Sumatran tiger faces extinction as forest habitat shrinks

Richard Lloyd Parry, Times Online 3 Mar 09;

The Sumatran tiger is in danger of becoming the first major mammal to become extinct in the 21st century, as villagers on the Indonesian island fight a deadly war with the magnificent but ferocious predator.

At least four tigers, and nine people, have been killed in the past month alone, as the shrinking of Sumatra’s already depleted forests brings an increase in attacks on farmers, hunters and illegal loggers.

With fewer than 400 of the creatures estimated to be left in the wild, the Sumatran tiger is classified as critically endangered, the most vulnerable of all the six surviving tiger subspecies.

The fact that several victims of the recent attacks have been devoured by the tigers, which usually have little taste for human flesh, suggests how hungry and desperate they are becoming, as economic exploitation of their habitat confines them in ever smaller and more impoverished patches of jungle.

As the tiger attacks become more common, conservationists are hurrying to trap man-eating animals humanely, and release them away from human habitation, before terrified villagers hunt them down and kill them.

“As people encroach into tiger habitat, it's creating a crisis situation and further threatening this critically endangered subspecies,” Ian Kosasih of the conservation group WWF, said. “In light of these killings, officials have got to make public safety a top concern and put a stop to illegal clearance of forests in Sumatra.”

According to the Indonesian government, between five and ten tigers are killed on average every year, but the scale of the slaughter in 2009 is on course to be higher than ever. A male tiger was speared to death a week ago after attacking a security guard on a palm oil plantation in the Indragiri Hilir area of Jambi province, the fourth animal to be killed this year.

Three young tigers were killed in February in neighbouring Riau province, after wandering into a village in search of food. Another Sumatran tiger was successfully trapped by conservationists.

But at least six people have been mauled to death and several more attacked and injured. In the grisliest attack, a 50-year-old man named Suyud was killed in his hut, which he shared with his 21-year-old son Imam Mujianto. The young man was consumed by the creature, which ate his brain, heart and liver, according to local reports.

“The shocking news that six people have been killed in less than one month is an extremely sad illustration of how bad the situation has become in Jambi,” said Didy Wurjanto, the head of the Jambi province Nature Conservancy Agency. “It’s a signal that we need to get serious about protecting natural forest and giving tigers their space.”

The number of tigers across the world has declined by 95 per cent in the past century, and three subspecies have become extinct, including the two others native to Indonesia – the Bali tiger and the Javan tiger, which was seen in the wild as late as the 1970s.

Poachers hunt them for their skins and other body parts which are a prized ingredient in traditional Asian medicines – the bodies of the animals killed in Sumatra in the past weeks quickly disappeared, and a tiger corpse is worth $3,200 (£2,200), a small fortune for an Indonesian villager.

But there is also less and less room for tigers, who require large areas in which to prowl, hunt and mate. Road building, farming, the timber industry and, particularly in Sumatra, the clearing of jungle to create lucrative palm oil plantations, is driving tigers into smaller islands of natural forest.

Sumatra’s lowland forests are shrinking at the rate of 2,700 sq km every year, an area larger than Luxemburg.

“You can't expect tigers to become vegetarians,” Nurazman Nurdin of the Nature Conservation Agency told AP. “They need meat and humans trespassing their territory are relatively easy targets.”

Death Match Between People, Animals in Sumatra’s Declining Forests
Anita Rachman, The Jakarta Globe 3 Mar 09;

In the heart of Sumatra, amid the forests, farmlands and rural villages, a disturbing turf war is raging between humans and animals for dwindling space and natural resources.

The dispute has exposed the ugly side of human nature — illegal logging, land clearance, poaching and corruption — but has also brought out the basic instincts of some of Sumatra’s most critically endangered species.

On Monday morning, the battled erupted again, and once again ended in death, when a Sumatran tiger killed two men in a forest in Jambi Province’s Muarojambi district.

Didy Wurdjanto, head of the Jambi Natural Resource Conservation Body, said he suspected the victims were outsiders who were illegally logging in the forest near Sungai Gelam village.

The fatality scorecard since January now stands at: tigers 4, humans 8.

In addition, two women were trampled to death in late January by a pair of elephants in Aceh Province, which itself has seen increasing conflicts between people and pachyderms.

