INTRODUCTION - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 7

policy must deliberately consider wildlife, which, in turn, generally means creating in-
centives for households, cooperatives, counties, and provinces to restrain themselves in
deference to maintaining some wildness.
In part, it is the “western vs. eastern” China distinction that is important. However,
from the point of view of strategies for conservation of wildlife, the issue is one of di-
viding the country into zones in which wildlife can only realistically expect to persist in
formally protected areas, as differentiated from those in which wildlife can have a future
alongside human activities. The distinction is probably most closely captured by simply
distinguishing rural from pastoral—that is, an economy based on agricultural crops vs.
an economy based on livestock . I have focused my attention on the latter, and assert that
Chinese policy errs by treating these two areas as strategically identical. Sichuan, despite
being in the “west” and having a fantastically unique and varied fauna, belongs mostly to
the former category. Outside of nature reserves, the steep hills and recovering forests in
Sichuan harbor very little wildlife and even secondary-forest-dwelling small species are
probably beyond recovery. The issue in the forested areas of Sichuan is how well (and
indeed, whether) nature reserves can be made to work.
WILDLIFE SPECIES IN CHINA'S WEST
I need to be honest and admit that many of the species and much of the tremendous
biodiversity in China to which I referred above does not extend past my boundary line
into western China. Because of the much lower primary productivity in western China,
biodiversity in general is much lower, and thus provides habitat for fewer species of ver-
tebrates. In western China as I have defined it, there are no “mega-diversity hotspots,” no
Qinling Mountains crawling with endemics such as golden monkeys and takins. When we
travel west of the pandas we also leave behind pangolins and honey-eaters, sambars and
bulbuls, palm civets and parrotbills. The physical aspects of birds' niches, which can be
stacked vertically, cannot possibly be so diverse in a landscape devoid of trees. China's
west also has few reptiles and even fewer amphibians.
But considering its generally arid state, western China still contains an amazingly di-
verse assemblage of terrestrial vertebrates. In western China, one can find hawks, falcons,
eagles, and kites of all sizes and shapes. Carrion-eating vultures may be emblematic of
America's southwestern frontier, but both the number of species and the birds themselves
are puny in North America compared with what western China has to offer. In many ar-
eas, one can encounter three different species of vulture—cinereous, Himalayan griffon,
and lammergeyer—all of which are enormous birds, trailing only the Andean condor
as the world's largest-winged flying bird. There are also owls, although only a small
one (the aptly named little owl) and a large one (the eagle owl). There are upland birds
ranging from large (such as the white-eared pheasant), to medium-sized (the Himalayan
snowcock), to small (the Tibetan partridge), not to mention sandgrouse, bustards, and
shrikes. If it lacks forests to support a varied group of Passerine birds, western China is
still home to huge flocks of larks and snowfinches on the grasslands, along with the oc-
casional wagtails and redstarts.