Silver linings

I decided to try being Turner-esque.

Not sure the digital camera really masters this.

I wanted to show the sun beams, which are so visible to the eye.

And as I was trying, a crow flew to chase a kite.

These eyes in the trees don't show up terribly well either.

You often see them on birches, but here is a beech, ash, and oak.

And eyes. The eye of the tiger. I have been listening, for the second time, to John Vaillant's The Tiger, which is incredible. It's the story of a tiger who seemed to be seeking revenge on a particular man and then on humankind. He killed two people in the far east of Russia. The book is excellent on the region, biologically and politically; on tigers and tiger hunting; on things that are dying out (tigers and ways of life). It is empathic and beautiful with a superb story and incredible characters - all carefully researched and including interviews, historical record and more.

Nowadays, there are about 400 tigers in Russia's far east. And maybe 3,000 wild tigers of all sub species. In captivity, there are around 2000 in Texas alone. But there has never been a successful rewilding of a captive tiger. Ever. Those who study Amur tigers (the sub species found in Russia) say 80% of those they trap and collar have been shot, many more than once. The tiger who is central to the book had dozens of bullets and pellets in his body. He'd been shot at multiple times.

The silver lining to this story? We do, somehow, still share a planet with wild tigers. And they could, given will and policy, vision and discipline, recover their numbers to a truly sustainable level.