The following has nothing to do with health care or crackpot teabagging candidates or which party is going to win the House in November but this is the type of news story I love best.  Conservationist Gordon Buchanan was hoping to confirm that tigers were living at high altitudes in Bhutan. Here is what he found and how he reacted.  I like this guy.

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And why is this a big deal?  Well, there might be as few as 3,200 tigers left in the wild.  Of the nine tiger subspecies, three have gone extinct in the last sixty years and the other six are all on the verge of extinction.  Over the last century, the tiger’s habitat has been reduced by 95% and poachers have been killing them for their body parts to serve the needs of traditional Chinese medicine.

The discovery of tigers living at altitudes of 13,000 feet could lead to them possibly having a safe haven to breed and increase in numbers.

From a conservation perspective, …this discovery helps significantly with developing what Panthera calls a tiger corridor along the foothills of the Himalayas in India, Nepal and Bhutan, and on into Myanmar. That would eventually connect with another corridor though Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Malaysia.

Since it’s now been confirmed that tigers can live at high altitudes, large areas of the Himalayas previously thought too high for tigers can be included in the corridor.

As one of the BBC producers filming the tigers says, “Bhutan could act as a tiger nursery from which tigers could breed safely and spread out to repopulate forests of some of the surrounding countries.”

Here’s hoping.

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