages to take dogs, which they seem to find easy prey. Russia has special response teams that deal with conflict tigers, trying to scare them off or catch them rather than kill them. Some of the captured animals, including orphaned cubs, are taken to rehabilitation centers such as the one at Alekseevka in Primorye, and several have been released back into the wild with collars to follow them. Visitors to tiger forests are very unlikely to see a tiger at all, let alone be attacked by one.