In February 2001, the ridgelines of central Bhutan were covered with a light dusting of snow. At the time, Pralad Yonzon, one of Southasia's top field biologists, was in professional exile from his home country, Nepal, and had been prowling these hills as a consultant to the Thimphu government. Consultant is a word that he uses for himself only sparingly and with clear distaste. 'You have to understand,' he says, 'consultants wear three-piece suits, carry laptops, are jet-setters – half of their report is already finished before they leave home. I don't do that. All of my data came from the field. Everybody in Thimphu would be happy when I would go off for three months and never show my face.' He was the type of consultant – at the time, researching and writing a conservation plan for Bhutan's central Thrumshingla National Park – who would pack his rucksack full of essentials and head out, roughing it out for months at a time.
And so it was that Yonzon found himself cresting the snowy saddle of a ridge that February, and staring at the unmistakeable tracks – pugmarks – of a royal Bengal tiger. Previously, Yonzon had worked as a field biologist with the Smithsonian Tiger Project in Nepal's Chitwan National Park for five years, in addition to having been the director of the King Mahendra Trust, a semi-government body overseeing conservation efforts in Nepal. As such, he was given to trusting his own wildlife identification. As he looked at the pugmarks, there was only one problem: the ridgeline that he was standing on was at an altitude of more than 4000 metres – 4110 m, he later ascertained.
'That's way up there,' Yonzon emphasises, by which he means that not only are tigers not supposed to go that high, but no tiger evidence had ever been found at anywhere near that altitude. Indeed, all over the world tiger habitat does not rise above 1000 m. Over the next few weeks, Yonzon was determined to document the discovery for the world to see. Armed with just two film 'camera traps', he recalls carefully scouring the landscape for a place he felt confident would be fruitful – 'With only two cameras, you have to be really picky,' he says. After shooting a few dozen rolls of film, he brought the camera back to Kathmandu for processing, as there were no such facilities in Bhutan at the time.
Out of all the rolls exposed, Yonzon had captured just one image of a tiger, but that was all he needed. True, at around 3000 m, his camera trap had been set up far lower than his initial discovery of the pugmarks. But not only did that single image still constitute the highest-altitude evidence of a tiger anywhere in the world at the time; it was also the first instance in which a live tiger had ever been photographed in Bhutan. Thus, Yonzon would seem to have scored something of a double play: satisfying his own scientific and research instincts while simultaneously making his employer – and, as a bonus, his employer's entire citizenry – very happy.