In Tajikistan, a conservation model funded by trophy hunting and involving the local community has led to the miraculous regeneration of once-denuded land
By Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent
It’s dusk when we leave the valley floor and begin the twisting ascent to the conservancy, clouds of red dust exploding from the wheels of our 4WD. The wide, stony river plain gives way to bare hills flooded by waves of bleating goats, their shepherds greeting us with hands on their hearts as we pass. At the crest of a ridge we pause to look down, the silver threads of the river glinting far below. ‘Short-toed snake eagle!’ exclaims my guide, Mirzo Mirzoev, a conservationist from the Association of Nature Conservation Organisations Tajikistan (ANCOT), a Tajik NGO, as he inspects a brown dot through his binoculars.
We arrive at the camp, a cluster of low white buildings crowning a ridge, as the sun is setting. In front of us, like a quilt unfurled by the gods, spreads a panorama of rust-red hills, their bony withers cloaked in Pontic hawthorn, Turkestan juniper and creamy dollops of olive blossom. Wildflowers abound in joyous profusion and birdsong silvers the air. Bar the camp, there isn’t a single other mark of human existence.
I’ve arrived at the Miron conservancy, a pioneering wildlife reserve in the Vakhsh mountains of western Tajikistan. Four hours east of the capital, Dushanbe, this little-known range is a spur of the High Pamirs, the third-highest ecosystem in the world after the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges. Among the rare species that live here are Bukhara urial – a type of wild sheep native to Central and South Asia – the Asiatic ibex, brown bear, cinereous vulture and, in winter, the occasional snow leopard.
Miron was the vision of Ghiyosiddin Hamzaev, a slim 38-year-old with a gentle demeanour and the eyes of a philosopher. We talk the following morning, seated on a wooden balcony overlooking the mountains. Over a pot of jamilak, blue-mint tea – picked from the slope below where we sit – he tells me how he grew up in a nearby village and often accompanied his grandmother into the mountains to collect medicinal herbs. ‘I always loved nature, but I never used to see much wildlife in the mountains, and I never saw a urial – I just heard about them from my father and grandfather,’ he says. ‘I thought they must be extinct.’ It was only in 2006, when he came to what is now the core zone of the reserve, that he saw one for the first time. ‘It felt like seeing a mythical animal.’
The inspiration for the conservancy came from an unusual source – foreign trophy hunters. In 2014, Ghiyosiddin heard how money earned from trophy hunting was being used to fund conservation in another part of Tajikistan and resolved to do the same here. Three years later, with support from private backers, he leased 19,000 hectares from the government and established Miron. Grazing and local hunting were banned and, in the 5,500-hectare core zone, all human activity, including collecting wild fruits and medicinal plants, was forbidden.
‘This whole area you see was heavily grazed,’ he says, gesturing at the luxuriantly clad hills. ‘There was hardly any grass. But we found the shepherds alternative grazing areas and gave them financial incentives. When I see what we’ve achieved in just five years, I can hardly believe it. It’s unrecognisable. I’m very proud of what we’re doing here.’
To help enforce the rules, he hired ten rangers, all young men from the local villages. As one of these rangers walks past, walkie-talkie in hand, Mirzo tells me that many of them are illiterate and that if they weren’t working as rangers they would likely be poaching.
‘Hunting is part of tradition here,’ Ghiyosiddin, himself a former hunter, says, ‘so it was hard to convince people to stop. But then we started helping the local villages and gradually people began to trust us. We’re not only helping nature, we’re helping people too – and that’s why it’s working. But none of this came easily. It’s been a lot of hard work, a lot of difficulty.’
In 2020, Miron partnered with ANCOT to help provide alternative sustainable livelihoods for people in the four villages that surround the reserve. Aided by a grant from the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund (CEPF), which had identified the Vakhsh as a key biodiversity area, ANCOT has since funded beekeeping development, biodiversity surveys and ranger training.
Further income has come from trophy hunting, with Miron hosting 15 foreign hunters since 2020. Tajikistan has 13 private trophy-hunting concessions, although few are run by people as community-minded as Ghiyosiddin. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of the funding for conservation in Tajikistan comes from foreign trophy hunting,’ Mirzo tells me. ‘Before, people used to go into the mountains and kill anything they could, but now, in places like this they protect them because they have financial value.’
By ANCOT’s estimates, trophy hunters contribute £6 million per year to the Tajik economy, with the government setting annual harvest quotas for urial, ibex, wild boar, argali and Bukharan markhor, the world’s biggest goat. In 2020 and 2021, Miron was awarded two of Tajikistan’s ten annual urial licences, with hunters paying US$30,000 to shoot one sheep, around 30 per cent of which goes direct to the conservancy. Further income is generated by ibex and wild boar licenses.
