Gazelles returning on the edge of a war zone

KIRIKHAN, TURKEY >> Turkey’s southern border with Syria has become a place of hardship and misery, with tented camps for people displaced by a decade of war on the Syrian side and a concrete wall blocking entrance to Turkey for all but the most determined.

Yet amid the rocky outcrops in one small area on the Turkish side, life is abounding as an endangered species of wild gazelle is recovering its stocks and multiplying.

The mountain gazelle, a dainty antelope with a striped face and spiraling horns, once roamed widely across the Middle East, and as Roman mosaics reveal, across southern Turkey as well. But by the end of the last century, it was hunted almost to extinction, with only a dwindling population of 2,500 left in Israel, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

In Turkey, the gazelle was forgotten and thought to no longer exist. The only ones officially recorded were a subspecies, known as goitered gazelles, in Sanliurfa province in the southeast of the country.

The rediscovery and survival of the mountain gazelle in Turkey has been largely thanks to one man and his love of nature.

Yasar Ergun, a village teacher who became a veterinarian and professor at Hatay Mustafa Kemal University in the city of Antakya, heard in the mid1990s from an old hunter that there were wild gazelles in the mountains along the border with Syria.

A keen hiker, he set out to try to find them. Barely 25 miles from Antakya — the ancient city of Antioch — Kurdish villagers knew about them and shepherds occasionally saw them. The gazelles live on the rocky hillsides, where their markings and coloring make them almost invisible. But they come down in groups to graze and find water on the surrounding agricultural land.

The professor spotted his first one in 1998 and, after a decade of observing them, estimated that there were about 100 living in the area.

With a small grant for a teaching project, he bought a camera and telephoto lens, which led to a close encounter and a breakthrough discovery.

“It was the mating season,” he recalled. “I ran to the road, and the male ran toward me to defend his females. It was very unusual.”

When he examined the photos, he realized the gazelles differed from those in southeastern Turkey.

“This one was light brown, with some parts white, and the horns were completely different,” he said.

He was sure he was looking at the mountain gazelle but found little interest in his claims in academic circles, he said.

“I sent the photographs around — professors just laughed,” he said.

He drew on the help of Tolga Kankilic, a biologist, who gathered samples of dung, fur and skin from the remains of dead gazelles for genetic testing, and found that the DNA matched that of mountain gazelles.

The discovery presented Ergun with an altogether more important task: to help the gazelles survive. There were several threats to them — lack of water and habitat especially — but by far the greatest danger was illegal hunting. Hunting is allowed only under license in designated areas in Turkey, but illegal hunting is rife.

The gazelles had disappeared completely from other regions, including Adana, farther west, where U.S. soldiers stationed at Incirlik Air Base used to hunt them 20 years ago, he said.