Animal crossings

Kaderhan Bayken, director of the wild fauna and flora conservation and management center at Bortala's forestry and grassland administration, has known Li for over a decade. Since 2019, they've been cooperating on the protection of the Ili pika.

Having accompanied Li on field investigation and monitoring excursions, the official admires Li's will to never give up, and that, in his late 60s, he continues to embark on the arduous journeys through the isolated land, at an altitude of up to 6,000 meters, to seek the Ili pika.

Some places they have been to, like the cliffs, even horses were not able to go to. Falling over meant severe injury as they both personally experienced.

Friends have tried to keep Li and his wife from making these journeys, yet the couple insist on going, as they bet on where to place the infrared cameras that will be most likely to capture an image of an Ili pika.

According to Kaderhan Bayken, local herders in Jinghe county have been volunteering to help patrol and conduct routine maintenance of the monitoring equipment during summer grazing.

Some of them are the children of those who accompanied Li in the early days.

Now, 71 percent of the Ili pika's habitat has disappeared, which means there might currently be less than 1,000 Ili pikas in the wild, Li says.

Global warming has led to the cold-resistant species moving up to higher altitudes. Some have made their way to the top of the peaks — they have nowhere left to retreat. Inbreeding and a highly fragmented population further reduce the quantity and reproductive quality of the Ili pika.

To Li's relief, in 2021, the country listed Ili pika as being under second-grade State protection, and in August, volunteers spotted and captured a group of snapshots of an Ili pika in Jinghe county, which gained wide attention on social media. That month, they also found some fresh Ili pika excreta in Kuqa, a place they previously thought the species had died out. It turned out that they had moved upward.

"The Ili pika is extremely sensitive to climate change. The disappearance of Ili pika indicates the damage and shrinking of our own living environment," Li said in a promotional video for the first sitting of the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP 15, in Kunming, Yunnan province, in October 2021.