Throwback Thursday is when we trawl through the That's archives for a work of dazzling genius written at some point in our past. We then republish it. On a Thursday.
By Leslie Jones
After finishing grad school in 2004, Paul Buzzard flew to Tibet to see if he could hack the altitude. He had no job prospects, just a vague plan to find a means of studying endangered Tibetan antelope. Minus a yearlong interlude with monkeys in Ghana, he’s been working in China ever since.
Buzzard is one among a tiny number of field biologists studying wildlife in Xinjiang, Yunnan and on the Tibetan Plateau. He says many of the Chinese scientists he knows prefer the lab. Buzzard himself is in the field up to five months a year, so perhaps it’s no surprise that on trips to Shanghai, the former Illinois farm boy has been known to wear hiking boots into JZ Club.
Fieldwork relies on cobbling together funds to buy the large amount of survival gear, scientific equipment, utility vehicles and horses necessary to set up a research base in remote wilderness. It is not easy or stable work. For the first two years, Buzzard strung together consulting jobs, a few expeditions, but nothing full-time. Even today, and despite his PhD from Columbia, Buzzard reckons his earnings aren’t much more than an English teacher’s. “But it’s what I love,” he explains.
It isn’t difficult to see why. He’s driven high up into the Tibetan Plateau and seen herds of 2,000 antelope. It is only possible to get within about a kilometer of them without making it take off. Sometimes old bulls will charge the expedition vehicles. For the last two autumns, Buzzard has studied the mating habits of wild yak.
“We found out what it looks like when the female yak comes into heat. She’s being guarded by ten bulls, kind of similar to American bison,” Buzzard says.
He describes watching the female escape her guards, the bulls take off running behind her and others in the area joining the pursuit, “She’s leading this huge chase, up to a hundred yak.” Meanwhile, some of the bigger males wait up on the sand dunes.
“We were walking back, some of us riding, then it was basically a white out. We tried to stay within sight of each other but it was impossible.”
“Some in the chase break out in fights, going horn to horn. Literally bedlam,” Buzzard says. In the future he hopes to get remote-controlled cameras that can fly above the action for a closer look.
Due to harsh conditions and unpredictable weather, expeditions can be dangerous. Last summer, Buzzard’s group got caught in a blizzard on the Tibetan Plateau. They were lucky to make it out alive. “We were walking back, some of us riding, then it was basically a white out. We tried to stay within sight of each other but it was impossible,” Buzzard recalls.
Realizing there was no way to make it all the way back to the research base, part of the group sought shelter in the summer house of a Tibetan herder. Buzzard was one of the last to make it inside, hands tingling. The herder had a fire going and offered them yak butter tea to warm up, but soon it became clear the rest of the group wasn’t going to join them. Later, they learned the others found another herder house to wait out the storm. “Once we got word that was a pretty huge relief,” he says.
Today, Buzzard works primarily with the China Exploration and Research Society (CERS), the country’s leading geographic exploration, conservation and research non-profit organization. In the late 1990s, the research and evidence CERS collected on the poaching of Tibetan antelope helped reduce demand for shahtoosh, the world’s finest wool. More expensive than cashmere, a shawl made with Tibetan antelope fur can go for up to US$10,000. Selling or owning shahtoosh is now illegal in most countries, and CERS continues to look out for poachers.Buzzard has also been awarded funding from National Geographic. Flavor and fragrance company Symrise is currently sponsoring his research of endangered musk deer in northwest Yunnan. The deer are poached for their musk secretion, which is used in perfume and traditional medicine.
When he isn’t out with the yak or the antelopes or the deer, Buzzard is based in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province. He sometimes leads educational groups for students. But Buzzard is looking forward to the next expedition.
This article first appeared in the August 2012 issue of That's Shanghai. To see more Throwback Thursday posts, click here.
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