Tracking Tigers Is Just As Dangerous As It Sounds | Expedition Raw

We're setting camera traps to study tigers. Two people got eaten by tigers right before we started. When there's a tiger around, you can't sleep; you can barely eat. You can't do anything because all you are scared for your life.

I've been in Indonesia now for almost a year tracking tigers through the remaining national parks. You can smell tigers every now and then if they're very close; they have a very distinct smell. Whenever we thought that there might be one around, it was drop everything, cut a spear, light a fire, and do everything we could to never see one.

The way we monitor where tigers are is by setting remotely triggered camera traps. There's not a single trail, and there's really just two options to get through these landscapes: one is along a ridge line, and the other is up a river. So, climbing up 1,000 meters at a 45° angle with a 70lb pack, we are all exhausted.

We return two months or three months later and retrieve the memory card, and we get to see all the animals. Northern end, and we've come across another clear cut. This is fresh, only six months old, maybe less.

The thing is, people, we come here—maybe the forest department or researchers like me—maybe once every five years. We would randomly come across this location, so if someone clears a piece of land like this, they're going to get away with it.

Our research has highlighted that tigers will remain in all sorts of forest, no matter if they're logged, degraded, or fragmented, as long as we can control poaching. This is their earliest pre-colonial shipwreck ever discovered, so to find something like that was like, you know, this is like a Hollywood story, you know?