Pollyanna exhibition 'Land of the Snow Tiger' was inspired by her toughest challenge yet - an expedition to the wastelands of Siberia to sketch the critically endangered Amur Tigers, and the snowbound wilderness in which they live.

Pollyanna braved temperatures as low as -60 to work alongside scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society's Siberian Tiger Project, joining them in radio tracking these elusive animals in the snowbound Sikhote Alin Mountains of Russia's inaccessible far east. This beautiful species - the world's largest tiger - has been brought back from the very brink of extinction. In the 1940's only 30 wild tigers remained After a gruelling four day journey to reach the remote reserve, Pollyanna lived in a tiny log cabin in the forests, without running water or electricity and had to walk out across the surface of a frozen river each evening to fill buckets of water through a hole in the ice to take back to the cabin. All the hardships were worth it to get a sighting of a wild tiger. Pollyanna was also able to sketch a family of tiger cubs at a wildlife research station near Spassk

A crisis is still looming in the Russian Far East, very close to the area visited by Pollyanna earlier this year. Plans to build the world's longest oil pipeline threaten the rarest cat on earth - the pipeline would run through a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve ' Kedrovaya Pad' which is home to a quarter of Russia's threatened species, including Siberian Tigers, and the Amur Leopard, of which only 30 remain in the wild. Ecologists have said that it would be impossible to select a site which would do more damage to the environment in terms of habitat damage and pollution. We implore you to write to :

His Excellency Mr Grigory B. Karasin, Ambassador of the Russian Federation, Embassy of the Russian Federation, 13 Kensington palace Gardens, London W8 4QX and

UNESCO Moscow Office, Bolshoi Levshinky per., 15/28, Bld 2, 119034 Moscow, Russia.