Hainan Daily reporter Li Mengyao Yu Weihui
From "Yo Yo Deer Singing, Eating The Apple of the Wild" to "Seeing Deer When the Tree Is Deep, The Creek Does Not Hear the Bell at Noon", and then to "Frost Falling Bear Rising Tree, Forest Empty Deer Drinking Creek", the long and long sound of deer chirping comes out from the "Book of Poetry", and has been written and sung by generations of literati and inkers, and has long been endowed with traditional Chinese aesthetic characteristics and symbolic meanings.
Just by looking at the traditional character for "Li" written as "Li", we can see that people have a great preference for the deer.
Among the 17 species of deer in China, the Hainan slope deer is the most precious. Their light and agile posture once shuttled freely between hills and terraces, becoming the "face value" of the animal kingdom of Qiongdao Island, and the number was also drastically reduced due to the influence of human activities, once only 44 were left, fortunately, humans immediately took a series of protective measures to help their populations gradually reproduce and recover to more than 1,000 heads.
This is a story from endangerment to rebirth, and it is also a useful revelation for a person to live in harmony with nature.
Hainan po deer. Hainan Daily reporter Su Xiaojie photographed
Hainan Po deer used to be all over Qiong Island
Thick eyelashes flickered slightly, a pair of eyes as clear as autumn water, when looking at a Hainan slope deer, almost no one will not be captured by this cute creature in front of them.
Named for its habitat on hilly slopes, the Hainan deer resembles a sika deer, but is smaller, less spotted, and has a more slender neck, body and limbs. What is more special is that the male horns of the Hainan slope deer have a large and curved eyebrow branch, which is connected with the curved main branch, almost curved and bowed, so that it has the nickname of "eyebrow deer" and "eyebrow horn deer".
Historically, Hainan Po deer was widely distributed in Ledong, Ding'an, Sanya, Lingshui, Wanning, Lingao, Chengmai, Danzhou, Qiongzhong and other places. "Deer, commonly known as po deer. Shaped like a mountain cow and slightly smaller... Oysters have horns, curved horns and many branches... The summer solstice horn is solved, and the horn is exposed after the white dew. First out, the most tender. From this record in the "Guangxu Yazhou Chronicle", it can be seen that at least in the late Qing Dynasty, people had a certain degree of understanding of the "horned and multi-branched" slope deer.
But in the beginning, the name "Polu" was not widely recognized by the academic community.
In the 1960s, when the state sent experts to conduct a thorough census of the wildlife resources of Hainan Island, many Chinese and foreign experts believed that it belonged to the Thai subspecies of Zelu. Until the expedition team collected the no. 1 po deer specimen in China and compared it with the Thai subspecies of zelu, it was found that the morphological characteristics of the two were obviously different, and it was considered that it was an independent subspecies - Zelu Nan asian species, and the "legal status" of "Hainan po deer" was officially confirmed.
No one knows when the first ze deer landed on Hainan Island, and how long it took to complete the subspecies differentiation. According to the speculation of Zhang Qiong, an associate researcher at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in the article "The Origin, Evolution and Protection of The Hainan Po Deer", perhaps as early as the Pleistocene Ice Age, ze deer migrated to Hainan Island through land bridges from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and other countries in mainland Southeast Asia, and since then embarked on a long road towards the evolution of deer on the slope of Hainan.
At one point, only 26 were poached
The lush savanna in the low hilly areas, coupled with the absence of threats and intrusions from large predators such as tigers, wolves, jackals and leopards, allowed the Hainan slope deer to live a leisurely and self-sufficient life for a long time. As late as the early 1950s, people in parts of Qiongdao could still see this scene: wild po deer often mixed with cattle to graze, and when the cattle returned to the village in the evening, po deer would even return to the cattle pen with the cattle.
"I heard the old man in the family say that in the past, po deer would often run to the village to find grass to eat, at first everyone thought it was cattle, but later saw that they were particularly good at jumping, and then recognized that this was a deer." Tang Biaoyi, who lives in Xiaoling Village, Basuo Town, Dongfang City, remembers that at first there were many deer near the village, such as cattle, and with the rise of large-scale reclamation and hunting activities, it became increasingly difficult for them to see this "particularly jumping" animal.
