Wild horses return to the Golden Steppe
Photojournalist Ami Vitale followed Przewalski’s horses—once declared extinct in the wild—on a 2,000-mile journey back to their ancestral home. (And only one tried to escape.)
On a Monday morning in June, as traffic streamed toward downtown Prague, a young stallion named Wisky—a Przewalski’s horse, one of the world’s most endangered species of equines—kicked his way out of a wooden crate on the back of a truck and landed on the highway, stunning drivers.
After being raised in captivity for a year and a half at the Prague Zoo, Wisky was on his way to a new home on Kazakhstan's steppes as part of a historic effort to restore Przewalski’s horses in the wild. And now this rare horse was loose in the middle of traffic.
The conservation team managed to corral and sedate Wisky and return him safely to the zoo. But seven other Przewalski’s horses raised in captivity—three from Prague and four from Hungary—continued onward that day toward freedom.
Filmmaker and photographer Ami Vitale was on hand to document the horses’ journey. She traveled with them across more than 2,000 miles, first flying on a military cargo plane with refueling stops in Turkey and Azerbaijan. After eight more hours by truck, they reached the Altyn Dala State Nature Reserve in Central Kazakhstan.
Przewalski’s horses are the only living species of horse never to have been domesticated. They once roamed the windswept steppes of Central Asia—but by the time the horses were described in 1881 as a distinct species, their numbers were already dwindling from hunting and habitat loss.
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By 1969, they were declared extinct in the wild. Fewer than 200 remained in the world, all of them in zoos and all descended from 13 Przewalski’s horses captured before 1948.
In 1990 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) drafted a plan to save the species. It called for preserving the horses’ genetic diversity by careful breeding. It also called for restoring the species to its original habitat by creating five to 10 self-sustaining populations in the wild, with potential sites identified in Mongolia, China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and in the mountains around Lake Baikal in Siberia.
The decades-long effort began in the early 1990s by introducing captive-bred horses to wild areas in China and Mongolia. In 2010, after a brutal winter killed two-thirds of the Przewalski’s horses released in western Mongolia, the Prague Zoo launched “The Return of the Wild Horses” project to replenish the population. Using cargo planes from the Czech Air Force, the zoo coordinated multiple transports of captive-bred Przewalski’s horses to Mongolia.
There are now over 1,000 Przewalski’s horses in China and Mongolia, and the Prague Zoo is expanding the effort to restore the species to another part of its ancestral territory—the steppes of Kazakhstan. To do so, they are collaborating with another groundbreaking project—the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, which in 2006 began a mission to save another endangered animal, one that shares the horses’ native territory: the bulbous-nosed saiga antelope.
Saiga migrate hundreds of miles in winter to find food and water. To protect their habitat, the partners of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative (Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Frankfurt Zoological Society, Fauna & Flora and the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan) have protected nearly 20,000 square miles of steppe grassland and savannah, an area bigger than Denmark.
Before bringing the first horses to Kazakhstan, the partners secured legal protection for the horses by getting them recognized as an endangered species in Kazakhstan’s Red Book.
Then, the partners launched a plan to introduce 40 horses over a five-year period to the Altyn Dala. Biologists hope they will create the foundation of a self-sustaining population.
Last year, the Czech military delivered the first seven captive-bred horses from Prague and Berlin to Altyn Dala. The animals spent a year in enclosed acclimatization pens to ensure they could survive their first winter on the steppe, where temperatures can drop to -50 degrees Fahrenheit.
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Vitale, a former war photojournalist, documented the release of these seven original horses and the arrival of a new group of horses (which was supposed to include Wisky until his last-minute highway escape). When the first seven horses returned to the steppe, it marked the first time in perhaps nearly 200 years that the species has roamed free in Central Kazakhstan. (An attempt in 2003 to restore the horses in the country’s southern region failed.)
Meanwhile, the newly arrived horses—three from Prague and four from Hungary’s Hortobagy National Park—will also spend a year in acclimatization pens before their own release onto the grasslands.
