Bing titled today's photo "The Tiger's Roar Returns, Sharp Claws Descend Once More." But the real keyword is "family."
Image: Bing Daily Wallpaper · A Bengal tiger family in Ranthambore National Park, Rajasthan, India (© Archna Singh/Shutterstock) · Official original.
Open the Bing homepage today and you're greeted by a family of Bengal tigers, photographed in Ranthambore National Park, Rajasthan, India.
A single adult tiger is majestic; a whole tiger family is something else entirely. Cubs mean the forest has enough prey, enough territory, and quiet corners where a mother can lie down without worry—it means there's a future. And for tigers as a species, "future" was once the scarcest thing of all.
In a hundred years, ninety-seven out of every hundred walked away
The numbers go like this: at the start of the twentieth century, there were roughly 100,000 wild tigers worldwide. By 2010, only about 3,200 remained—an all-time low.
Put it another way: imagine a stadium seating 100,000 people; a century later, only 3,000 sit scattered across the stands, too far apart to hear each other's voices. The tiger's situation was even worse—they weren't just few, they were sliced into tiny fragments by highways, farmland, and villages. A male tiger could walk his entire life and barely encounter another of his kind.
The turning point came in that very trough year. In November 2010, heads of state from thirteen tiger range countries gathered in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the International Tiger Conservation Forum—commonly known as the Tiger Summit. The summit adopted a Global Tiger Recovery Program and set a goal that seemed audacious at the time: double the number of wild tigers by the next Year of the Tiger—2022. It was also this meeting that designated July 29 each year as Global Tiger Day.
So today wasn't picked at random. It's the anniversary of that wager.
Did they win the bet?
Roughly half-won. The IUCN's 2022 reassessment showed between 3,726 and 5,578 tigers remaining in the wild—about 40 percent higher than the 2015 estimate. Part of that is genuine recovery; part is more accurate counting. Numbers are climbing in China, India, Russia, and Nepal; Southeast Asia is the least encouraging, where Malayan and Sumatran tigers have all but vanished in several countries.
The tiger family in this photo is relatively lucky. Ranthambore was brought under India's "Project Tiger" as early as 1974—the national tiger conservation initiative launched by Indira Gandhi in 1973. In 1980, it was upgraded to a national park. The park covers roughly 1,300 square kilometers and contains a namesake ancient fortress; tigers sometimes stroll brazenly past its walls. India today holds about three-quarters of the world's wild tigers—the 2022 national census counted 3,682. The sixth census cycle is underway, with results expected next year.
But the land is only so large. Researchers estimate by ecological carrying capacity that Ranthambore's 1,300-odd square kilometers can sustain at most around sixty tigers. When there are too many, they venture outward—and run into people. This is India's hardest problem right now: rising tiger numbers are good news; rising human-tiger encounters are not.
The stripe pattern on a tiger's face is like a human fingerprint—no two are exactly alike. So every infrared camera capture can be matched to a specific "who." The family you see on today's homepage probably each has an ID number in some database.
They certainly don't know today is their day. But if there's a moment worth noting in the roughly two million years tigers have walked this earth, a mother tiger leading her cubs safely across a grassy slope should count as one.