Wanderings in the wild, wild west
Hoh Xil’s vast grasslands host incredible biodiversity. Erik Nilsson recounts encounters with wolves, Tibetan antelope and burrowing owls on the world’s highest plateau.
Why did the Tibetan antelope cross the road? To get to the other side, of course. Easier said than done. So, migrating herds do so in areas where it’d otherwise seem too remote to require crossing guards.
Conservation officers charged with protecting the threatened species halt vehicles when the creatures cross. There are no stoplights. Antelope don’t obey traffic signals, anyway.
Hoh Xil is a place where traffic jams’ causes often have hooves.
Officers give the animals vast spaces to minimize human impact. So they appear like distant figurines to the people. And vice versa, one would imagine.
The waiting vehicles of this otherwise largely uninhabited swath of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau snake as far as the eye can see, engines grumbling.
Officers motion once the last straggler teeters over the pavement. Vehicles growl forward. I’ve seen these endangered creatures regularly during my four visits to Hoh Xil over the past six years.
But I’d never seen such a spectacle until this summer.
It struck me that the respective migrations of primates (in cars) and bovid (on hoof) were literally and metaphorically arriving at a crossroad.
One mostly runs north to south. The other runs east to west.
Modern development paved one with asphalt. Ancient instinct blazed the other through grass.
Hoh Xil is where we intersect as species, in every sense.
I’ve seen many rare animals during visits, such as wild donkeys, eagles and wild yaks. That’s not to mention more common critters, such as marmots, mastiffs and rabbits.
The first time I saw a Tibetan antelope was while driving off-road to stay with a nomadic family in isolated mountains, years ago.
As it bounded out of sight, I noticed tiny heads popping from a cliff face to my left.
I expected they’d belong to the ubiquitous pikas that have carved the plateau’s topsoil like Swiss cheese. They surface to flit between the mouths of the yawning underworld they’ve quarried.
But the faces peering out of these pocks in this bluff belonged to a colony of tiny owls. The last thing I would have expected. I’d never known these — or any raptors other than vultures, which often announced carrion’s presence in Hoh Xil — to ever live in groups, let alone burrows. It seemed antithetical to all I knew about owls, which I encountered regularly while growing up in the rural United States.
And they were active around noon, which is antithetical to the nocturnal trope so accepted that we use the terms “night owl” vs “early bird”.
But there they were, in front of my face, pointing their pointed faces at mine. Real. Alive. Wild. It makes sense in retrospect. They live underground in Hoh Xil because elevations jut above the tree line.
A branch-top abode isn’t an accommodation option that high up. One year, I saw a wolf. It exploded as a flash of fur in our headlights as it blasted across the road.
My ethnic Tibetan friends tell me sightings are auspicious. That’s the local folklore. But the predators pose practical problems for the nomads. They prey on herders’ sheep.
A nomad I stayed with this summer told me about the time he went to chase a wolf away from his flock. He ended up running in the other direction. It wasn’t a wolf. It was a bear. The government provides compensation to alleviate conflicts between humans and wildlife, such as when predators kill livestock.
Bears are burglars. Any nomad will tell you.
They literally follow their noses to the food. A bear burned Beige’s house. The nomad, who like many Tibetans only has one name, put his stove in his home’s entrance when he led his livestock to graze.
The idea was a bear would feel the heat and flee.
Instead, it knocked the stove over. Baige’s house caught fire.
Officials photographed the damage and documented the case. They gave him bedding, a new door and cash to compensate for the incinerated possessions, mostly furniture, sheepskins and jewelry.
I believed the story to be a local yarn until I saw the government’s paperwork.
I haven’t seen a bear during my journeys through Hoh Xil. Yet.
Maybe next time — perhaps while it’s crossing the road to get to the other side.