“In a field where loss is often the norm, the return of a species once considered extinct in the wild is a rare and fragile achievement,” Vitale wrote in an e-mail. “Rewilding, in practice, is equal parts science, logistics, and trust—trust that animals bred in confinement can re-adapt, that ecosystems can recover, and that what has been lost might still return.”
Vitale spoke to National Geographic about Wisky’s escape and her work documenting the "Return of the Wild Horses" and other projects to protect endangered species and their habitats.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
National Geographic: How did you get involved with this project?
Amy Vitale: A few years ago the Prague Zoo reached out and invited me. I’ve been interested in finding stories that are not just focusing on the challenges of this planet when it comes to the environment and wildlife and issues of extinction. When I read on these issues, I’m left with these overwhelming statistics, like, ‘We have lost 73 percent of the world’s wildlife in the last 50 years.’ That came out last year. And it’s haunting. These things sit with me, and I have always, in my work, tried to figure out, ‘What do we all do about this?’
It’s led me down this amazing path of meeting the most extraordinary individuals who are doing incredible work across the globe. The Przewalski’s horse was always a story that, when I started in this work, was the one we referenced. They are this iconic species that people almost destroyed and then actually brought back. Coincidentally, one of the veterinarians I worked with on saving the northern white rhinos is also working on the Przewalski’s horse. So I just always wanted to be part of this. I couldn’t go the first year, so I came this year. They were supposed to bring eight [horses], but Wisky escaped, so it became seven. Somewhere floating out on the Internet is the actual video of when it happened, when he kicked his way out the back, and then backed out of the moving truck.
So you were in the convoy, and Wisky’s truck was ahead of you?
We’re all in this convoy and it stopped, and I realize something’s wrong and jump out. The police stopped all the traffic and then we, the entire team, are running. I remember grabbing some of the marketing team, and saying, ‘OK, we’ve gotta stand really close and have our arms up, and if the horse jumps towards us, do not move. Just wave your hands up and down.’ My fear was Wisky would jump into the other lane of traffic. So that’s what I was thinking, and the team was absolutely incredible. That was the beautiful part, seeing everybody coming together, no matter what their role was. But it was scary. Every move I’ve been on, something happens that is unexpected.
So you kind of formed a human pen, you stretched arms out?
Yes, we all raced over immediately. You don’t want to run directly at them. You run to the side. You never run straight towards them, ‘cause that will make them run away. So we all kind of came in from different directions, but not directly at him, because he would’ve jumped to get away from us. That’s kind of how you work with animals so that they don’t think you’re confronting them.
The rest actually happened really quickly. We were able to surround him and sedate him so he wasn’t feeling the stress. We needed to get the horse back in the crate—another crate, actually, because he had broken out of that one. So they sedated him, and they had to sit on the side of the road with him sedated. Meanwhile, all of us had to keep going and get the other horses on the military jet to make all the deadlines. Wisky, turns out, was totally fine. I did go back and see him after we got back, and Wisky is thriving [at the Prague Zoo] and totally uninjured.
Do you know if they’ll make a second attempt to release Wisky?
He will not be going to Kazakhstan in the future, as far as I know.
So you guys left Wisky in Prague and got on a military cargo plane with the rest of the horses. What was that like?
It [the cargo plane] was really cold. We were all in our winter wear, bundled up. And it is super noisy and really slow. You’re just freezing and sitting in jump seats. It was a long journey. We stopped in Istanbul to refuel and then stopped in Azerbaijan. The veterinarians were amazing. They were up around the clock, watching them, feeding them.
We got to Kazakhstan and then had to drive. It was wild to see that landscape. I have never been to the steppes before. There are no trees. You don’t see all the life immediately. But you wake up in the morning, and it’s just this cacophony of birds. … There’s so much life around you. Even the bugs. I was sitting there for at least an hour as the sun was coming up, and this little baby saiga—he didn’t realize I was there—he comes running by, in front of the Przewalski’s horses.
