With their numbers plummeting from 100,000 to 3200 in a century, the tiger’s fire is growing dim.

But can a global summit this week bring it back to life?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

from The Tyger by William Blake, 1794

It wasn’t quite the scene I had pictured when I imagined seeing a wild tiger. There were a dozen people in our vehicle, an open-topped 4x4 which chugged and clanked through the dusty foliage of Ranthambore Tiger Reserve with the delicacy of a mechanical bull. We sat without speaking, exchanging alarmed looks. Unless the nearest tiger had an iPod and was listening to Survivor, someone muttered, we didn’t have a hope.

But we hadn’t allowed for the fact that this was Ranthambore, Rajasthan, one of India’s most visited tiger reserves. The animals here are wild, but remarkably – and rather sadly – inured to gawping, shrieking humankind, as we were about to find out.

Over the radio, the driver received a message that a tiger had been spotted in undergrowth a short distance away; after a few more moments, we came to a shuddering halt and switched off the engine in a dell surrounded by twisted tree trunks.

Just ahead of us was another stationary minibus, the tourists on which were making little effort to keep quiet, talking at full volume and laughing. “Shhh!” one or two of us hissed at them through gritted teeth. And it was in the middle of this undignified spectacle that this prince of animals sauntered into our midst.

A hush of sorts descended. At first, he was a flicker of dusky orange behind some leaves.

“There! There!”

“Where? I can’t see it!” we whispered to one another, bobbing left and right, trying to follow the direction of jabbing fingers; and then he stepped elegantly into full view, three metres away, his great head raised, not to look at us, but to sniff the bough of a tree. His eyes narrowed as he did so, just the way domestic cats do when they’re patrolling a garden. We were captivated; several of us lowered our cameras and just stared. Then he stepped graciously over the bough and right into the road between the two vehicles, still ignoring us. We could see the sinews of his shoulders rippling beneath his skin, follow the lines of his russet and black markings and appreciate what a work of art he was. The commotion on the other bus threatened to break out again, but he wasn’t bothered. He merely lifted his leg and sprayed a tree, marking his territory, before padding away into the woodland. We drove off through the long shadows of late afternoon, trying to take in what we had seen. A wild tiger – one of the rarest, most poignant sights in the natural world.

In 1900, there were an estimated 100,000 wild tigers; today, the World Wildlife Fund’s best estimate is 3200. It inhabits just 7% of its former range. The first big decline was caused by sport shooting between the First and Second World Wars, but when the hunters departed, the poachers and bulldozers moved in. In the last decade alone, tiger numbers have dropped by 40%. Three subspecies of tiger are already extinct and the other six are insecure. Unless the decline is reversed now, WWF believes they will disappear in the wild within a generation.

That is why, starting tomorrow, a summit will be held in St Petersburg, hosted by the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a passionate supporter of moves to save the animals, and backed by the World Bank, bringing together the leaders of the 13 remaining tiger range countries, scientists and conservationists. Marking the Chinese Year of the Tiger, it has one clear aim: to agree a plan to bring about a near doubling of the world wild tiger population, to 6000, by the next Year of the Tiger in 2022. The Global Tiger Recovery Programme has already been drawn up in draft form by officials of the 13 nations, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam (it is unknown whether any tigers remain in North Korea).

The governments are expected to pledge to cooperate in managing habitat across national boundaries, protect and enhance tiger habitats, eradicate poaching, smuggling and the illegal trade in tiger parts, engage with local communities and improve the management of tiger habitats. To date, most such efforts have failed to arrest the tiger’s decline.

Debate has continued until the eleventh hour over how to ensure the signatures on the summit communique actually translate into action. Conservationists warn that a high-level talking shop will do nothing to silence the death knell for the wild tiger.

The tiger (panthera tigris) is, in a sense, an easy species to save. It is adaptable. Tigers used to be found from Turkey to China, and are still swimming with bull sharks in the mangrove swamps of the Sunderbans in Bangladesh and prowling at altitudes of more than 3000m in Nepal. They require dense vegetation, sufficient prey and access to water, and if they have those things, breed easily.

