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Once a year, thousands of people descend on the remote town of Birdsville, Australia, for a three-day horse racing event in western Queensland's Diamantina Shire. Commissioned to document the Shire—a 36,000-square-mile area on the edge of the Simpson Desert—Your Shot contributor Rowan Bestmann was covering the event from a light plane when he came across this view of parked 4x4s. "The owners of these vehicles had driven from all over Australia," he says. "During the races, the town's two service stations sell more than 160,000 liters [42,000 gallons] of diesel fuel."

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With its tubular, bulbous nose, it may look like a character from a Dr. Seuss book or the bar scene in Star Wars.

But don't be fooled by its droll appearance: The saiga antelope is one of the animal world's great survivors. (See video: "Ice Age Antelope Under Threat.")

Saiga (Saiga tatarica) are about the size of a small goat—males weigh on average 90 pounds (41 kilograms) and females around 60 pounds (27 kilograms)—and live in the steppes, the arid grasslands that encompass parts of Eastern Europe and most of Central Asia.

Saigas, an endangered antelope species, are returning to Kazakhstani wildlife, thanks to conservation efforts.

Saiga graze near a watering hole.

Photograph by Klaus Nigge

Despite their awkward running gait, head down, stubby legs on either side driving in tandem, they can clock 50 miles an hour (80 kilometers an hour) on their long migrations.

Saiga date back to the Ice Age—and they were once as prolific in Central Asia as bison were on the plains of North America. More than two million roamed the Eurasian steppes as recently as last century.

But following the breakup of the Soviet Union, poaching and other disruptions to their habitat led to a precipitous decline: In just 15 years their numbers plunged by nearly 95 percent, making the saiga antelope one of the world's most threatened animals.

Saiga gather at a watering hole. This scene was impossible to imagine, even a few years ago.

Photograph by Klaus Nigge

In 2002, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—the world's leading conservation body—placed Saiga tatarica on its "red list" of critically endangered species.

Conservationists, scientists, and non-governmental organizations have rallied to the little ungulate's side.

One informal grouping, called the Saiga Conservation Alliance (SCA), helped formulate an action plan for the saiga's preservation. All four countries where the antelopes still exist—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia—have signed on.

The SCA works alongside the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan (ACBK), the main organization coordinating the saiga's defense, which is headquartered in the Kazakh capital, Astana.

ACBK is establishing protected areas across a region the size of France in Kazakhstan, home to around 90 percent of the world's saiga.

The most recent saiga reserve to have been declared is a 1.2-million acre swath in the Altyn Dala (Golden Steppe) region.

Under the ACBK's auspices, to monitor their status, saiga are being caught and tagged, and the calves weighed.

Scientists weigh a newborn saiga.

Photograph by Klaus Nigge

Local people are being educated about the saiga's significance and the need to protect them.

This often constitutes a reintroduction to a lost tradition: Some indigenous groups once regarded the saiga as a holy animal.

The initiative is already yielding heartening results: From a low just a few years ago of around 20,000 to 30,000 saiga, spread thinly across Kazakhstan, their numbers last year passed the symbolic 100,000 mark. At last count they exceeded 150,000.

"This is a big deal, given the fact that the population was almost eradicated ten years back," says Steffen Zuther, a German scientist who works with the Kazakh government and the various organizations supporting the project.

Although, as Zuther says, saiga are still close to disappearing in some parts of their range, the hope in Kazakhstan is to return them to their early 1990s level of half a million.

Discussions are taking place about whether, and when, saiga can be taken off the critically endangered list, Zuther says.

Promising Signs

Poaching is on the decline in Kazakhstan, and saiga have been allowed to roam more or less freely.

A herd of saiga rush through the grasslands.

Photograph by Klaus Nigge

The antelope's own fertile reproduction patterns are a boon. Females start giving birth when they're only one year old, and they often produce twins and triplets. (Saiga female life spans average ten years, and one doe may produce as many as 20 young.)

Saiga congregate Serengeti-like at a spot that shifts slightly from year to year, where they give birth en masse over roughly a week's time. This mass birthing allows enough calves a battling chance to survive predators such as wolves and eagles.

Once, the flat expanses and shallow rolling hills of the Betpak-Dala region—greened from the spring rains and dotted with the whites, yellows, and reds of wild tulips—were blanketed with tens of thousands of massing saiga.

During the past decade, though, their numbers in Betpak-Dala (also known as Hunger Steppe) fell to just a few hundred.

The first indication that protective measures were taking root in Betpak-Dala came in the spring of 2011, when some 20,000 saiga returned to give birth.

