SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 125

lation would be situated roughly in the center of its previous geographic range. Animals
living in the center would benefit from having potential conspecifics immigrants in all
directions, and—a reasonable guess might continue—if the appropriateness of habitat
conditions varies along some sort of gradient, the conditions in the center might be the
very best, tailing off in quality as one traveled toward the historic periphery. Such an
assumption, logical as it is, would be wrong. 22
With the Przewalski's gazelle, we encounter an example of the counterintuitive phe-
nomenon in which remnant populations of once more abundant species are, as often as
not, found at the edge, rather than the center, of the species's geographic home. Nowadays,
this gazelle is found only in Qinghai, and within this province, only on the northern shores
of Qinghai Lake as well as in two or possibly three small, isolated locations relatively
close by. This extremely restricted distribution has led most who have any familiarity
with the species at all—it hardly qualifies as famous outside of China—to associate it
closely with the famous lake (known to most geographers prior to 1949 by its Mongol
name, Koko Nor, which, like the Chinese version, means “blue-green lake”). In recent
years, the Przewalski's gazelle has even become a flagship species for conservation of the
environment surrounding Qinghai Lake in general, and both its endangered species status
and the efforts to recover it have become a point of pride for Qinghai-based government
officials. Just as Sichuan has its pandas, Shaanxi its crested ibis, Hainan its Eld's deer, and
Yunnan its elephants, Qinghai has its Przewalski's gazelle. 23 With the increased national
attention recently paid to perilously endangered species, one almost gets the impression
that even if it were not truly endangered, Qinghai officials would claim that it was. More
to the point, the very limited habitat within which it still survives, as well as pressure
within those habitat patches, has allowed for only a relatively few individuals from this
formerly much more abundant species to persist. Today, notwithstanding its relatively
low profile on the international endangered species scene, the Przewalski's gazelle has
the honor of being not merely the most highly endangered gazelle in China, but, in fact,
of being the rarest species of antelope in the world.
And while attention is appropriately focused on how to prevent this graceful gazelle
from joining the pantheon of Chinese species that have become extinct within historic
times—thus concentrating work on its remaining habitats around Qinghai Lake—it would
be mistaken to lay the causes for its predicament at Qinghai's feet, and thus to ignore
the larger lesson of how this state of affairs came to be. For all the available evidence
suggests that the Przewalski's gazelle is a species adapted to the semi-arid conditions
typified by the plains and valleys of the Ordos and Alashan plateaus of Inner Mongolia,
the steppes surrounding Ningxia's Helan Mountains, and Gansu's Hexi Corridor. 24 Its
historic distribution no doubt included 3,000-meter-high Qinghai Lake where we find it
today, but there is little indication that it was ever a resident of the higher, colder reaches
of the Tibetan Plateau south and west of the lake. Rather than typify the habitats for
which the species has evolved, Qinghai Lake appears to represent a refuge of sorts, the
last redoubt of a species that has been in a state of continuing contraction from formerly
suitable areas. 25 Because it was not until attention was paid to its plight in the late 1980s
that any scientific information was collected at all, virtually everything we know about