The tiger who killed Musmuliadi, 31, and Musliadi, 30, on Monday morning was not protecting the forests from the two men. It was protecting itself, which is an increasingly difficult job in Sumatra these days. Local and international conservation groups say there’s less than 500 wild tigers left in Indonesia, mostly in south and central Sumatra, with a lone one believed to be in western Sumatra.

Local residents have nonetheless trapped and killed four “man-eating” tigers this year, despite warnings by the central government, while eight people have died and two others survived their encounters with a tiger. Among the victims was a 17-year-old boy from Lampung Province, whose body was dragged off on Feb. 22 and found the next day.

Direct conflicts between people and animals is occurring because human development is encroaching on the habitat of wild animals, affecting their food sources, hunting grounds and breeding areas, said Desmarita Murni, communication manager of the Indonesian branch of World Wide Fund for Nature.

She said forest cover in Sumatra was 25 million hectares in 1985, but by 2007 it had fallen to 13 million hectares due to illegal logging and land clearance, and the expansion of the palm oil industry and other agribusiness.

Additional reporting by Antara

Catch a Tiger, Save Its Tail
Zakki Hakim, The Jakarta Globe 2 Mar 09;

Indonesia’s tiger catchers have a double job — protecting humans from tigers and tigers from humans.

The elite teams of rangers and conservationists rush to the scene every time villagers report attacks or sightings of a Sumatran tiger, which is a critically endangered species. First, they calm the people. Then, if there are signs the animal is nearby, they return with steel cage traps, live
bait, heat-sensitive cameras and other equipment to catch the magnificent beasts.

This time Sartono, who at 40 has spent nearly half his life on the job, arrives with his six-member squad at a remote oil palm plantation in Sungai Gelam district, knowing they will have to act fast.

Two people have been reported killed in just the last 24 hours, while three were killed in the space of less than a week earlier this month. Rabai Abdul Muthalib, 45, a rubber tapper ambushed near a river, and days later, Suyud, 50, and his son, Imam Mujianto, 21, who were sleeping in their hut when the yellow-eyed tiger pounced through the thin roof. The beast devoured the brain, heart and liver of the youngest victim, spreading terror through surrounding villages.

Sartono knows if he and his team cannot put a quick end to the killing spree, residents will shoot or poison the Sumatran tiger, which is already on the brink of extinction because of rapid deforestation, poaching and clashes with humans. There are only around 250 of the cats left in the wild, compared to about 1,000 in the 1970s, according to the World Wildlife Fund, meaning the Panthera tigris sumatrae could become the first large predator to go extinct in the 21st century.

The tiger catchers’ job is to trap the animals, carry out health checks, fit them with GPS tracking collars and then release them back into protected areas. Often they come back empty-handed, but this time, not long after beginning their intensive foot patrol through palm oil plantations and peatland forest, they have good reason to feel optimistic.

They find and snap photos of fresh paw prints and, together with experts from the Zoological Society of London, start repositioning their traps around the rugged Makin Group’s palm oil plantation. They use a young dog and a goat as bait but place the animals in interior cages to protect themselves.

For the next few days, they hike beneath the equatorial sun, their clothes soaked in sweat, in search of clues, while other team members interview witnesses and check out rumors of more attacks and sightings. Finally, they have one of their own.

On a scorching Sunday afternoon, an adult tiger charges out of dense jungle brush and then suddenly retreats into the shrubbery. Slowly, as Sartono aims his cocked rifle at the trembling bushes, the squad walks backward.

“I was afraid, who wouldn’t be,” the veteran tiger catcher later says with an uneasy laugh. “We might have experience, but we don’t have superpowers!’’

After the beast manages to bite off the goat’s head and drag the so-called safety cage with its carcass into the nearby brush, the squad finally snags her. When they pull up to the site in their green pickup truck on day eight, they find a tigress, 1.8 meters long excluding the tail, crouched in the trap. At first she is calm, then she explodes, growling and throwing her 82-kilogram body against the steel bars.

“Easy, easy, we’re here to save you,” whispers Nurazman Nurdin of the Nature Conservation Agency, as the crew carefully approach the tigress, which has since been named Salma.

For the tiger catchers it is a tense but thrilling moment.

