In reeds tinged red in the Central Asian sun, a tiger once roamed. There, in riparian forests that line rivers like the Vakhsh in the former Soviet country of Tajikistan, the Caspian tiger (Panthera ...

Tigers now occupy less than 7% of the range they used to, and in Kazakhstan, systematic hunting and a reduction of tiger prey saw the big cats declared extinct in the Caspian region in the 1950s.