Princely hunt
Shikar centuries
Mughal and colonial hunts cut numbers before anyone ran a camera grid.
Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Panthera in Asia
- Hailey / Corbett park
- Man-Eaters of Kumaon
- Project Tiger
- Ranthambore tourism boom
- St Petersburg Tx2
- India camera-trap census
- India count rise
- Tx2 deadline
- Malayan and Indochinese losses
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Speed69
Intelligence76
Range37
Resilience14
Cultural impact94
Ecological role82
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Last reviewed Sources & creditsMedia creditsMethodology
Quick answers
How many wild tigers are left?
Global estimates in the 2020s sit near 4,000-5,500 depending on the year and method. India holds the majority. The number is a camera-trap product, not a Victorian hunter tale.
Did Project Tiger work?
India wild counts rose from a 1970s crisis to the largest national population. Methods changed (pugmarks to cameras), so the graph is not a single instrument. Southeast Asia did not copy the rebound.
What was Tx2?
A 2010 pledge by tiger-range states in St Petersburg to double wild numbers by 2022. Some countries gained; others lost. The slogan outlived the deadline.
Why not score tigers and lions the same?
Lions are Vulnerable with a wider African footprint and a tiny Gir relic. Tigers are Endangered, more forest-bound, and culturally heavier in South and East Asia. Scores stay relative across all 24 types.
Who was Jim Corbett in this story?
A hunter of man-eaters who wrote Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944) and later lent his name to India first national park -- a colonial-to-reserve arc.
Are Siberian tigers a separate conservation?
Panthera tigris tigris now lumps many mainland tigers in some taxonomies; Amur animals still have a Russian-Chinese border programme and a different prey winter.
IUCN: Endangered
The tiger did not enter English as a finished emblem. Hunts, films, listings and field stations rewrote the animal on a dated clock.
This chapter keeps ten timeline points, five eras and three milestones so a later translation can hold the same years.
Where it began
Pleistocene PantheraSouth and East Asian forests
Timeline
c. 2 MaPanthera in Asia
Pleistocene fossils already show large striped cats on the continent they still occupy.
1936Hailey / Corbett park
United Provinces reserve that later became Jim Corbett National Park.
1944Man-Eaters of Kumaon
Corbett book that fixed the man-eater as an English-language type.
1973Project Tiger
Indira Gandhi-era launch after a crisis count -- the policy that still structures India tigers.
1986Ranthambore tourism boom
A reserve became a global viewing economy; later tigress identities (Machli) followed.
2010St Petersburg Tx2
Range states pledged a doubling by 2022.
2014India camera-trap census
All-India estimate used cameras more systematically -- a method break from pugmarks.
2018India count rise
Official figures passed 2,200 -- celebrated, then debated for method.
2022Tx2 deadline
Global double did not arrive uniformly; India claimed success, SE Asia did not.
2023Malayan and Indochinese losses
Range-country reports kept mainland SE Asia on the wrong slope.
The eras
1936-73
First parks then crisis
Corbett-era reserves did not prevent a 1960s-70s crash.
1973-2010
Project Tiger state
India built a reserve bureaucracy other range states only partly copied.
2010-22
Tx2 slogan years
A doubling pledge met camera maths and uneven politics.
2020s
India vs the rest
One country holds most wild tigers; the map is not a species recovery.
Milestones
Project Tiger
1973A national project, not a charity poster, became the tiger state.
Tx2 pledge
2010A diplomatic number that 2022 only partly honoured.
Camera-trap census
2014-Method change that made later rises hard to compare with pugmark decades.
Reading tiger history beside the resilience score keeps a recovered stock from standing in for a threatened cousin.
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