The battle to Save China’s snub nosed monkey

Until the eighties of the last century, people wandered around the Shinongjia Mountains in China’s monkeys in central China for their meat and their meat.

The poor farmers were still cleansing vast areas of trees, and since their environment collapsed around them, and so did the local population of golden monkeys, where they decreased to less than 500 in the wild.

This was the situation when the new graduate, Yang Jingwan, arrived in 1991, and is still in his early twenties.

“The monkeys house was destroyed by cutting the trees until their numbers drop quickly,” he says. “Now it is protected, and the monkey characters are really improved.”

These days, Professor Yang is the director of the Shinongjia Institute for Scientific Research and maybe no one knows this type better than he does.

Professor Yang, 55, spent his entire working life in an attempt to understand and protect these endangered subcultures from amazing monkeys, which are found only in these mountains in Hobby County, and took us to the forest to meet them.

I asked whether it was true that he now understood what a lot of their noise means.

“Yes,” he said. “Yeee tells others that the area is safe. They can come. Wu-ka means it is dangerous. Be careful.”

Certainly, there was a different noise where the monkeys came out of the trees, grabbed our hands, touched and achieved humans.

While we sat on the floor to put them in comfort, he said that these animals have a very complex social structure.

With children’s monkeys jumped to my lap and crawled on us to find out what is going on, Professor Yang explained how their groups collapse.

One of the heads of a family group may have three to five wives, as well as their children. Then families gather to form a larger band that can be more than a hundred.

The bachelor’s males make up their own sets, which sometimes stand as a guard. Females have “affairs” behind the appearance of her husband, causing tension and looking not only when a man controls a family from a current male head, but when an entire “tribe” is of monkeys with other battles to control lands.

The six-year-old females know when it is time to leave their families and join the other to prevent the marriage of relatives and animals-which lives up to about 24 years-also get to know the time when the time is to die.

Close to the end of their lives, we were told, they found a quiet place for themselves and go out alone. Rangers said that the sites were so isolated that, for decades, they could not find a monkey’s body after this happened.

These unique animals can now be found in an area of ​​400 square kilometers (155 square miles) that are completely different from how.

Although the national park was created in 1982, a 49 -year -old guard originated in the region, Fang Jixi, said that it took many years for farmers struggling to stop destroying this environment.

“People were very poor in these mountains and hunger was a real concern. There was no concept to protect wild animals,” he said.

“Even after banning tree cutting, there are still people who illegally cutting timber. If they did not say trees, how will they have money? There were also people who were secretly looking here to survive. Local farmers’ awareness has only changed after a long period of building the consciousness of local farmers.”

Part of this consciousness was to bring these farmers on board to become a forest of the forest instead of its wreck.

“When the change occurred, it was the scientists who told us that you can actually come and work with us. You can get a job here to help animals,” said Mr. Fang.

Now it is part of a team that takes place in the hills, monitors fishermen, and most importantly, looking for the place of monkeys so that researchers can study how and place their sleep, feed and childbirth.

It can be difficult to find them because animals can cover an area through trees within minutes a person may need an hour to walk.

Moreover, these wonderful princesses are not naturally open to human interaction, especially given the danger of this communication in the past.

It took a tremendous effort to convert this.

The large batch of memorization came in 2005 when Professor Yang and a small group of others formed a specialized study team.

In order to contact a specific set of monkeys that we were sitting in the forest, the team spent a full year approaching them.

Professor Yang said: “They were very afraid of us at first. When they saw us from afar, they all fled,” said Professor Yang.

But – a month after a month – it became 800 meters 500 meters, then 200 meters until the animals allowed the team to be among them.

“I was very excited because they finally became my friends. Every day we can be together and communicate,” he said.

Old photos appear from the first days of Professor Yang Barry Hills team with a tree cover of about 60 %, but when we offer a drone, from the top of the mountain, we can see that current coverage reports in about 96 % look accurate.

The beauty of this place naturally brought tourists and brought millions of visitors in recent years.

However, while tourists can travel around many parts of the national park, the monkey protection areas are devoted outside the borders of all accredited employees.

We took a rugged mountain road in one of these areas.

We passed the camera and transmission equipment prepared to monitor not only monkeys but black bears, pigs and many other wild species in Xinjia.

After that, from a great point of view, Wadi showed that farmers lived once but were now transferred to other sites to help protect the ecological system.

We later talked to one man who said he was happy to leave this respected distant presence. With the support of the government he obtained for this step, he and his family were running a guest house and happier.

All this effort was a difficult way for Professor Yang, who became more difficult by the fact that golden monkeys of very slow in reproduction, with only one child at one time, every two years. Also, not all their children survive.

However, the number 500 monkeys has become more than 1,600 and hopes this 2000 will pass within 10 years.

Professor Yang said: “I am very optimistic,” said Professor Yang. “Their house has become well protected. They have food and drink, and do not worry about the necessities of life, and most of all, their numbers are growing.”