Word: amur
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...confined to small, shrinking pockets of their forest habitat. The Caspian subspecies became extinct more than a decade ago. So did the Balinese and Javan cats. The survivors are impossible to count with any precision, but fewer than 650 Sumatran tigers remain and maybe 200 of Siberia's Amur, the world's largest cat. China has a few dozen left, and these isolated individuals will soon...
Ironically, what makes the tiger so vulnerable to humans is its unshakable grip on the human imagination. For millenniums, tigers have prowled the minds of mankind as surely as they have trod the steppes and forests of Asia. On the banks of the Amur River in Russia, archaeologists discovered 6,000-year-old depictions of tigers carved by the Goldis people, who revered the tiger as an ancestor and as god of the wild regions. In Hindu mythology the goddess Durga rides the tiger. And Chang Tao-ling, a patriarch of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism, also mounts...
...situation is in India, it is far worse in eastern Russia's taiga. The Amur tiger that inhabits this 800-mile-long stretch of evergreen forest nearly disappeared once before -- during the 1930s, when communist big shots would bag eight or 10 of the cats during a single hunt. But the state exercised iron control over the region, and when it decided to protect the tigers, their population recovered from roughly 30 to as many as 400 during the mid-1980s. Unfortunately for the Amur, tiger-bone prices began surging in the early 1990s, just when the fall...
...There is no end to our effrontery. In Arizona a mutant Chinese grass carp, the sterile triploid amur, has been released into the ponds and water hazards of golf courses to keep the water free of entangling weeds lest golf balls be lost or the scenery spoiled. An African fish, the tilapia, cruises irrigation canals devouring any growth that might impede the water flow, but it endangers the Colorado River's sport fish. Coast to coast, European starlings darken the skies. A century ago, the first few were released in New York City by a reader of Shakespeare bent...
That, however, was only a small taste of what was available through clandestine channels. At a village near Quanzhou, the WWF agent was treated to the sickening sight of 28 leopard skins, including six identified as the critically endangered Amur, believed to number only 40 in the world. The price: $380 apiece. Two taxidermy shops in Fuzhou offered more extravagant horror shows. "One had egrets, leopard cats, pangolins, slow lorises and eagles." The other shop contained "at least 100 animal specimens and must have had 500 birds -- kingfishers, hummingbirds, everything." The owner, she speculates, "may have connections in the local...