For villagers, who have locked themselves up after dark, shuttered stores, and canceled prayers in the mosque from dusk to dawn, it is a relief. Though some support plans to relocate the animal into a jungle far away, others wish the rangers would just shoot it. Many worry there may be more tigers out there.

They are right. Three more people have been mauled to death in the same area since the capture, all of them illegal loggers. Since those attacks took place within the cats’ habitat, there are no immediate plans to catch or relocate them.

Among the most traumatized is Efrianto, a 28-year-old villager who survived January’s midnight attack on his uncle, Suyud, and cousin, Mujianto, by kicking a hole through the wall of their hut.

The men on the tiger team said it was disturbing, and rare, that Salma ate one of the victim’s remains. Normally, Sumatran tigers avoid humans, but if they do kill a man, they usually leave the corpse untouched.

The tiger catchers saw the unusual behavior as a sign of how desperately hungry the tigress must have been.

“There’s no place for its prey to live here, all the land has been converted into oil palm plantations,’’ said Nurdin, the Nature Conservation Agency official, as he surveyed churned-up wasteland and neat rows of trees.

As their name suggests, these tigers can only be found in the wild on Sumatra Island.

Their habitat is disappearing at an alarming rate, with 270,000 hectares of lowland forests being cleared annually, mostly for palm oil, which is used in cosmetics and candy but also to make “clean-burning” fuel for markets in the US and Europe. Other culprits are loggers and mining companies, whose projects limit mating grounds, leave remaining tiger populations isolated and scattered, and chase off the majestic cats’ prey.

“You can’t expect tigers to become vegetarians,’’ Nurdin said.

“They need meat and humans trespassing their territory are relatively easy targets.”

The biggest threat to conservation is conflict with humans, according to a recent report by the Forestry Ministry. On average, 5 to 10 Sumatran tigers have been killed every year since 1998, the report said.

“At this rate, they will soon be extinct,’’ said Hariyo Wibisono of Harimaukita, an alliance that coordinates 15 state agencies and tiger conservation groups.

Sometimes the animals are killed by frightened villagers, other times by poachers who sell their carcasses for trophies or to supply a growing demand for tiger bones in traditional medicine.

A poacher can get $3,300 for a dead tiger, what some people in this impoverished nation of 235 million people make in a year.

But Nurdin said trafficking operations are almost impossible to crack because they involve syndicates. “Only the well-connected would dare to buy such things,” he said, noting that the last person they caught trying to sell a carcass was a soldier.

In the meantime, the tiger catchers are fighting an uphill battle.

At the present rate of deforestation, there will eventually be no safe place to release the captured tigers. So international wildlife experts are working with the government to come up with a 10-year conservation strategy. They want palm oil and other companies to either help monitor the activity of tigers on their property or, better yet, put aside some land as a sanctuary for wildlife.

“For years, we fought against land conversion, but it did not work,” said Wibisono, of the tiger conservation alliance. “We had to try a different approach.”

For Sartono and his team, catching a tiger is bittersweet. “It’s kind of sad, I feel sorry for the tiger, but it’s better than the alternative,” Sartono said.

“But don’t call us tiger catchers. Please! We’re tiger savers.”

Associated Press

2 killed in new tiger attack
Straits Times 4 Mar 09;

JAKARTA - A SUMATRAN tiger has mauled to death another two illegal loggers in Indonesia, bringing the toll to eight in the last five weeks, an official said on Tuesday.

The loggers were attacked in their forest hut on Sunday night in the third such incident since late January, according to a conservation official in Jambi province, Sumatra island.

'They were playing guitar and singing in their temporary hut in the forest when a tiger suddenly attacked one of them,' the official, Didi Wuryanto, told AFP.

'After having paralysed the first victim, it ran after another man and mauled his head and chest while his friends were watching.' Human-animal conflicts are a rising problem as people encroach on wildlife habitats in Indonesia, an archipelagic nation with some of the world's largest remaining tropical forests.

Environmental group WWF said villagers have trapped and killed four of the endangered tigers in response to the deadly attacks, which it blamed on illegal logging in the tigers' habitat.

Mr Wuryanto said authorities were pleading with villagers not to trap and kill the protected cats.

'We've repeatedly urged people not to enter the forest and asked them not to attack tigers,' he said.

There are less than 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild, according to WWF. -- AFP