Li Weidong has spent the last four decades trying to preserve the rich and diverse wildlife in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, where he personally discovered an endangered species, Fang Aiqing reports.
Li Weidong has founded an NGO to carry out protection and monitoring of Ili pika in the Tianshan Mountains, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
Somewhere in the boundless desert in the eastern part of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, a railway flyover spans a highway. Underneath the rails, but above the road, there is a "land bridge" 100 meters wide, specially built for wildlife to be able to safely cross the expressway.
There are two such constructions over the 515-kilometer expressway section connecting Wutongdaquan in Hami and Mulei Kazak autonomous county, as well as 60 road bridges and downslopes for wild animals.
Eighteen months after this section came into service, Mongolian wild asses and goitered gazelles can be seen traversing the overpasses and underpasses with ease.
This section is part of the G7 Expressway, connecting Beijing and Urumqi, the regional capital in Northwest China. It's the longest stretch of desert expressway in the world.
"Based on field research and monitoring data from infrared cameras, we can say that large- and middle-sized wild animals have gradually become accustomed to the wildlife passages," says Li Weidong, 67, wildlife protection expert.
He has led a program that provided consultation before and during the expressway construction, and monitored wildlife activities since its completion. During the process, he and colleagues from an NGO he initiated have also investigated the distribution and number of common species in the area, especially the ungulates.
Li (second left) takes a group photo with local volunteers, partner NGO members and media staff in Jinghe county, Xinjiang, in May 2016.(PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
In the 1980s, it was Li who discovered and named the Ili pika. Since then, the former public health expert has turned his career focus to wildlife protection. As he himself has put it, he "has served as a spokesperson for wild animals "for four decades.
He has joined protection programs for the Ili pika, Tibetan antelope, Camelus ferus (wild camel), and Mongolian wild asses, among others, and over the years has been consulting on, and delivering environmental impact assessments of, major construction projects in the region.
He's also a lagomorph expert for the International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission.
The wildlife passages over the G7 Expressway, built on a total cost of more than 200 million yuan ($29 million), aim to minimize human intervention and guarantee safe passage for the animals. They are covered with sand and gravel to simulate natural conditions. The railway-wildlife passage-highway structure is an unprecedented trial in the country, Li says.
The expert believes the passages have met the basic needs of wildlife migration in the area.
At first, he opposed the construction plan because he thought the railway intersecting the highway meant the two enclosed roads would block animal migration from all sides.
However, he and his colleagues thrashed it out with decision-makers, architects and construction units and, together, conceived the wildlife-passage solution.
Li's team surveyed the progress of the project on-site and suggested where to set up some of these passages. They especially helped determine the elevation of the downslopes, which determines the height of the roadbed and directly affects the cost of the expressway project.
Wild asses captured on camera by Li in the Altun Mountains national nature reserve in 2011. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
Li had to take the concerns of the construction team into consideration. Based on monitoring data, he put forward a minimum height of 3.6 meters instead of 4.5 meters, as they had originally presumed, which helped the construction in many ways.
Previously in the Kalamaili Mountain region, he and colleagues had just completed a similar three-year monitoring project after a railway was built. There, they also guided the animals with water, food and odor to help them adjust to wildlife passages.
For Li, it's a proper solution to balance economic development and ecological protection, and an actual demonstration to show how difficult it is to convert the concept into practice.
He's relieved and proud that they managed it with joint effort, and that in face of frequent doubt, misunderstanding, disregard and rebuke over the decades, he has always stayed true to his principles.
Over the past 10 years, woodland, grassland, wetland, rivers and lakes, as well as other land types with strong ecological function in Xinjiang, have increased by 7.5 million hectares, according to the regional government.
"Great improvement has taken place in regard to Xinjiang's ecological situation. With more wildlife being observed, the way people and nature coexist is changing," Li says, adding that he feels, in recent years, carrying out work has been much smoother, and his decades of effort has yielded good results.
