We’re following an old Soviet-era map across the Kazakh Steppe when the first saiga break cover.
Heads down, they charge through the knee-high grass reaching speeds of up to 120kph, a hard-wired legacy from the days when Asiatic cheetahs were the top predators on these central Asian grasslands.
Following decades of conservation work, this strange-looking antelope, which wouldn’t be out of place on the set of Star Wars, is back, with more than 2.8 million individuals now roaming the landscape. But 20 years ago, the picture was quite different.
A relic from the last ice age, the saiga once rubbed shoulders with the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros. It is incredibly tough, able to survive the worst extremes the steppe can muster. In winter, when temperatures plummet to -45°C, it grows a thick shaggy coat, while its bulbous nose warms the cold air it breathes. In summer, when the mercury can hit 45°C, its nose helps to filter dust, as well as cooling the blood.
The Kazakh Steppe is a vast wilderness, stretching from the Ural Mountains in the west to Mongolia in the east. Covering more than 800,000km², it represents a quarter of the world’s remaining temperate grassland. It’s a flat, featureless landscape, punctuated by isolated farms and occasional bursts of green, as plants flourish around the scrapes where snowmelt lingers well into summer. The heat of the sun brings out an intoxicating smell of wormwood and other herbaceous plants, while the air buzzes with insects and the familiar trilling of skylarks.
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Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world and a territory of the former Soviet Union. When communism collapsed in the 1990s, so did the country’s agrarian economy, with a mass exodus of people from the countryside to the cities. Farms were abandoned, livestock disappeared and the state-sponsored harvesting of saiga for meat also came to an end.
The steppe became lawless, with the saiga at the mercy of poachers who slaughtered the males in huge numbers, their horns much prized for use in traditional medicine in China. This also broke the natural equilibrium, leaving females outnumbering males by as much as 10:1.
Saving the saiga
Hunting was banned in 1999, but despite the ban being heavily enforced, the population dropped to fewer than 50,000 by 2005. This was the year the Altyn Dala (Golden Steppe) Conservation Initiative was founded, a partnership between the Kazakhstan government, the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan (ACBK), and international groups such as Fauna & Flora, the RSPB and Frankfurt Zoological Society.
By 2015, conservation efforts combined with the hunting ban had seen numbers recover to around 250,000, but when a BBC film crew arrived on the steppe to film that year’s calving season for Planet Earth II, they discovered a scene of devastation.
The saiga is a species prone to sudden die-offs, and in this case it’s thought that the warm, wet spring conditions caused bacteria that usually live benignly in the animals’ noses to become toxic, leading to septicaemia and death. That year, nearly 120,000 animals perished. Nonetheless, the saiga is resilient and has developed ways to deal with a naturally oscillating population, such as a tendency to give birth to twins.
Without saiga, large areas of the steppe are left ungrazed, which means the grass grows much taller. This deprives birds, such as the sociable lapwing, of the shorter swards needed for nesting.
They’re a keystone species, explains Michaela Butorova-McGurk, Kazakh Steppe project manager for the RSPB. “The way that saiga move across the landscape and graze at different times means they create a mosaic habitat,” she says, “and by trampling droppings in the earth, they help the cycle of nutrients.” Dead individuals also provide food for endangered species, such as the steppe eagle, which is showing promising signs of a comeback.
Saiga also keep vegetation under control says Alyona Koshkina, a scientist at ACBK, consuming up to 70 per cent of steppe biomass and preventing wildfires from getting out of control. Without them, she adds: “something else would have to consume it, and this would be fire”.
The Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative has helped to create protected areas across Kazakhstan, covering more than five million hectares, with the most recent the 657,000ha Bokey Orda and Ashiozek Sanctuary in West Kazakhstan, designated in 2022, which includes the key calving and rutting sites of the world’s largest saiga population. In November, Altyn Dala won the ‘Protect and Restore Nature’ category of The Earthshot Prize 2024.
Working with local people
Technology has played a huge role in establishing these areas, explains Albert Salemgareyev, lead specialist at ACBK, whose work saving the saiga was recognised with a Whitley Award in 2023.
Using drones, satellite collars and GPS tracking equipment, Salemgareyev and his team were able to plot migration routes and calving areas, using the data to show the vast areas across which the saiga roam, and providing the evidence needed to create the reserves. He was also able to divert infrastructure projects that could have blocked these historic routes, and, by knowing where the herds are, rangers can stay one step ahead of the poachers.
