Tianjun county in NW China’s Qinghai makes notable progress in biodiversity protection

Photo shows grasslands, blue skies and snow mountains in Tianjun county, northwest China’s Qinghai Province. (Photo courtesy of the publicity department of the CPC Tianjun county committee)

Tianjun county, located in the hinterland of the Qaidam Basin in northwest China’s Qinghai Province, has been striving to build itself into a model of ecological protection and governance over the past years.

Situated next to the Qinghai section of the Qilianshan National Park, Tianjun county has a total area of 25,700 square kilometers, over 80 percent of which is covered by alpine grasslands.

32-year-old Zhihetai Tsering is a herder and an ecological protector in Zhihema township, Tianjun county. The man patrols the mountains every day, and each trip usually takes about half a day.

“My duties include protecting the environment, patrolling the grasslands and wild animals, collecting garbage, implementing grazing bans and checking the grass-livestock balance,” said the man.

Photo shows wild animals in Tianjun county, northwest China’s Qinghai Province. (Photo courtesy of the publicity department of the CPC Tianjun county committee)

Over the past more than six years, Zhihetai Tsering has left his footprints in almost all places in the locality, including along mountain ridges, valleys, forests, and grasslands, having learned a great deal about the various species of plants that grow there.

Kargegyal is head of an ecological livestock breeding cooperative in Tianjun county. The man said that several years ago, the grasslands had been degraded due to excessive livestock grazing. As a result of this, the health conditions of the livestock populations became worrying.

To solve problems such as grassland degradation and to help increase incomes for local herders, Kargegyal established an ecological livestock breeding cooperative to promote standardized and science-based livestock farming. After excessive livestock farming was curbed, the grassland’s vegetation recovered, and wild animals, which hadn’t been seen in the locality for years, started to reappear.

Photo shows sheep roaming on a grassland in Tianjun county, northwest China’s Qinghai Province. (Photo courtesy of the publicity department of the CPC Tianjun county committee)

In October 2019, Chinese photographer Bao Yongqing won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year in 2019 for his image titled “The Moment,” which captured a standoff between a Tibetan fox and a marmot in Tianjun county.

In 2020, Chinese photographer Li Shanyuan became a winner of the 56th Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards for his picture of a family of Pallas’s cats in Tianjun county titled “When Mother Says Run.”

“There are quite a lot of animals under first- and second-class state protection in Tianjun, including snow leopards, blue sheep, weasels and Pallas’s cats,” said Bao, noting that this provides a necessary condition for photographing wild animals.