Born and raised in the Ili Kazak autonomous prefecture, Li recognizes Xinjiang's magnificent landscapes and abundant biodiversity resources, while understanding the urgent demand for development. Without better economy and infrastructure, talk of ecological and environmental protection, especially in deserted regions, would be meaningless.
"We have to be really down-to-earth and, step by step, shoulder to shoulder, find the balance point to achieve a win-win result," Li says.
Images of Ili pika captured by Li Weidong, wildlife protection expert, in the Tianshan Mountains in 2014. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
It's been 40 years since the former public health expert accidentally discovered the Ili pika while on a mission to discover the source of plague foci in the Tianshan Mountains. Looking back, he's filled with emotion.
"I discovered the endangered species. If I don't protect it and it becomes extinct, I'll be the one to blame," he says.
The Ili pika is a small, fluffy mammal, around 20 centimeters long, with bright fur, big round ears and brown mottled fur on its forehead and neck. It impresses people with its beauty and cuteness.
It looks like a cross between a rabbit and a mouse, but actually belongs to the Lagomorpha order. Among the world's 30 pika species, it has the largest ears, longest hind feet and largest body size.
It's endemic to the bare rocks located between 2,800 and 4,100 meters above sea level in the Tianshan Mountains. It lives alone, doesn't drink water, but eats rare alpine plants, including snow lotus and Rhodiola rosea (roseroot stonecrop).
When the Ili pika was formally recognized as a new species in 1986, Li estimated that there were around 3,000 of them. At first, experts thought that keeping a low-profile to minimize human influence would benefit the creature's preservation.
However, when Li traveled around the area in 2002, he became anxious that the species had lost half of its habitat. Since then, he has systematically investigated the population of Ili pika every four years, mainly by tracking their spoor and monitoring their food storage.
Over the years, among the 14 monitoring points in the Tianshan Mountains, they have only discovered a few new trails and food stores, mainly at Glacier No 1 on the headwaters of the Urumqi River and in Jinghe county, Bortala Mongolian autonomous prefecture.
Kaderhan Bayken, director of the wild fauna and flora conservation and management center at Bortala's forestry and grassland administration, has known Li for over a decade. Since 2019, they've been cooperating on the protection of the Ili pika.
Images of Ili pika captured by Li Weidong, wildlife protection expert, in the Tianshan Mountains in 2014. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
Having accompanied Li on field investigation and monitoring excursions, the official admires Li's will to never give up, and that, in his late 60s, he continues to embark on the arduous journeys through the isolated land, at an altitude of up to 6,000 meters, to seek the Ili pika.
Some places they have been to, like the cliffs, even horses were not able to go to. Falling over meant severe injury as they both personally experienced.
Friends have tried to keep Li and his wife from making these journeys, yet the couple insist on going, as they bet on where to place the infrared cameras that will be most likely to capture an image of an Ili pika.
According to Kaderhan Bayken, local herders in Jinghe county have been volunteering to help patrol and conduct routine maintenance of the monitoring equipment during summer grazing.
Some of them are the children of those who accompanied Li in the early days.
Now, 71 percent of the Ili pika's habitat has disappeared, which means there might currently be less than 1,000 Ili pikas in the wild, Li says.
Global warming has led to the cold-resistant species moving up to higher altitudes. Some have made their way to the top of the peaks — they have nowhere left to retreat. Inbreeding and a highly fragmented population further reduce the quantity and reproductive quality of the Ili pika.
To Li's relief, in 2021, the country listed Ili pika as being under second-grade State protection, and in August, volunteers spotted and captured a group of snapshots of an Ili pika in Jinghe county, which gained wide attention on social media. That month, they also found some fresh Ili pika excreta in Kuqa, a place they previously thought the species had died out. It turned out that they had moved upward.
"The Ili pika is extremely sensitive to climate change. The disappearance of Ili pika indicates the damage and shrinking of our own living environment," Li said in a promotional video for the first sitting of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP 15, in Kunming, Yunnan province, in October 2021.
Mao Weihua in Urumqi contributed to this story.
Contact the writer at fangaiqing@chinadaily.com.cn
