JAKARTA — Ripi Yanuar Fajar and his four friends say they’ll never forget that evening after Indonesia’s Independence Day celebration in 2019 when they encountered a big cat roaming a community plantation in Sukabumi, West Java province. Immediately after the brief encounter, Ripi, who happens to be a local conservationist, reached out to Kalih Raksasewu, a researcher at the country’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), saying he and his friends had seen either a Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas), a critically endangered animal, or a Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica), a subspecies believed to have gone extinct in the 1980s but only officially declared so in 2008. About 10 days later, Kalih visited the site of the encounter with Ripi and his friends. There, Kalih found a strand of hair snagged on a plantation fence that the unknown creature was believed to have jumped over. She also recorded footprints and claw marks that she thought resembled those of a tiger. This photograph of a live Javan tiger was taken in 1938 in Ujung Kulon, at the western tip of Java Island, and published in Andries Hoogerwerf’s “Ujung Kulon: The Land of the last Javan Rhinoceros.” Image by Andries Hoogerwerf via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). The single strand of hair from the suspected Javan tiger collected from a community plantation in Sukabumi, West Java. Image courtesy of the Indonesian National Research and Innovation Agency. Kalih then sent the hair sample and other records to the West Java provincial conservation agency,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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