Yevgeny Smirnov has a number of ways to find a tiger. Sometimes he scratches at tree-trunks for traces of urine, sometimes he just sits on a rock waiting for days at a time, and other times he just peers through the bright orange foliage and white trunks of the autumn birch forest.


None of these methods is particularly reliable, according to Smirnov, who has worked for the past 31 years at the Sikhote-Alinsky nature reserve in the Russian Far East, some 350 kms northeast of Vladivostok. So mostly he just points his H-shaped antenna at the forest and waits for his receiver to start beeping.


That is how, the other day, he found Katya, one of the 20 to 25 Ussurian tigers in the reserve, as she crossed a mountain pass in search of prey.


Katya, her mate Zhenya and six other tigers each carry an electronic transmitter around their neck that broadcasts one signal when they sit still and another when they move, with a different frequency for each tiger


As a tiger may cover dozens of kilometers in the park's 347,000 hectares, it would be impossible to keep track of them without the receiver, Smirnov said.


"Why do I like working with tigers? I guess I like to play cat and mouse," he said.


Smirnov's antenna symbolizes both the blessings and curses that Russia's market reforms have brought to this reserve, a beautiful rugged forest where, along with the few tigers, deer, bears, and boars roam the forests and seals bask on the pebble beaches.


Without the antenna, the forest rangers would rarely see any of the tigers because poachers and a booming timber industry have in recent years halved their numbers to only 200 in all of Russia.


The deregulation of exports, combined with the relaxation of Soviet border controls, has enabled poachers to earn thousands of dollars in China selling tiger skins and bones, used in aphrodisiacs; it has also encouraged logging firms to clearcut the tiger's habitat.


The antenna, however, is also a donation of the Hornocker Wildlife Research Institute in United States, one of a growing number of Western and Russian organizations and businesses ready to sponsor the park. The rangers who guard the park are paid by the World Wildlife Fund, and drive around in vans donated by Mezhcombank.


"That money pays a major role in saving the reserves," said Vladimir Krever, Russian program director for WWF, which runs 20 wildlife conservation projects in Russia. "Many are on the brink of collapse."


Most vital to the tigers' survival in the park are a new team of six armed forest rangers, who tour the park and nearby roads with a local police officer in search of poachers.


"The poachers are everywhere," said Boris Litvinov, who set up and heads the team for the World Wildlife Fund. "If this park did not exist it would all come an end here."


Thanks to its improved guards the reserve has not lost a single tiger since 1992. Just outside the park, meanwhile, at least 10 tigers were killed this year alone.


Because state funding has dwindled to 90 million rubles ($30,000) this year, the World Wildlife Fund earlier this year allotted $43,000 to finance the forest rangers at least until mid-1995.


To gather data on some of the last remaining Ussurian tigers, the Hornocker Wildlife Research Institute sent in two American zoologists to work jointly with Smirnov.


Bart Schleyer used to shoot grizzly bears in Alaska with a tranquilizer gun, now he hunts tigers. Earlier this year, he manager to fire a tranquilizer dart into a tiger's leg from a helicopter, but most of the tigers are tranquilized after they are caught in a trap.


The traps, the tranquilizer and most other equipment used by the researchers are donated by the institute, which also finances weekly flights across the park to keep track of the tigers.


Mezhcombank has donated $300,000 in cars, equipment and gasoline to three reserves and may donate again next year, said Irina Volkhonskaya, senior account executive at the Young & Rubicam Sovero public relations firm.


"It's embarrassing to be rich," said Volkhonskaya, who designed the bank's environmentally conscious image. "If they show they don't just think about rich people, it's a plus."