This is an amazing image of an amazing animal. This tiger is walking around the Harapan rainforest on Sumatra where the RSPB, Burung Indonesia (our partner in Indonesia) and BirdLife International are working together to protect the forest from destruction and to restore it to its former glory.
I've never visited Harapan so I can't talk from personal experience but colleagues who have been there come back with tales of its richness. Rainforests are perversely difficult places to see wildlife - there's lots of it out there but somehow it seems to hide very well. The chances of seeing a tiger are very slim - tiger footprints are perhaps more likely - but face-to-face tiger encounters are rare (maybe just as well - those are big teeth). This tiger took its own picture - by passing along the track it triggered the camera which let us have this special and privileged view.
I'd love to see a tiger - I bet you would too. The rainforest is the home to thousands, maybe millions of species, most of them creepy crawlies, and I am very glad that they are there, but it would be the tiger that would draw me to these life-filled, Earth-girdling forests. You can't get much more charismatic than a tiger.
When I think of the rainforests of southeast Asia I think of tigers, gibbons and tapirs; I think of birds such as trogons and hornbills; I think of green cathedrals of trees filled with life; but I should also think of an atom of mass 14, peaty soils and keeping the world's climate within manageable limits. The Harapan rainforest is a massive carbon store - in the trees, in the soils and a little bit in the tigers.
About a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions come from forest destruction. And that destruction is a major cause of species extinction. The RSPB's work with national and local governments and conservationists to conserve rainforests in Indonesia and Sierra Leone will contribute to saving species and saving the climate. Such win-win situations should form an important part of the Copenhagen climate-change discussions in December. Wouldn't it be great if world leaders agreed to measures to stop rainforest destruction?
Such measures would have to involve money flowing from the rich North to the poorer South - and I think it is amazing and wonderful that RSPB's members' money has helped that tiger to continue to pace through the lowland rainforest of Sumatra. We have only had relatively small financial help from the UK Government on this front - though, to be fair, the Darwin Initiative paid for the camera that took this photograph! In fact the EU and German and French governments have been much more help! But if you would like to help us to save the tiger and save the climate then please do donate.
And with apologies to William Blake:
Forest, forest burning bright
Put the tigers all to flight
What irrational hand or eye
Allows your carbon stores to fry?