This was how Gerald Durrell described his first sight of saiga antelopes (Saiga tatarica) in Kalmykia, on the west side of the Caspian Sea. They are ‘about the size of a small goat, with lyre-shaped horns and a huge, bulbous nose, which they can whiffle about in the most extraordinary fashion.' Writing in the mid-1980s he was able to paint a rosy picture of their current status: ‘... early in this century the saiga herds had been so decimated by uncontrolled hunting that they were in danger of extinction. Then, in the nick of time, hunting was banned and gradually the saiga started to recover. From the few hundreds that were left the herds strengthened and multiplied and now there are over a million of them, with 170,000 in Kalmyk[ia] alone. This surely must be one of the most spectacular conservation stories.' (Durrell in Russia, pp.88-92)

A decade later the situation had deteriorated. The Soviet Union had disappeared, law and order had broken down in many areas, the borders were opened, and Far Eastern demand for saiga horn - reputed to have medicinal properties - had made itself felt. Thus were created the conditions for a thriving illegal trade in the horns, which are borne only by the male animals. Even in the 1970s, however, the saiga populations in Kalmykia and Kazakstan were facing problems. Industrialisation and Khrushchev's virgin-lands projects were destroying habitat, and railway lines disrupted migration since saiga are reluctant to cross them (cf reindeer and above-ground pipelines in the Arctic). In Kazakstan the herds used to migrate north for the summer and south for the winter, calving on the way in May. Land degradation is causing them further problems: privatisation of agriculture may eventually lead to higher stocking rates and accelerated degradation, to add to that caused by climate change and the drying of the Aral Sea.

Dr E.J.Milner-Gulland (EM) was originally interested in population modelling of elephant and rhino, in the context of trade in animal products. Her attention then turned to saiga since it was considered to be a possible substitute for rhino: the two types of horn are used for similar purposes in the Far East. While this might have been reason enough to consider research in the Soviet Union, an added incentive was the fact that her father was a professor of Russian. Surrounded since childhood by things Russian in the home, often with Russian visitors too, she felt a strong urge to explore the rhino/saiga link.

While still a PhD student at Imperial College, London, in a department largely devoted to research on fisheries, she applied to a number of institutes in Russia and Kazakstan. From the start she wrote in Russian. At this stage she did not know the language, but set about learning it, and had help with drafting her first letter. No reply was received from Alma-Ata, but a positive response did come from the Institute of Evolutionary Morphology & Animal Ecology (IEMAE, now Institute of Ecological & Evolutionary Problems or IEEP) in Moscow. To fund the one-month visit she applied to the British Council, and was awarded a grant intended for established scientists - a reflection, perhaps, of the lack of competition at that time. The month in Moscow was spent reading the literature and extracting data, of which there was a great deal. Her growing knowledge of Russian came in useful since only one of her contacts in the institute spoke English adequately.

Male saiga running

This visit was productive on account of the abundant data on saiga. Most of it derives from hunting/harvesting - as is the case with most fisheries population modelling. For instance there was a customs post at Orenburg in the 19th century, and the number of saiga horns passing through was recorded routinely. Some of the ecologists in the institute had an admirably historical approach, with a general understanding of the long-term dynamics of populations such as those of saiga, yet at the same time there was no tradition of mathematical modelling. So, from EM's point of view, here was an ideal situation - plenty of adequate data on saiga from the 19th and 20th centuries just waiting to be analysed.

No collaboration was proposed during that first visit, partly because she was a young PhD student, and partly because her approach did not interest the Russians. But having discovered such a mass of material she wondered about following up its analysis with additional, more focussed data collection in collaboration with local scientists.

As pointed out by Durrell, the recovery of the saiga since the low point in the 1920s was definitely a success story, and from 1951 in Kalmykia and 1954 in Kazakstan the saiga herds were exploited commercially on a sustainable basis, mostly for meat. The management was based on twice-yearly counts and the setting of cautious hunting quotas. During the Soviet period poaching was under control because of the difficulty of smuggling horn into China. The magnitude of demand for the horn only became clear once the borders were opened after 1991, and now the males are so depleted by poaching that official trade in horn is impossible. Poachers are still making money at it, but the legal hunting cooperatives are not.

International attention was focussed on saiga in 1993, on account of large amounts of horn coming onto the market. IUCN contacted EM in connection with trying to set up a sustainable-use project for the Kalmyk population. In the same year she obtained another British Council grant, this time to visit Mongolia, again searching for data much as she had done in Moscow.

Between the two visits there had of course been enormous political changes in the Soviet Union. Before its collapse in 1991, in scientific terms everything went through the centre, which meant Moscow. It was in Moscow that most of the experts were to be found. Thus EM had to visit IEMAE to find out about saiga in far off Kalmykia. That Russian area seemed remote enough from Moscow, but Kazakstan was regarded as even more of a backwater. The result was that, when the Kalmyk saiga population was facing difficulties, extrapolations were made to the much larger (c 1 million) and less threatened Kazak population, which the people in Moscow knew little about. Naturally EM felt that the international concern was missing the point, and that attention needed to be directed to the saiga in Kazakstan and the problems they faced of desertification and irrigation.