This model is seen as necessary because, unlike in nearby India, wildlife tourism is almost non-existent in Tajikistan. Proximity to Afghanistan and a lingering, unjustified fear of ‘the Stans’ puts off all but the most intrepid travellers. I’m the first foreigner to come to Miron without a gun. With scant income from tourism and few major foreign donors, for now, trophy hunting isn’t something Tajikistan has the luxury to stop.
Back to beekeeping
Nowadays, the biggest threat to the environment isn’t hunting but overgrazing. ‘In Tajik culture, it’s prestigious to own livestock,’ explains Mirzo. ‘For wealthy Tajiks, animals are the equivalent of stocks and shares – and it’s very profitable. The wealthier people are becoming, the more livestock they’re buying.’ But there are alternatives.
In Doshmandi, one of the nearby communities, Mirzo and I have lunch with the village headman, Ubaidullah Musoyev, a genial 63-year-old whose toqi (an embroidered skullcap), perches on the back of a balding head.
Seated on floor cushions in a room gaudily decorated with purple floral wallpaper and a plastic chandelier, we battle our way through an elaborate, typically Tajik feast: huge roundels of tandoor-fresh non, bowls of dried walnuts and blood-red cherries, plates of fat white mulberries, which we eat, gluttonously, with spoons. Everything is grown and produced in the village. Ubaidullah’s beetly eyebrows knit together when I say that I’m a vegetarian. ‘I didn’t know people existed who didn’t eat meat!’ he exclaims.
As we eat, Ubaidullah tells me about the popularity of beekeeping during the Soviet period, when the government provided people with hives, bee colonies, sugar and medicines. ‘Although everything was collectivised, the system worked very well,’ he says. ‘In those days, there was less livestock and no overgrazing, so the bees had more to eat. We had three honey yields per year.’
A landlocked, mountainous country bordering China and Afghanistan, for decades Tajikistan lay at the eastern limit of the Soviet empire. But in 1991, when the USSR disintegrated, Tajikistan slid into a five-year civil war that cost an estimated 100,000 lives and forced a million more from their homes. People could no longer afford to feed or look after their bees and gradually the colonies died out. It was during these same violent, hungry years that the country’s mountain ungulates – the Bukharan markhor, argali and urial – were hunted to near extinction.
‘When I was a child, I remember big herds of urial, but then the civil war came and everything was hunted excessively. By the time the conservancy was established in 2017 there was hardly anything left,’ recounts Ubaidullah.
Three decades later, thanks to the grant from CEPF, ANCOT has provided beekeeping equipment and training to 20 families in Doshmandi. ‘People here are very happy,’ says Ubaidullah. ‘Beekeeping is already improving their lives. The conservancy has also donated oil and flour to poor people here, and employed people as rangers. It’s a gift.’
A few kilometres upriver, in a hamlet of nine mud-brick houses, Hokimsho Holov, a slim man dressed in worn camo, puts on his beekeeping hat and gently lifts the blue wooden lid from the first of his nine hives. Slowly, calmly – the hat is his only form of protective clothing – he works his way down the line of hives, pulling out frames to check them for honey, the air around him clotted with bees. I’m amazed that none of them sting him.
Afterwards, Hokimsho spreads a red carpet on the grass in front of the hives and brings cushions, plates of watermelon (try telling a Tajik you don’t want any food!) and a pot of green tea. He tells me how ANCOT gave him five hives last summer and trained him how to keep bees. ‘There’s nothing difficult about bee-keeping – I’ve spent my whole life in nature, so it’s been easy for me.’ His bees produced 50 kilograms of honey last year, some of which he kept for his family, some of which he sold in Baljuvan, the nearest town, for 100 Somoni (£8) per kilogram.
In this remote mountainous region, where jobs are scarce and most families have at least one person working in Russia (a flow of money hit first by Covid-19 and now the invasion of Ukraine), such income is a lifeline. Hokimsho hopes that his nine hives will produce more than 100 kilograms of honey. ‘In the future, I would like to have 50 hives,’ he says. ‘Then I wouldn’t need any other source of income. Learning beekeeping is changing my life.’
Hokimsho, I later learn, used to poach urial. Listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, these magnificently horned wild sheep are only found in isolated pockets of mountains across Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and here in Tajikistan, where they number around 3,000 individuals. Poached for their highly prized meat, the demand is often driven by wealthy people from Dushanbe or Dangara, the nearest town, who pay locals to hunt for them. For this, a villager might earn up to 2,000 Somoni, the equivalent of several months’ pay. It’s the same story the world over: poverty and poaching go hand in hand. ‘We’ve caught a few poachers here but it’s so hard to prosecute them – always some wealthy individual calls the police and demands their release,’ says Mirzo.
