Another page to the Cinderella story
Zolushka (Russian for Cinderella) is a tigress with a heart-warming tale, and one that has been close to David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation and our TigerTime campaign for many years.
Orphaned in 2012 at only 5 months old, Zolushka was successfully rehabilitated and released back into the wild in 2013.
In 2015, the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation was happy to hear from our project partners The Phoenix Fund, that Zolushka had become a mother of two cubs.
Now, three years on, we have heard the fantastic news that Zolushka is a mother yet again!
The story since her release has been pieced together with the help of remote camera traps which importantly do not interrupt her natural behaviours. Early this year, our partners in Russia were able to catch a quick glimpse of Zolushka from remotely captured footage. Moments later, she is followed by a growing, and perhaps surprisingly large, 6 or 7 month old cub!
It’s exciting to see that Zolushka, a mother again to a new generation of precious Amur tigers, is thriving in an area where the DSWF supported project is working to protect these amazing animals and their habitat.
However brief, footage like this of Zolushka, provides vital information that can be used to develop strategies to protect tigers and monitors breading populations and numbers. Remote cameras that are triggered by heat and movement, can provide important insight into tiger behaviour, range, population, and ecology, and in this case, they have revealed to us another chapter to her Cinderella Story.
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For more information on about the projects we support in Russia click here