Tibetan Antelope Migration — Chang Tang

Each year between May and July, female chiru — Tibetan antelopes — undertake one of the world's most extreme mammal migrations, travelling up to 300 kilometres from their winter range across the Tibetan plateau to their calving grounds in the Chang Tang reserve at 5,000 metres elevation, their path crossing active roads, rivers, and areas with deep snowfall in a migration of extraordinary physical endurance by animals whose survival was threatened by poaching for their extraordinarily fine underfur — shahtoosh. The chiru's recovery from under 70,000 animals in the 1990s to over 300,000 today following Chinese anti-poaching efforts is one of conservation's great Asian success stories, and watching the spring migration columns — thousands of pregnant females moving in streams across the open plateau — from the Tibetan highway between Golmud and Lhasa creates one of the most accessible large mammal migration encounters in Asia. The ewes give birth within days of arriving at the calving grounds and the newborn chiru standing on their feet within hours on the windswept plateau at 5,000 metres is one of wildlife's most extreme nativity scenes. The Tibetan plateau's vast scale, its sky the deepest blue in the world at altitude, and the spiritual significance of this landscape to Tibetan Buddhism add dimensions of grandeur to the wildlife encounter. Tibetan wolf packs follow the migration routes.