AKIPRESS.COM - Kazakhstan’s Ile-Balkhash State Nature Reserve is a different place now than it was a decade ago, CNN reports.

The delta ecosystem, which occupies around 4,151 square kilometers (1,603 square miles) across the country’s Almaty and Balkhash region, was devoid of large mammals, and its scrub, marshland, and woodland were degraded.

Fast-forward to 2024. Rare mammals like the Bukhara deer and the Kulan, a type of wild ass, graze on vegetation, surrounded by over 50 hectares of restored forest.

Now, the region is about to welcome back an animal that hasn’t been seen in the wild there for over 70 years: the tiger.

The apex predators once roamed across Central Asia, part of their historic range — an area that once extended from Turkey in the west to the Korean peninsula in the east, and from the northern Siberian territories of Russia to the equatorial tropical islands of Indonesia. 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.

In September, two captive Amur tigers were translocated from Stichting Leeuw, a big cat sanctuary in the Netherlands, and are now settling into a semi-natural three-hectare enclosure within the reserve — with the hope that their offspring will be among the first wild tigers in the country in decades.

“These tigers were selected because they’re very similar to what would have been found in the Caspian region (before their extinction),” says Stuart Chapman, lead of the Tigers Alive Initiative, WWF’s coordinated network of tiger range offices, government bodies, partners and communities. Amur tigers, typically found in Russia’s Far East, have to survive hot summers and freezing cold winters, which is a similar climate to the Balkhash region.

The two tigers, called Bodhana and Kuma, were transported on land from the Netherlands to Germany, from where they took a six-hour flight in the hold of a commercial plane to Kazakhstan, and then a 20-minute helicopter ride to the reserve.

Chapman describes the event as a landmark moment for conservation and says it gives hope to the future of tigers — not just in the region, but globally.

“Tigers have been translocated within country boundaries, and zoo tigers cross international borders all the time, but that’s for them to remain in captivity,” says Chapman. “This is the first time that tigers have crossed international borders to reintroduce them into the wild.”