Fundraising and Events News

NEW PATRON and PRINCE MICHAEL VISIT RUSSIAN FAR EAST
Lord Fairfax and a group of motorbike enthusiasts have just set off for a charity fund raising ride across Russia — The White Nights Ride. They left Vladivostok at the start of May and hope to be in St Petersburg by early June. For the first part of the journey they were joined by His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent who is Patron of AMUR partner the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation. Some of the money raised by this journey will be donated to AMUR.

Lord Fairfax of Cameron is a frequent visitor to the Russian Far East and has a deep interest in wildlife so AMUR was delighted when he kindly agreed to be a new Patron to stand along side Sir Roderic Lyne and Ilia Lagutenko.

For two days the bikers met with conservationists, scientists and antipoaching teams and visited a tiger rehabilitation centre to see where injured or orphaned tigers are treated prior to release back into the forest.

The journey started with a press conference followed by an official departure from the main square of Vladivostok. AMUR partner Phoenix had organised a theatrical display of children in tiger and leopard costumes to send the bikers on their way. During the two day visit the British guests were accompanied by Sergei Bereznuk of Phoenix who leads the local conservation programmes including the anti-poaching teams and education in schools and Dr Dale Miquelle of WCS, lead scientist in the Amur tiger and leopard research programme.

The bike team also met experts from the Institute of Agriculture who are currently partners of the Zoological Society of London in the veterinary project for Amur leopards which is being part financed by AMUR.

GALA EVENING in MOSCOW
AMUR would like to thank the Moscow Marriott Grand Hotel who kindly organised a fantastic Gala Evening in the autumn of 2004 which raise nearly $10,000 for AMUR and attracted a huge amount of press coverage.

LOSS OF BP AS SPONSOR
We are sorry to have lost the sponsorship support of BP in 2005. However we are very grateful for their support since 2001 and for assisting us with getting started in the early days. Thank You to BP

RUSSIAN REGISTRATION
AMUR is now in the process of registering as a charity in Russia. This means will be able to accept donations from the Russian public and have Russian companies as sponsors.

BBC TIGER TRAFFIC
In March the BBC aired ‘Tiger Traffic’, a documentary by Amanda Feldon. It was part of the This World foreign current affairs series and featured the work of AMUR and our conservation partners. The programme showed the devastating effects of the illegal trade in tiger parts from the Russian Far East into the Asian markets. It followed the under cover work of the anti-poaching teams in the Russian Far East and demonstrated just how dangerous their work is.

The programme attracted 1.5 million viewers and a lot of positive response from the audience who all asked why there are not more informative wildlife programmes such as this on the television.

The programme also increased the number of visits to our website tenfold for a month and brought in about $1,000 in donations from the public.

Conservation

AMUR LEOAPRDS FACE EXTINCTION FROM OIL PIPELINE
On 31st Dec 2004 Russia’s Prime Minister announced that Russia will build the world’s longest oil pipeline (4100km) to transport oil from the central Siberian fields to the Sea of Japan. The pipeline will be Russia’s largest project to date with total investments estimated at between $11 & $17 billion. Environmentalists were shocked by the location chosen for the pipeline terminal: the Amur (Perevoznaya) Bay in Russia’s biodiversity ‘hotspot’, South West Primorye, home to the remaining population of 30 Amur leopards. The selection of THIS route will almost certainly result in the extinction of the Amur leopard in the wild.

We are not against the pipeline itself, but citizens, environmentalists and scientists strongly oppose the last 4% of its route and the planned terminal location at Perevoznaya on the Amur Bay in SW Primorye. From there the oil will be shipped to Japan and other oil importing nations such as the USA, South Korea and China.

SW Primorye is a small sliver of land bordering on China and North Korea. It is probably Russia's most biodiverse area and home to 30% of its endangered species.

The proposed terminal location is the worst possible place that could have been chosen; as a result the pipeline will needlessly threaten three protected areas. One of these is Russia’s only marine reserve situated in the Amur Bay not far from the proposed new terminal.

Another area under threat is Kedrovaya Pad nature reserve, which was recently awarded the status of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Founded in 1916 to protect Amur leopards, it is Russia’s oldest reserve. In addition to the pipeline and terminal other infrastructure will be built including railways and roads, 18 storage oil tanks and an refinery.

Transneft (the company building the pipeline) and the Russian authorities have ignored all opposition despite the fact that other preferable locations exist such as ports near Nakhodka.

LEGENDARY AMUR TIGER, OLGA, KILLED BY POACHERS
Olga, the first Amur tiger ever fitted with a radio-collar has been missing since January 2005. Biologists believe she was poached and her radio-collar destroyed. Olga was the first animal captured by the staff of the Siberian Tiger Project, a cooperative research and conservation programme between AMUR partner the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Sikhote-Alin Nature Reserve. Captured when she was just one year old near the village of Terney, her movements and life history were closely monitored up to her 14th year.

She spent her entire life in a 500 km2 swath of forest north of Terney, giving birth to six litters totaling at least 13 cubs, of which only six survived.

“To our knowledge, Olga is the oldest and the most intensively studied tiger in the world,” said Dr Dale Miquelle, Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Russia Programme, and one of the people who first radio collared Olga. “For many of us, Olga was a symbol of the tiger’s resilience and capacity to live side by side with humans” continued Miquelle. “Since we first radio collared her in 1992, she lived largely outside of protected areas, in forests heavily used by hunters, and intensively grazed by cattle.

But for 13 years, she avoided contact with those hunters, and never turned to cattle as a source of food, even when trying to feed her hungry cubs. Her perseverance while other tigers were falling victim to poachers’ bullets symbolized the fight to save the world’s last Amur tigers, despite overwhelming odds. It was a privilege to be able to observe her for such a long period, and it’s a shame that we could not have followed her longer to witness a more dignified death from old age.”