Saiga Spotting

Steffen Zuther recently led me and a small group of others on a hike to witness the calving.

As we walked under the enveloping sky, the smell of wild sage hanging in the air, he spoke of the subtle beauty of the steppe—and the saiga's importance within it.

"If you draw a circle of the steppe's ecosystem, the saiga is at the very center," Zuther said.

Steppe regions are defined by extreme temperatures (from minus 40 to more than 110 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 40 to 43 degrees Celsius) and by modest rainfall (between 8 and 20 inches or 20 to 50 centimeters a year), allowing only grasses, herbs, and shrubs to grow.

Although the steppe may conjure images of emptiness, some 2,000 species of plants grow in northern Kazakhstan alone, about 30 found nowhere else.

Saiga help maintain this vegetative balance through grazing and by carrying seeds in their fur that drop to the ground during their migrations between summer and winter pastures.

And, Zuther said, the antelope themselves are sustenance for those predators.

"The steppes that don't have saiga are somehow deader, quieter, and less diverse," he said.

Poaching: A Post-Soviet Crisis

During the late 1980s and 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region underwent economic convulsions, and saiga became an easy means to supplement reduced diets.

Or make a quick buck. Chinese use the males' foot-long translucent horns, ground into a powder, as a medicine for headache and fever. A pound of saiga horn could earn a poacher U.S. $2,000.

A preferred hunting method was to chase a saiga in a car or motorcycle until it collapsed from exhaustion.

Poaching played havoc with saiga reproduction. The rutting season is an intense affair: Males fight to the death—between 50 and 70 percent perish in the process—and in the end one buck will maintain a harem of around a dozen does.

During the worst of the poaching, the ratio was reduced to one male for every hundred females—an impossible situation for long-term survival of the species.

A saiga carcass is inspected by scientist Steffen Zuther and a driver.

Photograph by Klaus Nigge

As our group walked on, we encountered a Kazakh ranger patrol on the lookout for poachers. The men suspected that a group might be operating there—they'd seen tire tracks.

Equipped with high-powered SUVs and fast motorcycles, poachers frequently outrun law officers, who more often than not drive clapped-out Soviet-era jeeps.

Nevertheless, saiga poaching is on the decline, thanks to a higher number of rangers and more vigilant policing.

New Concerns

Disconcerting developments loom on other fronts.

Kazakhstan has built a fence along its border with Uzbekistan, bisecting the Ustyurt Plateau migration route of one saiga population, which is still dangerously sparse.

At the same time, Kazakh officials are planning to build a railroad across the all-important Betpak-Dala steppe, where most of the country's saiga live.

And over the last four years, a mysterious disease has struck down thousands of saiga, mostly females, in various locations at the end of their calving season.

Experts originally blamed the bacterial infection pasteurellosis for the deaths. Now some believe the saiga had eaten too much "moisture-laden" grass during their postpartum period, when they're particularly hungry and thirsty.

Birth of Hope

Moving softly, single file, we at last spotted a female saiga a few hundred yards ahead of us. She sprang up, then darted away.

Saiga calves are left alone after birth. Their mother picks them up the same day or the next day and brings them back to the herd.

Photograph by Klaus Nigge

As we approached the spot, we saw twin calves lying in the brittle, pungent grass. They couldn't have been more than minutes old.

Their downy, earth-brown fur was damp, their eyes unblinking black orbs, their twitching noses like miniature vacuum spouts.

The mother would return later, Zuther explained, and in a few days they would leave here altogether.

In the distance, eagles circled in the dome-like sky. Predators aside, the future for these newborns seemed reasonably secure.

As we stood admiring them, the only sounds were the soughing of the wind, the song of a lark, and the rapid breathing of the babies.

We were elated—and humbled. Yet another generation of a creature that had coexisted millennia ago with woolly mammoths was emerging into the world of humans.

David Stern is based in Kiev, Ukraine. He writes primarily about the countries of the former Soviet Union.

