Project Harimau

I will not exaggerate when I write that I have been waiting for this chance for not long weeks, not months, but years.

In the extreme "Covid" era, I decided to take a risk and overcome all the pitfalls that accompanied the preparations and the journey itself, and set out for my "striped dream" in Sumatra. For many years, I was attracted by the idea of ​​taking one of the few high-resolution photos of the Sumatran tiger(Panthera tigris sumatrae)!

Practically from the beginning of my efforts with this somewhat alternative photography technique, I have been in contact with the Czech-Indonesian non-profit Justice For Nature, which buys land originally covered with rubber plantations in Sumatra and gradually restores the face of a real and irreplaceable rainforest on the edge of Gunung Leuser National Park. Their other activities include relatively extensive monitoring of animals, which are slowly but surely returning to these areas, and the tiger is one of them, and in May 2021 I finally installed my four special camera traps, to which I will return in a few months and see if they were successful or not.

I returned in March of the following year and collected the remains of no longer functioning traps - mostly fortunately only because of the discharged batteries. I decided to leave two sets in the border zone of NP G.Leuser and take the remaining two to the area of Hadabuan Hill, where a real expert of the Sumatran tigers and the rainforest itself - Haray Sam Munthe - will help me with the setup.

After 315 days from installation, two news came from Sumatra - good and bad. The good is that the tiger came ... the bad one, that he came from wrong direction.

After a long time, I returned to Sumatra in March 2025 - I brought the equipment after renovation and installed in 3 places right in the Gunung Leuser National Park - I finally got this done and with a valid permit I worked directly in the kingdom of the Sumatran tiger with the NP rangers!!!

In September 2025 I arrived for the first check-up... 2 traps non-functional and totally destroyed by moisture and termites... one "setup" still partially worked. While browsing the images on the hard-to-read display of an old Canon SLR, my breath stopped and my heart rate increased brutally... the subsequent "roar of celebration" must have been heard all the way to Jakarta...