Into the Kazakh Wild

Standing by a large boulder, I looked over a biologist’s shoulder as he scrolled through videos on a camera trap. The trap had been set on a trail in the Altai-Sayan Mountains to learn more about the wildlife here. Suddenly, there on a screen, a snow leopard came sniffing around — at this very spot! Beyond offering an amazing connection to an elusive creature like this, such images are priceless for scientists. This is the kind of work we support at Eurasian Wildlife and Peoples.

After closing out our operations in Russia in 2023, the organization is getting down to work in Kazakhstan, the ninth largest nation in the world by land area. Little known outside the region, Kazakhstan holds extensive semi-desert grasslands, Saryarqa upland steppe, and dramatic mountain ranges. It is host to critical wildlife migration routes and flyways — for Przewalski’s horses, saiga antelope, steppe eagles, and cinereous vultures, to name a few. These dramatic landscapes are also home to wild cats large and small, wolves, falcons, and many others. Our focus is on research, species conservation plans, advocacy, and citizen science, all to build a better picture of these wild spaces.

And that includes the camera traps, which provide vital information about the population of a target species and any other wildlife that appear on camera, as well as how they all live and interact. With our support, for example, a team of researchers from the Manul Working Group and the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity in Kazakhstan recently completed upgrades and maintenance of the manul (Pallas’s cat) camera-trap monitoring network. Together, we are working hard to protect the fierce, fuzzy, solitary cats, who are so popular on social media they even have their own international fan club, “Manulization.” Later this year, we’ll be cooperating with the Manul Working Group to bring together US, European, and Central Asian cat experts and advocates to bolster a manul cat conservation network and to help these cats survive.

Meanwhile, for our feathered friends, we are continuing a conservation initiative that focuses on birds of prey in the Western Circum-Himalayan Corridor Flyway, which passes from India, through Kazakhstan, all the way to Russia. Together with the Biodiversity Research and Conservation Center, we are in the midst of a multi-year effort to document and map the lives of endangered or otherwise threatened birds, including steppe and imperial eagles and Egyptian vultures. We have identified threats to large birds posed by Kazakhstan’s burgeoning wind power industry, whose turbines and power lines are a danger to many birds. Our research will be used to improve the siting and management of wind power and energy infrastructure to protect birds — especially rare raptors.

We also support the work of the Biodiversity Research and Conservation Center, in conjunction with the Kazakh government, to enact actionable and specific measures to protect raptors from energy infrastructure and provide guidance to energy sector companies and the banks that finance their projects. Our teams will continue this effort in 2025, focusing on regulatory advocacy, threat reduction, and ongoing research.

Learn more about this Earth Island Project at ewandp.org.

This year, we are also supporting citizen science projects across Kazakhstan, training and supporting a volunteer corps to identify and count the country’s plant and wildlife species through the iNaturalist platform. When paired with trained experts, citizen science works and is a great means to crowdsource information about the country’s unique plants and wildlife.

This kind of work takes more than activists and citizen scientists. It takes everyone. We live in challenging times for our planet. But I believe that our work in Kazakhstan is important and timely, amid the planet’s climate crisis and need for urgent biodiversity conservation. Our small but mighty portfolio of wildlife protection initiatives makes a difference on the ground, where it matters — and where, it so happens, snow leopards still roam.

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