In the Gobi Deserts of Mongolia and China, in some of the most desolate country in the world, truly wild Bactrian (two-humped) camels still live. Wild Bactrian camels were captured and domesticated about four thousand years ago. Gradually, over time, the descendants of those first domesticated herds have become genetically differentiated from their wild relatives.
Everything I know about these camels I have learned from John Hare, the man who has done more to save them than anyone else. Indeed, but for him and the Chinese and Mongolian colleagues he works with and inspires, the wild Bactrian camels would almost certainly have reached the point of no return. I first met John Hare in 1997, just before the publication of his book The Lost Camels of Tartary.
John was once in the British Foreign Service—one of the old brigade, tough without being burly, efficient, determined, and with a passion for adventure. Over the years, we have talked a great deal about his mission to save the Bactrian camels. When we first met, I knew no more about them than he knew about apes. I rode on a domestic Bactrian in the Kolmarden Zoo in Stockholm—just to see what it was like—and John glimpsed a few wild chimpanzees when he was serving in Nigeria. But we are both basically creatures of the wild places, and only leave them to try to save them. John has generously shared his knowledge with me, written for me something of his years with the Chinese and the Mongolians—and the wild camels.
“My desert adventures—that have, over the past twelve years, enabled me to visit the four enclaves in the Gobi in China and Mongolia where the wild Bactrian camel still survives,” he wrote, “began in neither of those two countries but in Moscow. I was there, in 1992, to stage an exhibition of environmental photographs in the Polytechnic Museum. At the reception, I spotted a man in a dark suit who sported a Stalin look-alike mustache, and I asked him how he was managing to survive in lawless Moscow. For Moscow was a dangerous place at that time after both communism and law and order had collapsed. At that moment, camels and the Gobi Desert could not have been further from my mind.
“‘I work for the Russian Academy of Sciences,’ Professor Peter Gunin said in hesitant English. ‘I lead the joint Russian/Mongolian expeditions to the Gobi Desert. That takes me away from Moscow every year and so I manage to survive.’
“‘Do you ever take foreigners on your expeditions?’ I asked. ‘I’d give my right arm to go with you.’
“Peter Gunin stroked his bushy mustache. ‘There’s no market in Moscow for a foreigner’s right arm,’ he said with a smile. ‘Even the Mafia aren’t interested in them. What can you do? Are you a scientist?’
“‘Unfortunately, not,’ I replied, searching desperately for something relevant to say. ‘I could take photos. I could come as your cameraman.’
“‘My colleague, Anatoly, is coming on the next expedition as the official photographer,’ Peter replied. ‘Is there nothing that you can do that has a scientific background? I will have to justify your inclusion to the Academy.’
“‘Do you use camels on your expeditions?’ I asked. ‘I’ve had a good deal of experience working with camels in Africa.’
“‘That’s it,’ he cried. ‘Camels! We need a camel expert. We need someone to undertake a survey of the wild Bactrian camel population in the Mongolian Gobi.’
“‘I know nothing about the wild Bactrian camel,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all. I didn’t even know there was such an animal.’
“‘You will learn all about the wild Bactrian camel if you come with us,’ Peter Gunin said. “He gave me a broad wink. ‘Provided that you can get the foreign exchange.’
“‘How much do you want?’
“‘Fifteen hundred dollars, plus your air-fare.’
“‘I’ll try to find it,’ I said without the slightest hesitation. I had no idea how I was going to get hold of it or whether I would get leave of absence from my job. I only knew that I had to go with this amiable Russian professor into the Mongolian Gobi.”
As a result of that chance meeting, John has made seven expeditions into the deserts of China and Mongolia and probably knows as much as or more than anyone else about the wild camels, their habits, range, population status, and history.
Bactrian camels feed mainly on shrubs; their humps act as a rich fat store that allows them to go for long periods without food. They are also able to go for long periods without water—which is not, contrary to popular belief, stored in the humps. When water is located, they are able to drink as much as fifteen gallons at one time in order to replenish reserves they have lost. Two hundred years ago, Bactrian camels ranged across the deserts of southern Mongolia, northwestern China, and into Kazakhstan in habitats ranging from rocky mountains to plains and high sand dunes. Years of persecution have reduced the species to four small fragmented populations, three in northwest China (approximately 650) and one in Mongolia (about 450).
Their enemies are the humans who hunt them, prospect for oil in the desert sands where they struggle to survive, conduct nuclear tests in the heart of their homeland, and poison their limited grazing by using potassium cyanide in a search for gold. There could be fewer than a thousand—they are more endangered than the giant panda.
“In my quest for this timid and elusive creature,” John wrote me, “I have led expeditions, four of them on domesticated Bactrian camels, into some of the most breathtakingly beautiful yet hostile country imaginable. I have traveled through forbidden areas, closed for over forty years, made the first recorded crossing of the Gashun Gobi from north to south, and been fortunate to stumble across a lost outpost of the ancient city of Lou Lan. And so, whether I was walking behind domestic camels, Bactrians or Dromedaries, or scanning the sky-line for their wild relatives, the camel has enabled me to do what I like doing best: exploring.”