I love the image of the baby saiga running by you. Was this your first morning there?
Yes. There’s this huge enclosure, and I was laying with my tummy down, and I was there for about an hour, and then the sun is coming up, and you can see the light coming through the horses’ manes …Then this sweet little baby saiga did not see me and just came running by, and you see those horses there.
It was emotional to think they [these two species] probably hadn’t been existing side-by-side for centuries, and that this landscape is going to be restoring itself … and wondering what other species are going to be supported by having them back. It was fun thinking about what might happen because these creatures are back again. What will come back? Those are my questions. These creatures inspire wonder and make me ask questions and inspire curiosity, and that’s what all this does for me personally. And I hope for others too.
You say things happen all the time on expeditions that are unexpected.
Sometimes an animal, when you dart it, it doesn’t completely sedate them right away. You’re working in wild spaces and … if there’s water around, they will sometimes run into a river or a water source, and then you’ve got to quickly go and pull them out before the drug starts working and they collapse in water.
I’ve been on [expeditions] moving giraffes across rivers on a barge. We rescued nine Rothschild’s giraffes … because of so much rain, it turned their peninsula into an island, and then the baby giraffe was stuck in a marshy part and got bitten by a poisonous snake. They had to move these giraffes on a gir-RAFT, they called it. We did this story for Nat Geo. I’ve been on an airplane flying 24 lions from South Africa to Mozambique—where they had been missing from their habitat because of a civil war—bringing them back by private jet. They started waking up in the middle of the flight. It was just myself and the pilot and the veterinarian, and you’re nudging him [the veterinarian], like, ‘Could you please sedate him?’ And, like, flying a black rhino named Eric from the San Diego Zoo all the way to Tanzania. That took 48 hours and multiple flights. These are wild animals, so it’s really hard work … Stuff goes wrong. I’ve never seen an animal fall out of a vehicle, though, or kick its way out of a vehicle.
When you realize how much is involved—how much money, effort, manpower, time—I wonder if some people think, ‘Why do it?’
Every species that goes extinct, ultimately, is going to … impact humanity. Whether you understand it or not, it is. Maybe not for you in your lifetime, but it is for life on this planet, for your children. I have, in my lifetime, seen landscapes lose species and then really start to fall apart. And then it gets more and more uninhabitable. I’ve also seen the reverse, how quickly nature starts to heal itself when we give it a little bit of a chance. It’s amazing.
There’s something profoundly moving to be out there and believe that the land can heal, and the creatures can regenerate and come back … If we listen and watch, you realize the future is really still unwritten. We can choose to be caretakers, have this power to restore and reconnect and protect or … it’s also symbolic of what we stand to lose, too. I think the biggest challenge with all these things is getting people across countries and cultures, totally different politics, different belief systems, coming together to make it all possible. That to me is the main takeaway on all these stories: Humans need to get along to envision the future we want. It is possible. I see how actually it’s really in our hands what comes next.
You have said in other interviews that we can have an impact with every choice we make.
Definitely. I think more of us need to be involved in whatever ways we can. You don’t have to be involved in this story. You can be in New York City, and there’s so much [that’s] wild all around you that you may not realize. Part of the magic is just slowing down and watching. I’m sitting here on my front porch [in Montana], and there’s like, dozens of bees and butterflies pollinating these flowers. Gosh, if we just notice what’s in front of us, and that we’re part of it all, everything makes more sense. It’s kind of this wild miracle that they’re able to bring this horse back from extinction [in the wild], and now take it back to where it originally existed … That landscape is going to heal by having them back.
When you bring back those keystone species … there’s going be so much regeneration happening there. I love going down the rabbit hole thinking about that. I like circling it back to all of us, no matter where you are. To think that, yes, scientists are saying we are witnessing the Sixth Extinction, but imagine if all of us just paid a little bit more attention and got involved in a project in our backyard. Or even just becoming more aware of the things that you’re doing that are hurting wildlife.