However, as numbers increase, so does the territory required to support them. Both male and female tigers establish their own territories upon leaving their mothers after two years; for females, that could be 10-20sq km (up to 5000 acres) and for males, 30-70sq km (as much as 17,000 acres). In areas where prey is in short supply, such as Siberia, a tiger’s range could be 10 times larger. In reserves where tiger numbers are growing, the search for territory can bring younger tigers into conflict with people living on the peripheries.

Ranthambore National Park is one such reserve. It was chosen in 1973 as one of nine established by Indira Gandhi’s government; at that time, it had only 14 tigers. Today Ranthambore, one of the largest parks in northern India, has about 37, inhabiting 1300sq km (around 320,000 acres) of forest and savannah, rocky bluffs and lakes. Yet it continues to have its problems, which demonstrate in microcosm the difficulties plaguing tigers the world over. One is conflict with local people, which has worsened as tiger numbers have grown. Driving through Ranthambore, we encountered lone walkers and were surprised to learn that there are still villages within the reserve.

Understandably, locals fear their feline neighbours. In August, a young man visiting a temple in the forest was killed in a suspected big cat attack.

There have been persistent reports of people grazing their livestock in the core tiger areas, which is against park regulations. Not only can the villagers lose their animals, but the tigers then become vulnerable to revenge attacks. In addition, some of the cats are straying on to adjacent pasture land due to pressure for territory within the reserve. In March this year, two 17-month-old tiger cubs which had strayed beyond the boundary were found dead, having been poisoned. Reserve managers suspect they were killed in revenge for taking livestock.

The single biggest threat to wild tigers, however, is poaching. Between 1069 and 1220 tigers were seized between the year 2000 and April 2010, according to TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network; the vast majority were trapped in India, followed by China and Nepal.

Tiger bone has been used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for a millennium, while the animal’s claws, teeth and whiskers are thought to be lucky charms.

The trade in tiger parts is illegal under the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), and modern TCM leaders say they no longer need the bones because they have found substitutes, yet demand persists.

Attempts to tackle demand at source have had limited success. The emergence of tiger farms in China, which some have proposed as a solution, has been opposed by conservationists. Somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 tigers are held on farms and their parts are sold or their skeletons steeped in liquor to make tiger bone wine. Conditions are often shockingly neglectful. The Chinese government has an ambivalent attitude to the farms, but conservationists argue that they are not only cruel, but promote demand too by making tiger parts readily available. Wild tigers are more valuable, in any case.

Reserve managers across Asia know that only too well. Ranthambore was at one time ravaged by poaching. It was estimated in 1991 that tiger numbers at the reserve had reached 45, but over the following two years, poachers killed an estimated 20 animals. The situation has improved since then due to strict protection, including increased patrols, more security cameras, tougher penalties for corrupt staff and the provision of jobs and housing to a local nomadic tribe previously involved in poaching.

But the picture is bleak elsewhere: poachers wiped out tigers at the nearby Rajasthani reserve of Sariska – where, in 2004-05, a stock of 15 animals was completely eliminated – and at Panna in Madhya Pradesh. Sariska is being restocked from Ranthambore.

Besides retributive killings, other threats include habitat loss. In the last 10 years, tigers have lost 45% of their remaining territory. Forests are being cleared for agriculture and the timber trade, often illegally. The habitat that does remain is often fragmented, making it difficult for tigers to establish their own territory. Even where there is suitable habitat, there is not always sufficient prey. “Empty forest”, where humans have hunted deer or boar to scarcity, cannot support more tigers.

In an ideal world, land farmed by humans, grazed by their livestock or used for hunting would be entirely separate from tiger habitats. One approach is to relocate villagers voluntarily out of tiger zones, with compensation, as the Indian government does.

Yet with human populations rising, competition for land is fierce. “It’s very difficult,” says Bivash Pandav, a tiger conservationist with WWF, speaking from India. He considers south-east Asia: “The growing of the Asian economy and the influence of China in these countries is very, very strong. Conversion of habitat into palm oil or rubber plantations constitutes the main problem in Indonesia and Malaysia, and is slowly creeping into Cambodia. Cambodia still has plenty of forests but the Chinese are coming in in a big way, which is creating havoc.”

