A camera trap in northeast China filmed something nobody had recorded before: a wild Amur tigress walking a forest track with five cubs behind her. Amur tigers usually raise one to four. Fifteen years ago the country had around 20 wild tigers left. It now has roughly 70.
Six tigers, one frame
In November 2025, a sensor camera in the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park recorded a wild Amur tigress moving along a forest track. Behind her, in single file, came five cubs.
Nobody had filmed that before in China. Amur tigers normally raise one to four cubs, and raising five to that age means one thing above all: there was enough to eat.
What 20 became
The number that makes this worth telling is not five. It is 70.
Around 2010, the wild tiger population of northeast China had fallen to roughly 20 animals. Not 20 in a reserve. Twenty in the country. A population that small is usually a formality before extinction.
Today the estimate is about 70, inside what is now the largest protected area for tigers anywhere in the world, straddling the China-Russia border.
How it turned
None of it was luck. Three things ran at once, and all three were slow:
- Habitat restored and connected, so tigers could move rather than sit trapped in fragments
- Protection that held, with snare removal and patrols kept up year after year
- Communities living alongside them, because a tiger population only survives where people are not paid, in effect, to want it gone
That last one is the hard part, and it is the part that decides whether the number keeps climbing.
Why five cubs matters
A tigress with five healthy cubs is not just a nice photograph. It is a readout on the whole system. Cubs that size need prey, cover and quiet. Deer and boar had to recover before tigers could.
The population is still small enough to lose. Seventy animals is a recovery, not a rescue. But a forest that can feed six tigers walking together is a forest doing what it is supposed to do.
_Photo: Zolushka, a wild Amur tigress with her cubs, recorded by camera trap in Bastak Nature Reserve, Russia. Bastak State Nature Reserve, CC BY-SA 4.0. Not the Chinese footage described above._