After 70 years, tigers return to Kazakhstan

ILE-BALKHASH NATURE RESERVE :: KAZAKHSTAN

Last September, two tigers named Bodhana and Kuma stepped into a new enclosure—and into history. The captive tigers arrived from a big cat sanctuary in the Netherlands and are part of a WWF-supported program to reintroduce tigers to Kazakhstan, where they’ve been extinct for more than 70 years.

A century ago, as many as 100,000 tigers roamed free in the wild; now, around 5,500 wild tigers remain in Asia in what is left of their historical range, which once stretched as far west as Turkey.

To help reverse this trend, a male and a female tiger were moved into Kazakhstan’s Ile-Balkhash Nature Reserve, which was established in 2018. Kazakhstan has spent six years restoring the reserve, reforesting more than 120 acres with native trees and reintroducing prey species such as the Bukhara deer and the Asiatic wild ass.

The future offspring of Bodhana and Kuma will be raised to survive in the wild and then released, becoming the first wild tigers in Central Asia in decades. The goal is to translocate more tigers to Ile-Balkhash to establish a healthy population of 50 wild tigers by 2035.