The most immediate threat, though, is poaching. Pandav stresses that strong intelligence is the key to tackling it. “You should know everything about them,” he says, “like an army does about its enemy.” Tigers are highly susceptible to poachers because they habitually move through forests along set trails, not randomly through the undergrowth.

To prevent trapping, says Pandav, rigorous monitoring is required, and that means foot patrols. Regular, systematic ranger patrols combined with strong monitoring of poacher activity and backed by committed reserve managers have been shown to work in reducing poaching. Yet there has been a problem with accountability among reserve managers. Corrupt or irresponsible reserve managers who have allowed poaching to take place on their watch should be sacked and fined or imprisoned, Pandav believes; instead, some have been promoted.

He sounds depressed as he considers the fact that demand for tiger parts is cropping up where it didn’t previously exist. In Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, he notes, there are restaurants which sell tiger meat; it’s not on the menu, of course, but trusted customers will be offered it – presumably for a hefty price.

So what to do? In September, a paper was published in the journal PLoS Biology which has served to refocus the debate. Since the 1970s, many conservationists have advocated a “landscape approach” – a protection effort aimed at safeguarding large tracts of interconnecting territory so tigers can grow in number, find mates and maintain genetic diversity.

Yet the report’s authors argue that the tiger range countries should focus their efforts down on to so-called core areas where the majority of tigers are found. They calculate 70% of tigers are found on 42 sites occupying just 6% of tigers’ current range. Protecting these sites, they argue, offers the “most pragmatic and efficient” way to protect most of the remaining wild tigers.

John Robinson of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, one of the lead authors of the report, freely admits that a strategy that focused on core areas alone would be “doomed to failure” and says planning at landscape level is important in the longer term, but stresses tigers could “blink out” unless targeted protection is undertaken. “It’s been a real shock to realise that in the last 10 years or so there’s been systematic hunting in these core areas,” he says.

Pandav says protecting core areas is important, but a very short-term answer. He says: “These are very long-ranging animals, so if you want to protect tigers, you need to secure large chunks of connected forested habitats.”

He does not want to see the core areas commanding the majority of funding, insisting there has to be “a perfect balance between the core areas and the connecting areas”.

Is there time to save the tiger? In theory, at least, it is “very much possible” to double tiger numbers by 2020, says Pandav, pointing to one project in north-west India where numbers have doubled in six years. Pandav wants to keep its location secret but said there were three key conditions for its success: the villagers had been moved out, prey was abundant and poaching was rare. Yet even in a country like India, where the prime minister is highly committed to conservation, he notes tigers are disappearing, primarily because of a lack of accountability on the ground.

Long shards of late-evening sunlight reach across Ranthambore as we drive out through the reserve gate and leave behind us a precarious success story. Ranthambore’s rising tiger numbers are evidence that these awesome animals can recover quickly. Nature, you might say, is on their side. It’s humans that are the problem.

Facts and figures

The Caspian tiger, which was found from Turkey to Kyrgyzstan, was declared extinct in the 1970s, the Balinese tiger in the 1940s and the Javan by the 1980s. The south China tiger is critically endangered and considered “functionally extinct”.

There are 1400 Bengal tigers, mainly in India; 450 Sumatran tigers in Indonesia; 450 Siberian (Amur) tigers in Russia, where the population hit just 40 in the 1940s; around 500 Malayan tigers in Thailand and Malaysia; and 350 Indochinese tigers in south-east Asia.

Males, the larger sex, grow up to 3m long including a 75cm tail, with Siberian males weighing as much as 300kg (three times’ Mike Tyson’s fighting weight).

Tigers’ preferred prey is large ungulates (hoofed mammals) of which an adult requires around 70 a year. They mainly eat pigs, deer, antelope and buffalo, though will take livestock, smaller animals, including fish, and even other large predators such as bears, crocodiles and leopards.

Tigers stalk using sight and sound. For every successful attack, they might give chase unsuccessfully 16 or 17 times.

Tiger attacks on people do take place, especially where people venture into forests, such as in the Sunderbans in Bangladesh. When a tiger kills a human it has to be shot, to prevent repeat behaviour and indiscriminate reprisals against local tigers. There is no proof that a tiger can pass on man-eating behaviour to her cubs.