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Ishmukhambetov Yerzhigit is deputy head of the team that patrols the protected areas around the Kaztalovka district, close to the Russian border. The reserve is bordered by small villages and farms, where local farmers depend on the landscape for grazing sheep, cattle and horses, as well as for fresh water.
Driving out to visit some of the farmers, along dirt tracks that throw up huge plumes of dust, Yerzhigit explains that there is a deep sense of pride among many Kazakhs of the way the saiga has been saved. He saw his first saiga five years ago, when he was 19. “I’m not a hunter,” he says. “My heart wants to help protect them.”
Yerzhigit is in charge of 54 rangers, most of whom are local people who know and love the steppe. As well as anti-poaching patrols, they monitor and record wildlife and play an important role in nurturing relationships with farmers, communicating an understanding of the saiga and the laws that protect it – collecting the horns from dead animals, for instance, is illegal. The rangers also help farmers to steer saiga away from their pastures.
As we crest a hill, a huge herd of saiga several thousand strong spreads out about 100m in front of us, grazing in the morning heat. Yet only a few years ago, Yerzhigit tells me, you would have been lucky to see half a dozen. “It was the empty steppe, there was nothing there,” he says. Thanks to its recovery, the saiga has now been reclassified by the IUCN from Critically Endangered to Near Threatened.
“Farmers have spent the last 30 years without saiga – they don’t want them back”
It’s a huge conservation success, yet tempered by a growing conflict. Saiga are now competing in some areas with livestock for food and water, leading to mounting pressure on the government to control their numbers. “Some farmers are getting angry,” says Koshkina from ACBK. “[They] have spent the last 30 years living without saiga – they don’t want them back.”
I head to the office of Abdreshev Zulpkarovich, head of the department of entrepreneurship and agriculture in Zhanibek, another western Kazakh town. He explains that farmers are worried by the huge increase in saiga numbers. “The main source of living and surviving is cattle… there are so few places to work here,” he says.
As well as competition for resources, clashes occur when saiga trample hay meadows – farmers use the hay to overwinter cattle indoors. The antelope are also blamed for spreading ticks and other diseases. “We are not against the saiga, but we would like to regulate the number,” he says. “It would be better if locals benefited from them.”
Salemgareyev from ACBK concedes that at the start of the programme they were too focussed on conservation, and didn’t give enough thought to the future management of the saiga. Yet he also believes that they are an easy target, when in fact climate change is far more to blame for conflict.
In recent years, he says: “The steppe has turned from green to brown by June, not late summer,” with the heat, as well as shifting rain patterns and later frosts, killing the grass. This is compounded by less winter snow, which means the saiga don’t need to migrate to find food, putting further pressure on the landscape.
The current government has recently made it clear that there will be no saiga cull, or a return to harvesting the antelope, so other solutions are needed. Some, such as deterring saiga with scarecrows, dogs and electric fences, will be trialled, with ideas around compensation for lost crops, ecosystem payments for farmers to co-exist with saiga, and translocations also on the table.
Altyn Dala is looking to develop more ecological corridors to connect protected areas so that saiga can use the space in a more sustainable way, says Butorova-McGurk from the RSPB, while Salemgareyev is working with the Kazakh government to petition Russia, as it has already with Uzbekistan, to remove some of the border fences and allow saiga to roam more freely, though this is unlikely to be welcomed by Russian farmers.
ACBK believes the answer could lie in education, and is explaining the benefits that a healthy saiga population can bring to the steppe. It is raising awareness in rural schools with Saiga Clubs, which draw on the myths and legends associated with the saiga, and talking directly to farmers to pinpoint where livestock and saiga overlap. Using drones and camera traps, it is also identifying key conflict hotspots so that solutions can be more targeted, says ACBK’s Koshkina.
Driving across the steppe one final time, we are suddenly engulfed by a herd of saiga, zig-zagging across the grasslands from every direction, hurtling helter-skelter and easily outpacing our four-wheel drive. Conservationists, farmers and politicians will need to continue discussing how to manage this growing population, and the dark spectre of another mass die-off could be just around the corner. But for now, as hundreds of animals thunder past, I take a moment to enjoy this incredible spectacle, a true natural wonder.
Main image: Kazakstan species of saiga in 2023 / Albert Salemgareyev
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