A lone harem of wild horses lazily grazes their way across the grassland. Not too fearful of the human that has arrived one small hill over on this cloudy day, but also not unaware of their guest.
On the central steppes outside Ulaanbaatar and north of the Gobi desert are the endangered horses, the Takhi (Mongolian: Тахь), a species native to Central Asia and thought to have gone extinct in the wild around the mid-1900s. Roaming the Mongolian steppes for at least several thousand years, changing climates, human predation (in particular by European collectors), and other factors led to a population decline that had the last confirmed wild Takhi sighting in the late 1960s, until reintroduction projects began in the 1990s from the last known remaining members of the species, all in captivity at the time.
Their revival is both miraculous and a tribute to the devotion and intentional restoration efforts of the Mongolian conservationists who steward the protected zones and national parks of this vast country, and the international organizations that provide support.
These six, on the smaller side of a single family, are a rare encounter among a total population still in the low hundreds in the Khustain Nuruu (Mongolian: Хустайн нуруу) national park. And beyond this park’s borders there are only a few other protected areas in the world (two more in Mongolia with other conservation efforts in Kazakhstan and China) where these horses can be found outside captivity.
The harsh and unforgiving weather of Mongolia, especially its long winters, has resulted in occasional setbacks in reviving the nascent Takhi population, the world’s last wild horse. The horses still aren’t entirely without predators, even if humans threaten them far less today than in decades past. However, the wide expanses of Mongolia’s countryside, largely unencroached by modern civilization in the world’s most sparsely populated country, provide a near limitless field of opportunities for herds of harems to reestablish themselves.
Does this family know just how precious it is their species even has a homecoming and how precarious it still is? Will our species take notice as we find ourselves on a similar brink of our own unmaking? We won’t be so fortunate as to have our own rescuers.