SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 140

Chinese as decorative items, and also have a traditional use as a “bipod” for unsteady
Tibetan rifles. However, unlike shahtoosh, horns can be scavenged from dead animals,
and even if individuals are killed to procure them, only adult males are vulnerable.)
The chiru is virtually synonymous with the vast and bleak Tibetan Plateau. This
goat-that-acts-like-an-antelope roams in search of its preferred forbs and sedges in large
herds numbering from as few as a dozen to as many as thousands. To support such large
numbers on such unproductive habitat, chiru are migratory: most herds travel hundreds
of kilometers between winter and calving areas, although a few in mountainous areas
migrate on a much smaller spatial scale. Thus chiru marching across the Tibetan Plateau
are ecological analogues of barren-ground caribou marching across the North American
tundra: impervious to extreme cold, physiologically better adapted to moving widely in
search of high-quality forage than to staying put and dealing with low-quality vegeta-
tion. Like caribou, the chiru's main predator is the wolf. Also like caribou, the chiru is
susceptible to parasitism from insects (in this case, the larval stage of a warble fly), which
no doubt weakens individuals, making them easier prey for wolves. Unlike caribou,
however, chiru are almost always segregated sexually: except during the mating season
in December, males and females travel separately, in some cases hundreds of kilometers
apart. Single young are born in late June or early July, with females staying with the ma-
ternal herds and male calves separating from their mothers to join the all-male groups the
following spring. Although historical records sometimes note chiru in steppe grasslands
below 4,000 meters, they seem truly at home only in the alpine deserts above this eleva-
tion, where only summertime pastoralism and, more recently, mineral development can
disturb their solitude. 62
Many figures have been published about the number of chiru that existed historically
and how many there may be now; the most commonly cited state that there may have
at one time been up to 1 million animals but that that had declined to about 75,000 by
the late 1990s. No large-scale estimate has been conducted using rigorous sampling or
appropriate modeling, so the proliferation of numbers should be viewed skeptically: we
simply do not know how many chiru there are (and we even more certainly don't know
how many may have existed in the past). 63 This is hardly an indictment of either Chinese
or Western scientists. We would be similarly ignorant about the numbers in the various
arctic caribou herds of Alaska and Canada were it not for the technology available to
biologists in the form of aircraft, large-format cameras, and satellite radio-collars. On the
high Tibetan Plateau, such large-scale aerial census efforts would be made infeasible by
the thin air were they not already made impractical by the expense. We can count chiru
at congregations during rut and calving, and we can estimate densities within relatively
local areas using accepted distance sampling methods, 64 but obtaining a total population
estimate for all chiru is currently unrealistic.
That said, there is no doubt that the population has crashed, disappearing entirely in
some areas, severely reduced in others. 65 During most of the 1990s, poaching chiru on
the Tibetan Plateau functioned economically and socially much as did cultivating opium
poppies in Afghanistan or growing coca in Colombia. Of course it was illegal, and ef-
forts to stamp out the trade, interdict the smugglers, and arrest the perpetrators were