INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 4

habitats of up to 4,270 m (about 14,000). Although China has no true “great apes,” it has
four species of gibbons, which are evolutionarily just a notch down from the chimps,
gorillas, and orangutans that we understand as closely related to humans.
Although Americans often hear of “wild” horses in Nevada and Utah, these are not
wild species shaped by natural selection, but rather feral animals—domestic horses that
long ago escaped their human masters and became free-ranging. There have been no wild
species of equid in North America for millennia, but China is still home to three. Turning
to other animals, there is hardly a word that conjures up images of savage wilderness more
than “bear,” but although bears are increasing in Europe, they are all of a single species.
North America, even including polar bears, can boast of only three species. China has
four bear species.
Imagine a tiger and most will envision India; imagine a leopard and most will envision
Africa; yet China still contains a few of both of these big cats (in addition to a variety of
smaller ones). And we hardly associate rhinos with China, but until relatively recently
(at least in Chinese terms), as many as three rhinoceros species still lived in China. Simi-
larly, if you think you must travel to Alaska to be in a place with grizzly bears, wolves,
wolverines, and lynx, or with golden eagles, ospreys and peregrine falcons, think again:
China has them all.
Most North American big-game hunters prize their privilege to stalk various kinds of
deer (which include species not actually called deer, such as wapiti, moose, and caribou),
but China has almost four times as many species of deer or close relatives as in the New
World. Bird hunting is among the most popular outdoor activities in North America, and
most hunters realize that some of the most popular game birds are exotics (including,
of course, the ring-necked pheasant, which comes from China). But North America's
total of eighteen Galliform (i.e., large upland game) bird species pales in comparison
with China's sixty-two. In North America, we have our common sandhill crane and our
endangered whooping crane, but no less than eight species of crane make China at least
part of their migratory route.
There are, of course, entire orders and families that are concentrated elsewhere in the
world: China has no marsupials, and only a single Procyonid, the family of raccoons and
their relatives (although it is arguably among the world's most charismatic animals, the red
panda). But for every group that is missing entirely from China, one can easily name groups
of mammals, birds, or reptiles with which North Americans are wholly unfamiliar. North
America has no native Viverrids (civets and relatives, a type of carnivore); China has ten.
There are no tree shrews (order Scandentia, these are different from “regular” shrews) in
either North America or Europe, but one species ( Tupaia belangeri ) of this tropical Asian
critter has a distribution that arcs north to include southern China. The only elephants one
can see in Europe or North America are captive, but a few small populations of wild Asian
elephant still roam southern Yunnan (as they do in other Southeast Asian countries).
For the birder, there's no point staying in North America if you are looking for bar-
bets, hornbills, or sandgrouse. In addition to these, China's native avifauna includes pitas
and broadbills, leafbirds and drongos, forktails and wallcreepers. Consider the common
starling and the ubiquitous house sparrow that inhabit virtually every town in North