Across the open grasslands of Central Asia there once moved herds of saiga — a small, migratory antelope — in numbers running into the millions. Those vast gatherings belong firmly to the past. What remains of the species is now concentrated almost wholly within one nation, Kazakhstan, home to more than nine of every ten surviving animals; the thin remainder hang on in Russia, Mongolia and Uzbekistan.
Few creatures have been so exactly moulded by their surroundings. The saiga's most conspicuous feature is a swollen, downward-drooping snout, and this peculiar piece of anatomy earns its keep in several ways. Its enlarged nasal chambers filter windblown sand from each breath the animal takes; through the blistering summer they carry away surplus warmth, sparing the brain from overheating; and once winter arrives they take in freezing air and heat it on its way to the lungs. A further concession to the seasons is a dense fleece, put on as the cold tightens its grip and shed again when milder weather returns.
Superbly equipped though it is for a punishing climate, the saiga has proved helpless before the dangers that people bring. As far back as the nineteenth century, hunters pushed it to the brink of extinction. When the law finally intervened to protect it, the animal rallied, and across much of the twentieth century its numbers rose steadily. That reprieve, however, was short-lived. Within the ten years that followed the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, upward of 95 per cent of the world's saiga were gone — one of the fastest declines ever documented in any mammal.
This headlong crash was the handiwork of poachers working on an almost industrial footing. Adult males bear the brunt of it, hunted above all for their thick hides, which supply a profitable trade in luxury leather. Against expectation, the international drive to protect Africa's beleaguered rhinos did nothing to steer hunters towards the saiga; the slaughter was fed instead by a sudden overseas craze for goods fashioned from saiga leather. With the males so drastically thinned out, the population went into a slide it has still not fully reversed.
A second peril is the steady erosion of the saiga's home. As farmland and fresh settlements push out across the steppe, the animal is left with ever less ground, and its range shrinks in step. Structures thrown up by people — railway lines, pipelines and stretches of fencing among them — slice through the corridors the herds depend on for their seasonal journeys. Where the migrating animals find themselves boxed in, entire herds have on occasion starved.
Disease adds yet another danger. In 2015 an eruption of blood poisoning, triggered by a bacterium that ordinarily does no harm, carried off better than three-quarters of the world's adult saiga in just three weeks. Two years afterwards, a virus that jumped across from farm livestock destroyed roughly 60 per cent of Mongolia's saiga — a subspecies found in no other place on Earth. These abrupt collapses, termed mass mortality events, loom over the animal as a grave and unforeseeable threat.
The climate presents a linked hazard. Built though it is for savage winters and searing summers, the saiga fares badly when temperatures lurch about and the weather strays from its familiar rhythm. A good many experts hold that a freakishly warm spell was what set off the mass die-off of 2015. The steppe itself, meanwhile, has been drying out year on year, and countless shallow pools the herds once drank from have evaporated and disappeared.
Much of the recent push to rescue the saiga has been driven by the Zhasyl Dala Restoration Programme, a venture steered by a coalition of Kazakh wildlife agencies alongside several international conservation organisations. Its object is to mend the steppe, semi-desert and desert habitats of the region, together with the great range of living things they sustain — the gravely threatened saiga foremost among them. In 2022 the United Nations singled the programme out as a World Restoration Flagship, a distinction granted to just ten of the finest large-scale recovery efforts anywhere on Earth. With the accolade came a wave of fresh funding from supporters around the world.
So what is the tally today? By the year 2000 the world's saiga had dwindled to a record low of a mere 21,000. A slight rebound over the ensuing decade was then flattened by the mass mortality events that swept away hundreds of thousands. Yet the arrival of the Zhasyl Dala Restoration Programme has lent the tale a brighter recent chapter. Three years back, the Ustyurt Plateau herd in Kazakhstan brought forth its largest crop of calves in living memory. An aerial count two years ago placed the country's total at roughly 842,000, while a survey conducted earlier this year suggests the Kazakh population has now climbed past 1.9 million. The strangest-looking antelope in the world is still ranked as critically endangered — yet for now, at least, the tide is turning its way.
