A relic of the Pleistocene
The Saryarka Steppe, a vast expanse of temperate grassland in northern Kazakhstan, hosts one of the planet's most spectacular and precarious wildlife migrations. Each year, enormous herds of the Saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica) travel immense distances across this landscape. This animal is a relic of the Ice Age, a species that once grazed alongside woolly mammoths. Its most defining feature is its large, flexible proboscis, an inflatable nose that hangs over its mouth. This unusual snout is a adaptation to the steppe's extreme climate; it warms frigid winter air before it reaches the lungs and filters out dust during the dry summers.
The migration is driven by the seasonal availability of food. Herds, which can number in the tens of thousands, move north in the spring to their summer grazing grounds and return south in the autumn to escape the harsh winter. These journeys can cover up to 1,000 kilometers annually. The migration is essential for the antelope's life cycle, particularly for calving. In spring, females gather in huge aggregations to give birth synchronously, a strategy that helps overwhelm predators and leaves the population vulnerable to other threats.
A fragile recovery
The Saiga's existence has been volatile. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, poaching for horns and meat caused the population to plummet by over 95% in just over a decade, from over a million to just tens of thousands. The species was classified as Critically Endangered. The population faced a further catastrophic event in May 2015, when a normally harmless bacterium, Pasteurella multocida, turned deadly. Triggered by unusually warm and humid weather, the bacteria caused hemorrhagic septicemia, killing an estimated 200,000 saigas in just a few weeks—over 60% of the entire global population at the time.
Despite these immense setbacks, intensive conservation efforts have led to a remarkable comeback. Thanks to strong anti-poaching measures and international cooperation, the population in Kazakhstan has rebounded dramatically. By 2023, numbers had surged to over 1.9 million individuals. This success prompted the IUCN to reclassify the species from Critically Endangered to Near Threatened in December 2023. The Saryarka Steppe and Lakes of Northern Kazakhstan, a UNESCO World Heritage site, provides an important protected area for the saiga and millions of migratory birds, safeguarding the ecological processes that underpin this natural event.