John has developed an immense respect for these amazing creatures, so ideally suited to their desert environment. “Recently,” he told me, “I traveled with Pasha, a one-humped dromedary camel, for three and a half months across the Sahara. As I rode him day after day he became a wonderful companion. In the end he was following me about like a dog, sniffing at my trouser pocket, which held his beloved dried dates.”
In 1997 John set up the Wild Camel Protection Foundation (WCPF), a registered charity in the United Kingdom, to raise funds for conservation efforts to protect the Bactrian camels in the wild. The WCPF, working with eminent Chinese scientists, persuaded the Chinese government to establish the 67,500-square-mile Arjin Shan Lop Nur Wild Camel National Nature Reserve—which is bigger than Poland and nearly the size of Texas.
It is wild and desolate desert country where few living things can survive since there is almost no water for most of the year save salty slush that bubbles up from under the ground. At one time, there was some fresh water from the spring snowmelt from the mountains. But the construction of dams and overuse of water for agriculture have more or less eliminated this, except in the mountainous area in the south of the reserve. The wild Bactrian camels have learned to survive by drinking the salty water that the domestic Bactrian would not touch—although the wild camels much prefer to drink sweet water if they can get it.
When I first met John, he was searching for funds to set up five ranger posts for this nature reserve, and I was able to persuade two generous friends, Fred Matser and Robert Schad, to donate money for three of the posts. It was not difficult—both were captivated by my description of the camels, their wild habitat, and the man who risked his life to save them. And both care passionately about conservation of the natural world.
John and I bumped into each other again in Beijing, at the China headquarters of the Jane Goodall Institute, when he was working to convene a workshop involving delegates from the governments of China and Mongolia. He needed the cooperation of both to ensure the survival of wild camels in the adjoining desert habitats of both countries. Already in 1982, the wild camels of Mongolia were protected in the Great Gobi Reserve A, and they were protected in the newly established nature reserve in China, but there was no communication between the two countries. That workshop led to a historic agreement, signed by both the Chinese and Mongolian governments, to jointly protect the wild camels on both sides of the international border. They also agreed to cooperate in a wild camel data exchange program.
However, despite these successful moves to protect the wild Bactrian camels, there is still grave concern for their future. They have been heavily hunted for their meat and hide over the centuries and are still hunted—for “sport” or because they are perceived as competing with domestic livestock for the precious water and grazing of the desert. Ironically, it was the forty-five-year stretch in which the Gashun Gobi Desert was used as a nuclear test site, when the area was strictly off limits, that provided them with their only refuge. Now, however, a gas pipeline has been built across the once forbidden desert, and it has also become infested by illegal gold miners contaminating the environment with a highly toxic potassium cyanide. Hybridization with domestic camels poses a further threat to the survival of the wild Bactrians. For all these reasons, John and the WCPF felt that it was important to start a captive wild Bactrian camel breeding program.
In 2003, the Mongolian government not only approved this idea but also generously donated a suitable area for captive breeding—Zakhyn-Us, near the Great Gobi Reserve A, where a freshwater spring provides a year-round supply. A strong fence was erected, a barn for hay storage, and three pens where captive wild camels and newborn calves can find shelter from extreme weather—important since the female gives birth during the coldest months of the year, December to April, and the Mongolian winter can be very severe with temperatures dropping to forty below Fahrenheit.
In the summer months, when the frenzy of mating has subsided and the birth season is over, the captive camels are released from the fenced area so that they can graze as a herd near their natural homeland. During this time, they are constantly supervised by a Mongolian herdsman and his family, who are employed by the WCPF to look after them. Meanwhile the grass in the penned area is given a chance to recover.
“At the end of the first three years of operation,” John wrote, “seven wild Bactrian camels were born to the eleven wild females and the wild bull camel that had been caught by Mongolian herdsmen.”
The last time I met John, he had some wonderful news. Recently, after a successful Edge Fellowship training course held at the Zoological Society of London, he had invited two young scientists—one a Chinese and the other a Mongolian—to spend two nights with him in the gher (a Mongolian version of a yurt) that he has built on his land in England. “There, songs were sung and the whiskey flowed, and this helped to soften prejudice and deepen friendship,” he said. The two scientists are now firm friends and are in regular e-mail contact over the problems faced by the wild Bactrian camel in their respective countries. “Despite our technological wonders,” said John, “it is still, and always will be, human contact that matters.”
Before we parted, John gave me one of the only six winter hats that had been woven from hair shed by the Bactrian camels in the breeding program. Soon more of these hats will be available—the herdsman’s wife has established a small cottage industry, selling her products through the Wild Camel Protection Foundation Web site. That soft hat is one of my treasured possessions, beside me now as I write, a symbol of hope for the future of both the people and the camels of the Chinese and Mongolian deserts.