On taking up a post at the University of Warwick she obtained some money for travel, and again tried to contact saiga biologists at the Institute of Zoology in Almaty, this time successfully. She spent two weeks in the field there in 1995, collecting data and working out a cooperation agreement. From that visit a letter was published in Nature by EM, A.B.Bekenov (director of the institute) and Yu.A.Grachev (saiga expert in the same institute). Up to that time very little had been published on saiga. There was a major study in Russian (1961, translated into English in the 1970s by the Israelis), and in 1974 a study of the Kazak saiga. Bekenov and Grachev updated this latter work, and it was agreed that EM would get it translated into English, supplement it with some of her own work, and have it published under joint authorship (to appear in 1998 as an issue of Mammal Review). This is a useful product of the collaboration since the Kazak work over two decades since 1974 is reaching an international readership.

In May 1996 Professor Bekenov paid a ten-day visit to the UK, funded by the Royal Society, to sign an agreement on cooperation with EM over two-three years. At about the same time grant applications were made to INTAS to support work on saiga by EM's PhD students, concentrating on non-hunting factors affecting populations (hunting being considered well enough known in comparison with other factors). Two INTAS grants were awarded. In each case the total grant was £48,000, to be divided between four institutes, with about 80% going to Kazakstan. Any equipment purchased was to remain in the CIS country.

Division of labour, or ‘complementarity', is encouraged, which means bringing together scientists with different expertise. In the case of the first INTAS-funded project - on interactions between saiga and domestic livestock in the Aral Sea region through contact, competition, and transmission of pathogens - the second European participant is University College, Dublin, with expertise in disease diagnosis. The two Kazak participants are both in Almaty - the Institute of Zoology & Animal Genetics (ecology and parasitology of saiga) and the Veterinary Research Institute (veterinary care of livestock). The biologists at the Institute of Zoology are also good at organising expeditions, and know how to find the sometimes elusive saiga herds.

Female saiga running

EM's research student on this project is Monica Lundevold (ML), who started work in spring 1996 and made her first visit to Kazakstan in December of that year. A notable feature of the collaborative research organised by EM is that her research students must follow her example: it is a condition of acceptance that the student learns Russian. ML is Norwegian, and bilingual in Norwegian and English. Although she knew no Russian at the start she was willing and had aptitude, and has since made a good job of learning and using Russian in Almaty and on extended expeditions. As well as for conversation - rather few people in the Institute of Zoology speak English, let alone Norwegian - the knowledge of Russian is useful for reading the literature.

Like ML, the student working on the second project (since autumn 1996) was also found by advertising on the Internet. She is Sarah Robinson (SR). Keen on languages she studied Biology with European Studies at the University of Sussex. This combination involved spending a year in a French university, and provided an excellent preparation for international cooperation in scientific research. She also has experience using interviews and questionnaires to study rural economies in Africa - skills which are relevant to this project on land degradation and agricultural change on the rangelands of Kazakstan. The second European participant (found, like University College, Dublin, through the Internet) is the Space Applications Institute in Italy, with expertise in interpreting satellite data on land degradation. The Kazak participants are the Institute of Botany in Almaty, at which there are people experienced in vegetation mapping and monitoring degradation, and the Institute of Zoology, with expertise in saiga diet as well as the other areas mentioned already.

At present (1997) young research workers are going out to Kazakstan from the UK, and it is EM's hope that the arrangement can be made more reciprocal. Some Russian/CIS institutes would not be suitable, if only because there is poor recruitment of talented young scientists into them: they would simply have no-one suitable to send. The Veterinary Institute and Institute of Botany in Almaty are however willing and able to send some of their young workers to Europe to learn new skills. One from the Institute of Botany will go to the Italian institute to learn about handling satellite data. This could lay the foundations for long-term cooperation early in the participants' careers, and would seem to be a wise use of funds.

Another visit to the UK by a Russian/CIS scientist has been that of Dr Marina Kholodova (MK), from IEMAE in Moscow. Funded by the UK government's Department of the Environment, she came as a Darwin Scholar to the University of Warwick for a year (1996-97) to take the MSc course in Ecosystem Analysis and Governance. As a field ecologist she wanted to learn molecular techniques to help assess intraspecific variation in ungulate populations. Having gained a great deal from the course - not least because she put a lot of work into bringing her English up to a high standard - she has now returned to Moscow with the aim of applying her new skills to various conservation problems in Russia/CIS (such as investigating whether the Mongolian saiga are of specific or subspecific status). A successful visit of this kind to a Western university is an excellent way of enabling Russian/CIS scientists to see at first hand exactly what standards are required in international science, and how to raise funds from Western sources. She is now taking the initiative in setting up further cooperation with EM.

Update (1999):
EM has now moved to Imperial College, London.

• Baskin L.M. ‘Hunting of game mammals in the Soviet Union', in Milner-Gulland E.J., R.Mace The Conservation of Biological Resources, Blackwell Science, 1998.
• Bekenov A.B., Yu.A.Grachev, E.J.Milner-Gulland (1998) ‘The ecology and management of the saiga antelope in Kazakhstan', Mammal Review 28: 1-52.
• Durrell G.& Durrell J. Durrell in Russia, 1986.
• Milner-Gulland E.J., A.B.Bekenov, Yu.A.Grachev ‘The real threat to saiga antelopes', Nature 377: 488-9, 12 Oct.1995.
• Smirin V.M., Smirin Yu.M. Animals in Nature, Edinburgh: Russian Nature Press, 1999.
• Sokolov E.V., Zhirnov L.V. (eds.) Saygak: Philogeniya, Sistematika, Ekologiya, Okhrana i Ispol'zovaniye (Saiga: Phylogeny, Taxonomy, Ecology, Conservation & Use), Moscow, 1998. (In Russian.)