Video of a mother tiger and her cubs is a sign the endangered Siberian tiger could be making a comeback in China after it was largely wiped out over 65 year ago

A family of rare tigers has been caught on film deep inside China, more than 65 years after the species was largely wiped out in the country.

Conservationists said the video footage of a mother Siberian tiger and her two cubs playing 30km from the Russian border was a sign the endangered species could be making a comeback in China.

The last stronghold of Siberian tigers, or Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), is in Russia where around 450 are believed to live. They have been spotted before just inside China, but this is the first infrared video evidence of them so far inland, where only paw prints have been recorded previously.

“It’s confirmation they’re re-establishing, they’re not just animals coming in and out [from Russia],” said John Barker, Asian programmes leader at WWF, which recorded the video with a camera trap. He said that all the signs indicated the tigers were breeding in China, though it was too early to say for certain.

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“We shouldn’t get hysterical over one video. There’s a long, long road ahead. But the opportunity is there. If the government, civil society and communities can work together, there’s no reason there shouldn’t be a sustainable population of tigers again in China.”

The north-eastern area of China where the tigers were filmed is prime habitat for the species with tens of thousands of kilometres of birch forest. Much of the forest is still intact despite decades of large scale commercial logging, which was accompanied by much of the poaching that drove the tigers from the area, Barker said. China is currently testing a ban on logging in the Heilongjiang province bordering Russia.

“The critical habitat is there. Very often with tigers [globally] the thing you are fighting is just loss of tiger habitat,” said Barker. There are around 3,200 tigers left in the wild globally.

WWF’s conservation efforts to entice Siberian tigers back to China over the last six to seven years have largely focused on bringing back the deer that the tigers prey on.

Shi Quanhua, senior manager of WWF-China’s Asian big cats programme said: “A shortage of prey presented a major threat to wild Amur tigers. We worked to restore the Amur tiger’s prey populations through habitat restoration and anti-poaching efforts.”

Russia is currently conducting its once-a-decade Siberian tiger census, with 2,000 people searching for signs of the animal in the country’s far east. The Russian government hopes to show that numbers in the wild have risen from 450 in 2005 to 600 to ensure the species survival.