Winter is usually the toughest season for the big cats and poaching tends to become rampant in the three months before Spring Festival, China's traditional New Year's holiday.
Forests in Northeast China are covered by 50 centimeters of snow on average in the winter, making it easy for wildlife experts to carry out fieldwork by following footprints that animals leave behind. Yet, the same conditions are also advantageous to poachers.
Peng Jianyu, an anti-poaching officer with the World Wide Fund for Nature's China tiger program, said she has helped organize a team that will be composed of more than 50 rangers and will be charged with patrolling 15 reservations in the region.
To catch animals such as roe deer and hares, poachers usually set traps or snares on routes they are known to take, according to Liang Feng'en, a ranger at Nuanquanhe forest, who worked as a hunter 30 years ago.
The traps often make it either impossible for an ensnared animal to escape or wound them so badly that they can no longer hunt.
Two tigers have been caught in traps in recent years - one in 2006 and one in 2011. Both ended up dying of hunger.
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