Paradise found
The next morning we bump along a narrow dirt track towards the core zone of the conservancy, our way flanked by yellow candelabra of wild fennel, two-metre spires of great mullein, purple quivers of clary sage, scarlet drifts of poppies. The flora seems supersized, as if aware of its liberation from the tyranny of overgrazing.
Leaving the car, we set out across a rumple of low hills, wading through a waist-high tide of wildflowers: mugwort, burdock, purple trellises of tufted vetch. Wild rose bushes snag on my trousers. Golden orioles sing. The air swoons with the heady scent of herbs crushed underfoot. Apricots, cherries and mulberries hang in almost obscene, Bacchanalian abundance. The place is a lepidopterist’s paradise, the hot air dancing with every colour of butterfly that I can’t begin to name.
Following a river through a steep, blood-red canyon, I take my boots off to splash through the muddy shallows, pausing to photograph bear, porcupine, urial and wild boar prints. In a meadow beside the river, a family of wild boar forages under a mulberry tree, gorging themselves on fallen fruit. Mirzo shows me a wild pear tree, listed as vulnerable by the IUCN, and numerous types of apple. ‘Since the villagers are no longer allowed to collect the wild fruit here, animals like bear and wild boar have so much more to eat,’ he says.
I walk joyfully through this abundant wilderness; huffing up hills, sliding down dusty banks, creeping through groves of willow in search of an Indian paradise flycatcher. At one point, we pause at the lip of an escarpment to drink in the magnificence of it all, the earth rolling away from us like a great red-and-green sea frozen mid-storm. In the distance, a sharp spine of red mountains marks the core of the reserve, the heartland of the urial. The beauty, the wildness, of the place is staggering. I want to lie down, drink it in, never leave. I feel like I’m walking through a Garden of Eden, a testament to how quickly nature can recover if only we allow it. I reflect that some of our own national parks in the UK could learn a thing or two from this place.
We don’t see any large mammals, but the birds are extraordinary. Mirzo, a keen ornithologist, has seen 82 species here. We spot a jaunty pair of blue rock thrushes, several eastern Orphean warblers, a pair of lammergeiers and, to Mirzo’s great excitement, his first ever white-throated robin. ‘The abundance of birds here is incredible,’ he enthuses. ‘Of course, many of these species exist in other parts of Tajikistan, but not in these numbers.’
It’s not just birds that are thriving here. When representatives from ANCOT first visited in 2020 they were astonished by the regenesis that had already occurred in the three years since the reserve was established. And the results of their biodiversity surveys astonished them even more. Between 2020 and 2022, urial numbers had doubled from 182 to 355 individuals, the biggest population in Tajikistan. Brown bear numbers had also doubled, from 12 in 2020 to 24 two years later. ‘Everything had increased,’ says Mirzo, ‘from bears and urial to butterflies and wildflowers. We were very surprised by the results, by how fast an environment can recover from such serious overgrazing.’
At the end of my final day we walk along a track that marks the eastern perimeter of the conservancy. The air is golden and shimmering with heat and below us, beyond the boundaries of the reserve, spread hills ravaged by hungry flocks. A shepherd jostles past on a donkey, flotsam in a sea of sheep and goats. He’s moving the animals north to cooler summer pastures, 80 kilometres to the northeast. ‘Fifteen thousand animals pass this way each summer and autumn, most of them owned by wealthy people from towns and cities,’ says Mirzo as we watch them pass.
Later, as night falls over the camp, I ask Ghiyosiddin about his hopes for the future. ‘I want to make this place paradise,’ he says. ‘I want this reserve to be a source of help to the poor. I want future generations to benefit.’
Ghiyosiddin isn’t a conservationist by any sort of training, and certainly isn’t aware of the term ‘rewilding.’ He’s simply a man who grew up in nature, synced to its rhythms and changes. His day job is managing a market in Boktar, a town four hours’ drive to the west of here. He’s testament to the positive changes that can arise from the passion and determination of a single human.
It’s 10pm when we finish talking and a bright, gibbous moon hangs in an inky sky. Suddenly, a bird starts singing in the great vault of darkness below the camp, its trills and whistles electrifying the moonlit mountains. ‘Nightingale,’ Ghiyosiddin says with a smile. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard one and I lie back on the cushions, bathed in moonlight and nightingale song, convinced that this is paradise indeed.
