"Come in! Come in!" Ms. Dou welcomed us into her house. Ms. Dou is a worker at the Dahuanggou Forest Farm, Wangqing, Yanji. China recently announced its intention to establish a national park system and Ms. Dou's home village will soon be part of the new Northeast Tiger & Leopard National Park nestled between Russia and North Korea. The park will be built by 2020 to better protect the world's remaining Amur tigers and leopards and their biodiverse home. One of 10 new pilot national parks, the Tiger and Leopard National Park is 1.6 times bigger than Yellowstone National Park and borders a leopard national park in Russia.
In early November, we were invited on a two-day field trip to the park. Traveling from Washington D.C. and Montana, Susan Casey-Lefkowitz and Zack Strong joined Jingjing Qian, Janet Fang, and me in Beijing where we set out for the far northeastern corner of China. Zack brought with him his hands-on experience working with communities, conservation partners, and government agencies to help reduce human-wildlife conflicts in the Northern Rockies and you can read more about his perspective in his blog. Since the new national park encompasses an area including villages, ensuring co-existence with the tigers and leopards is a critical place where NRDC can lend support.
Inside Ms. Dou's house, the warm Kang bed, a typical heated brick sleeping platform in northern China which also serves as a family living and dining area, drove away the chill from outside after the first snow of winter. After finding out that we came to learn more about tigers and the national park, she told us last winter a tiger visited her village, leaving footprints in the heavy snow, and killed a cow. Native to this mountain area, she has witnessed changes to the wildlife and forest over the years. There used to be plenty of wild boars and deer when she was little. Due to hunting, especially through snaring of wildlife and other increased human activity, the boars and deer, natural prey to tigers, declined and tigers disappeared from the area until the late 1990s, when the government banned hunting and reclaimed farmland into forest. The tigers began to return and cattle and tiger conflicts rose.
Mr. Wang Fuyou, the director of conservation division, Wangqing Forestry Bureau showed us the efforts being made by the bureau to increase the prey base for tigers through winter feeding stations for boars and deer. Photo: NRDC
Ms. Dou invited us to try newly collected pine nuts from the surrounding mountain forests and proudly told us that she can earn a fortune in a good year from this side business. We learned that the major business of the farm used to be logging, but to better protect tigers, logging was banned by the government in 2015. As a result, people in the area started to collect pinecones for seeds and began free ranching cattle. Forestry officials told us that after the establishment of the national park, these activities will be banned to further reduce human disturbances to tigers.
Ms. Dou is treating us to her newly collect pine nuts. Photo: NRDC
While Ms. Dou will have to close her business selling pine nuts for use in foods such as pesto, she remains confident in her future. "I think we'll get compensation from the government and the national park will bring us new job opportunities," she says. She loves her hometown and we all could see that she could become a very good guide at the future park's education center if given the opportunity.
Accompanied by the forestry officials from the State Forestry Administration and the local bureaus, we not only visited Ms. Dou's house and village, and hiked in the forested mountain to check out the field camera with the patrol team, but also met with park officials at their Wangqing bureau to discuss how best to structure and administer this park to "ensure harmony between human and nature," as emphasized in the recent Chinese Communist Party's Congress report. The officials expressed a strong interest in working with NRDC, especially when they learned more about our work on wildlife–human co-existence in the Northern Rockies.
It's encouraging to see China's commitment and determination to conserve nature. I'm happy that NRDC can play a role in helping China reach its conservation goals. I drew this tiger right after I came back from the trip to seal the excitement I had when seeing him from the video filmed by the field camera in my memory. I cannot wait for my next trip to witness the prosperous future of both tigers and people there through our joint projects with local partners.
Lisa Hua's pencil drawing of the tiger she saw from the video filmed by a field monitoring camera. Photo: NRDC