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Pigeons and doves constitute the bird clade Columbidae, that includes some 310 species. They are stout-bodied birds with short necks, and have short, slender bills with fleshy ceres. Doves feed on seeds, fruits, and plants. This family occurs worldwide, but the greatest variety is in the Indomalaya and Australasia ecozones.
In general, the terms "dove" and "pigeon" are used somewhat interchangeably. In ornithological practice, "dove" tends to be used for smaller species and "pigeon" for larger ones, but this is in no way consistently applied, and historically, the common names for these birds involve a great deal of variation between the terms. The species most commonly referred to as "pigeon" is the Feral Rock Pigeon, common in many cities.
Doves and pigeons build relatively flimsy nests from sticks and other debris, which may be placed in trees, on ledges, or on the ground, depending on species. They lay one or two eggs, and both parents care for the young, which leave the nest after seven to 28 days. Unlike most birds, both sexes of doves and pigeons produce "crop milk" to feed to their young, secreted by a sloughing of fluid-filled cells from the lining of the crop. Young doves and pigeons are called "squabs".
The Pteroclididae (sandgrouse) were formerly included in the order Columbiformes largely due to this drinking behavior ("The only other group, however, which shows the same behavior, the Pteroclididae, is placed near the doves just by this doubtlessly very old characteristic." ); more recently, it had been reported that they cannot drink by "sucking" or "pumping", and they are now treated separately in the order Pteroclidiformes and are considered to be closer to the shorebirds.
Columbidae are usually divided into five subfamilies, probably inaccurately. For example, the American ground and quail doves, which are usually placed in the Columbinae, seem to be two distinct subfamilies.[5] The order presented here follows Baptista et al. (1997) with some updates (Johnson & Clayton 2000, Johnson et al. 2001, Shapiro et al. 2002).
Osteology and DNA sequence analyses indicate the Dodo and Rodrigues Solitaire are better considered as a subfamily Raphinae in the Columbidae pending availability of further information.
The arrangement of genera and naming of subfamilies is in some cases provisional, because analysis of different DNA sequences yield results that differ, often radically, in the placement of certain (mainly Indo-Australian) genera. This ambiguity, probably caused by long branch attraction, seems to confirm the first pigeons evolved in the Australasian region, and that the "Treronidae" and allied forms (crowned and pheasant pigeons, for example) represent the earliest radiation of the group.
As the Dodo and Rodrigues Solitaire are in all likelihood part of the Indo-Australian radiation that produced the three small subfamilies mentioned above with the fruit-doves and -pigeons (including the Nicobar Pigeon), they are here included as a subfamily Raphinae, pending better material evidence of their exact relationships.
Exacerbating these issues, columbids are not well represented in the fossil record. No truly primitive forms have been found to date. The genus Gerandia has been described from Early Miocene deposits of France, but while it was long believed[citation needed] to be a pigeon, it is more likely a sandgrouse.[citation needed] Fragmentary remains of a probably "ptilinopine" Early Miocene pigeon were found in the Bannockburn Formation of New Zealand and described as Rupephaps; "Columbina" prattae from roughly contemporary deposits of Florida is nowadays tentatively separated in Arenicolumba, but its distinction from Columbina/Scardafella and related genera needs to be more firmly established (e.g. by cladistic analysis). Apart from that, all other fossils belong to extant genera. For these, and for the considerable number of more recently extinct prehistoric species, see the respective genus accounts.

Description
Pigeons and doves exhibit considerable variations in size. The largest species is the Crowned Pigeon of New Guinea, which is nearly turkey-sized, at a weight of 2–4 kg (4.4–8.8 lb) The smallest is the New World Ground-Dove of the genus Columbina, which is the same size as a House Sparrow and weighs as little as 22 g. With a total length of more than 50 cm (19 in) and weight of almost 1 kg (2 lb), the largest arboreal species is the Marquesan Imperial Pigeon, while the Dwarf Fruit Dove, which may measure as little as 13 cm (5.1 in), has a marginally smaller total length than any other species from this family. Smaller species tend to be known as doves, while larger species as pigeons, but no taxonomic basis distinguishes between the two.
Overall, the Columbidae tend to have short bills and legs, and small heads on large compact bodies. Their characteristic head bobbing was shown to be due to their natural desire to keep their vision constant in a 1978 experiment by B. J. Frost in which they were placed on treadmills – they did not bob their heads as their surroundings were constant. The wings are large and have low wing loadings; pigeons have strong wing muscles (wing muscles comprise 31–44% of their body weight) and are amongst the strongest fliers of all birds. They are also highly maneuverable in flight.


The Common Indian Dove mostly seen in the Villages of India
The plumage of the family is variable. Granivorous species tend to have dull plumage, with a few exceptions, whereas the frugivorous species have brightly coloured plumage.[8] The Ptilinopus fruit doves are some of the brightest coloured pigeons, with the three endemic species of Fiji and the Indian Ocean Alectroenas being amongst the brightest coloured. Pigeons and doves may be sexually monochromatic or dichromatic. In addition to bright colours, pigeons may sport crests or other ornamentation.
Like some other birds, Columbidae have no gall bladders. Some medieval naturalists concluded they have no bile (gall), which in the medieval theory of the four humours explained the allegedly sweet disposition of doves. In fact, however, they do have gall (as Aristotle already realised), which is secreted directly into the gut.

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