Habitats Threats and Conservation S outh and Central Asia is a vast area of contrasts and extremes It is divided by the world’s highest mountain range the Himalaya with the highest peak of all Mount Everest rising to 29,035 feet 8,850 metres To the north of the range much of Central Asia is semi-arid grassland that is bitterly cold and inhospitable in winter but which has a surprising diversity of animal life for the rest of the year There are also areas of desert such as the vast Gobi Desert in Mongolia In contrast much of South Asia has a tropical monsoon climate so it is hot all year with heavy seasonal rains and a dry season This climate supports forests and rich grasslands although in many areas these environments have been cleared or cultivated Roof of the World To the north of the Himalaya chain is the high Tibetan Plateau for good reason sometimes called the roof of the world This has animals ranging from wild yak and wild ass to snow leopard and ground-feeding birds The plateau is an unforgiving environment especially in winter Several of Asia’s greatest rivers have their source there including the Mekong Salween Ganges Indus Yangtze and Yellow rivers Stretching from the plateau to the west and north are the huge expanses of the Central Asian grasslands steppes and semideserts A few hundred Przewalski’s wild horses the only truly wild horses in the world graze the steppes of Mongolia and rapidly declining steppe pikas fight a losing battle against habitat change in their native Kazakhstan Bordering that country is the world’s largest lake the Caspian Sea which has an area four times greater than Lake Superior Several thousand miles to the east in southern Siberia is Lake Baikal which at 5,371 feet 1,637 metres is the world’s deepest lake It is home for many unique plant and animal species including tens of thousands of freshwater Baikal seals and many species of fish and aquatic invertebrates Eighty percent of the lake’s animal species are endemic meaning they are found nowhere else 4 The Himalaya The highest peaks of the Himalaya range support few animals but snow leopards can eke out an existence at almost 15,000 feet 4,500 metres and markhors and takins also live on rocky mountain slopes At lower altitudes below the tree-line there are lesser pandas and a varied selection of pheasants and other birds including Temminck’s tragopans At the eastern end of the Himalaya in southwest China are giant pandas and black crested gibbons Lower still biodiversity increases further In Chitwan National Park Nepal for example a World Heritage Site there are at least 42 species of mammal and more than 500 different birds have been recorded The forest mammals at Chitwan include tiger sloth bear great Indian rhinoceros Indian pangolin rhesus monkey and hanuman langur clouded leopard has occurred but is not thought to be regular Among the birds are wetland species including kingfishers and the Vulnerable lesser adjutant stork while the Critically Endangered Bengal florican lives on the grassland
HABITATS THREATS AND CONSERVATION Western and Eastern Ghats South of the Himalaya range is the relatively more gentle landscape of the Deccan Plateau of India India is certainly not all flat The relatively gentle mountain ranges of the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats because they have been harder to cultivate still support important areas of forest and some animal species that are restricted to the mountains The Western Ghats are a center of endemism 84 species of amphibian 16 birds and seven mammals are found nowhere else in the world Species that are protected in the mountains national parks include tiger gaur sloth bear Asian elephant and Nilgiri tahr One of the endemic birds is the Endangered black-chinned laughing-thrush The Critically Endangered Jerdon’s courser lives in thick vegetation in the Eastern Ghats though it is rarely seen Much of lowland India has been given over to cultivation though a few forested areas still support very small populations of tigers while Asian elephants are more widespread Lowland wetlands attract millions of waterbirds from fall to spring when they migrate Climate change and the resultant increase in sea level could be a threat to many low-lying coastal regions around the Indian Ocean such as Bangladesh and the Andaman Islands south from the bitterly cold winter weather farther north The shallow monsoon-flooded wetland of the Rann of Kutch on the border of India and Pakistan is one such example When it fills with water it supports enormous numbers of ducks herons pelicans and birds of prey Nearby in Gir Forest is the world’s last remaining population of Asiatic lions numbering fewer than 500 of these magnificent predators Deserts and Coast To the west again is the Arabian Peninsula a region of vast deserts where only the hardiest creatures can survive These include the Endangered Arabian oryx and the Nubian ibex The warm saline salty waters that encompass the Arabian Peninsula from the Red Sea in the west to the Persian Gulf in the east have many coral reefs though these are threatened by coastal 5
The Amur Falcon Success Story One particularly dramatic conservation success story took place in northeast India in 2013 More than 1 million Amur falcons use Doyand Reservoir in Nagaland as a stopover in fall on their way from eastern Siberia to East Africa In fall 2012 it was discovered that hunters had used nets to trap up to 100,000 of these birds of prey as they roosted The birds were then killed and smoked for sale as food Amur falcon is not endangered at present but if it suffers several years of trapping on this scale it will be The Indian partner of BirdLife International the Bombay Natural History Society worked with local people through schools and churches to explain how important their area was for the migrating falcons Friends of the Amur Falcon groups were set up in schools to get the conservation message across to children The strategy paid off in 2013 because not a single Amur falcon was trapped Now the challenge is to keep the campaign going development pollution and a warming of the world’s oceans as a result of climate change Elsewhere for example around sections of the Bay of Bengal mangrove forest borders the coast In India Sunderbans National Park in the Ganges Delta supports a population of tigers and there are also river terrapins Critically Endangered South Asian river dolphins Endangered and olive ridley turtles Vulnerable Pressure on the Land Most of the threats faced by animals in the region arise from a growing human population Sometimes these threats are direct for example with increased levels of hunting and fishing Usually however they are indirect More people need to be fed so more land is given over to agriculture and this often though it does not have to means wetlands are drained forests are cleared and grasslands plowed As the human population grows so does the need for more homes schools hospitals and roads all of which have to be built somewhere The animals that depend on reedbeds mature forest and open grassland lose areas in which to feed and raise their young and are concentrated into small areas Animals that need large home ranges simply cannot be squeezed into smaller areas so their population declines Even if a forest is not cleared if a road is driven into it predators find it easier to get into the forest’s heart and mammals and birds that cannot cope with disturbance suffer In some parts of the region people’s extreme poverty takes its toll on wildlife People without 6 electricity in their homes have to cut wood from forests to supply fuel for warmth and cooking People without ready access to protein from any other source are compelled to hunt whatever animals they can Until these issues are addressed there will always be a threat to wild animal populations Hunting is one problem that is usually driven by extreme poverty For example fishers along the coasts of Bangladesh and Myanmar use nets to catch feeding shorebirds for food They do not select which species to catch so Critically Endangered spoon-billed sandpipers are caught and killed alongside more common birds Agencies such as BirdLife International have started to work with fishing communities to persuade people to stop this practice As long as the people remain desperately poor however they could always return to bird netting out of desperation Forest understory is often removed by burning as here before the trees are felled to make way for agriculture or development
