Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the Przewalski's gazelle comes from the Qinghai Lake populations. But the historic
perspective is critical, because scientists are necessarily hobbled in making manage-
ment recommendations by the fact that we know how the gazelle interacts with other
flora and fauna only in an extreme corner of its natural habitat. We must guard against
the tendency to conclude that it prefers, or is well adapted to, certain habitats or to cope
with particular predators or competitors associated with the lake, when a cursory view
of its historic distribution tells us that most of the Przewalski's gazelles that have ever
lived never encountered such conditions.
26
Despite the past dozen years of intensified research by scientists, the Przewalski's ga-
zelle today remains arguably the least understood member of the subfamily Antilopinae.
First encountered by a westerner (the Polish-Russian explorer N. Przewalski) only in 1875,
and described scientifically only in 1892, the species remained a backwater of scientific
interest until recently. Making sense of what was known prior to the 1980s was made
more difficult by the confusion about just what this animal was. Originally considered a
new species of the closely related genus
Gazella
, it was later misnamed as belonging to
the genus
Antilope,
and when finally put in the correct genus
Procapra,
initially believed
to be only a subspecies of the Tibetan gazelle,
P. picticaudata.
Until genetic methods allowed for somewhat more objective classification, such confu-
sion was understandable: superficially, the animal closely resembles not only its conge-
nerics, the Tibetan and Mongolian gazelles, but also the slightly more distantly related
goitered gazelle. Historic accounts are thus filled either with misidentifications, or simply
nonidentifications, with many early explorers simply referring to “gazelles” (or worse
yet, “antelopes”). Local hunters or pastoralists likewise would have had little reason to
distinguish the local type of gazelle from any other: why would they even have known
that there existed more than one kind?
27
And given the Przewalski's gazelle's small size
and generally wary nature, even contemporary observers can easily mistake it for any of
the other three or vice versa.
28
Basic as it sounds, without both detailed knowledge and
really good observation conditions, figuring out which species one is looking at under
typical sighting conditions is far from straightforward.
We currently understand that the diminutive
29
and graceful Przewalski's gazelle has oc-
cupied an ecological (and geographic) niche somewhere amid the other three Asian gazelle
species. It is well adapted to xeric conditions, but probably is not a desert specialist like
the goitered gazelle. It seems to be capable of normal reproduction and survival rates in
relatively cold and unproductive plateau environments up to 3,500 meters, but is clearly
not a high-plateau specialist like the Tibetan gazelle. (Where their distributions abut, north
and west of Qinghai Lake, observations suggest that the Przewalski's gazelle remains on
the lower-elevation flatter terrain, whereas the Tibetan gazelle will also use higher eleva-
tions and steeper terrain.
30
) Its historic range extends eastward almost to Shanxi Province,
but Przewalski's gazelle appears to have never been present on the vast Mongolian steppe,
which was inhabited instead by the Mongolian gazelle (see Figure 7.1).
And here, before knowing anything more, one gets a hint at the genesis of the prob-
lem: the Przewalski's gazelle has always wanted to be in places increasingly occupied by
people. Not quite at home on the sparsely inhabited Tibetan Plateau, nor quite at home
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