Surviving as a wildlife photographer

"But applying for a project, discussing it back and forth in e-mails, taking photos with limited time and funds, and writing reports afterwards is not what I expected from the job."

One day he read an article in National Geographic magazine about the Rapid Assessment Visual Expeditions (RAVE) survey taken by the International League of Conservation Photographers in Gabon. He was both impressed and inspired.

Then came the breakthrough in 2009.

Invited by a friend who was working with a research base of Peking University in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, he joined a biodiversity survey at a nature reserve together with several other photographers.

"I took photos of amphibians, Guo Liang (who became another IBE co-founder) took photos of mammals and birds and another friend took photos of snakes, "Xu recalls." We had a lot of fun and became aware that we could do something by working together."

In the beginning, they called themselves RAVE, later changing it to IBE.

Later that year, Xu applied for a project to do photographic expeditions to Meili Snow Mountain National Park in northwestern Yunnan province during each of the four seasons, for international conservation NGO, The Nature Conservancy. He organized a group of wildlife photographers and recorded the park's fauna and flora. The results from the four expeditions led to the publication of A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Meili Snow Mountain National Park in 2011.

"More importantly, we figured out the development direction of IBE, "Xu says." It should be an enterprise, instead of a conservation NGO."

According to Xu, the funding for the Meili project was less than 100,000 yuan ($15,970). Every participant received 100 yuan per day as field-trip allowance. But they had to rent horses to transport their equipment in the park at 160 yuan per horse per day." We joked we were cheaper than horses," Xu says. "In those days many of us had other jobs to make a living. Wildlife photography was often a passion instead of a profession. But we knew, to support our passion, we needed IBE to be sustainable."