According to Yan Jia'an, a doctor at Nanjing Agricultural University, in his article "Research on the History of Ecological Environment Change on Hainan Island", from the 1960s to the 1970s, the number of deer hunting was more than 100 in the incomplete statistics of Ledong Qianjia Town and Baisha Bangxi Town alone. By the early 1970s, the po deer had disappeared from Tunchang, Danzhou, Ledong and other places, and its distribution area had shrunk to parts of the five communes of Baisha Bangxi, Qifang, Changjiang Dapo, October Field and Dongfang Datian, and the population was almost on the verge of extinction.
Hainan slope deer, dangerous! In order to save this "indigenous people" of Hainan, the government set up Polu Nature Reserves in Datian in the East and Baisha Bangxi in 1976, but unfortunately, due to poor protection, all 18 Po deer in the Bangxi Conservation Area were poached soon after. The last 26 po deer that live in the eastern fields became the last hope of restoring the population of this species.
Po deer stop in the reserve to rest. Hainan Daily reporter Yuan Chen photographed
The population is increasing at a rate of 15% per year
How to recover the slope deer population? The first point, of course, is to provide them with enough living space first.
After enclosing a savannah of more than 1,300 hectares, the Hainan Datian National Nature Reserve built dozens of kilometers of protective railings around the perimeter, and transformed the habitat by means of burning to renew vegetation, dwarf shrubs, plant high-quality pasture grass on the ground and dig ponds. At the same time, experts such as Yuan Xicai, a professor at the South China Institute of Endangered Animals, began to work on the artificial domestication of deer cubs on the slope of Hainan, using goat's milk to feed deer that had lost their mothers or got lost, effectively improving the survival rate of young children.
Hainan slope deer cubs. Hainan Daily reporter Feng Shuo photographed
According to the forestry department of Hainan Province, by 2007, the number of deer on the slope of Hainan had recovered to 1785, and the population was increasing at a rate of about 15% per year.
"The number of deer on the slope is increasing, but the existing habitat is far from meeting their population recovery needs." Yu Fasheng, deputy director of the Hainan Datian National Nature Reserve Management Bureau, said that in order to cope with the food shortage and population density problems faced by po deer, since the 1990s, hundreds of po deer have been moved out of the reserve to 13 areas in the east, such as Monkey Macaque Ridge, Chihao Ling and Baomeiling in Changjiang, for wild release, semi-wild release and captivity.
Located in the Daguangba Reservoir, the Hainan Monkey Macaqueling Provincial Nature Reserve can often be seen in groups of three or five Hainan slope deer foraging for food and drinking water on the reservoir beach. "The last time I saw a deer on a slope in Hainan, they were drinking water on the beach of the reservoir." Fu Xuhong, a ranger at monkey ridge reserve, is pleased that with the inclusion of monkey ridge in the pilot area of the Hainan Tropical Rainforest National Park system, it means that the habitat of deer on the slope of Hainan will also be protected and controlled with the strictest.
In BaishaBangxi, the native area of Hainan Po deer, people use water resources such as streams and ditches to plant patches of pasture grass to simulate a very similar wild environment, allowing more than 200 Hainan po deer to live here comfortably. "Yo yo deer singing, eating wild apples", the beautiful Hainan has become a paradise where people and nature live in harmony.
The Hainan rainforest is endemic to mammals
Hainan neo-woolly hedgehog - mammalian insectivorous hedgehog family, is an endemic animal of Hainan, Hainan Provincial Wild Protected Animal. It is a hedgehog with no spines, the size of a general vole, but with a pointed and long beak, resembling a shrew, inhabiting tropical rainforests and tropical secondary forests at higher altitudes.
Hainan rabbit - mammalian rabbit-shaped rabbit family, is an endemic animal of Hainan, belongs to the national second-level protected animals. It is the smallest and most colorful of the Chinese hares, mainly nocturnal, distributed in the low grasslands of shrubland and coastal areas in the hills of western Hainan.
The Hainan giant shrew - mammalian rodent shrew, is an endemic animal of Hainan, a national wild protected animal in Hainan. The Hainan giant squirrel is a nocturnal animal that feeds mainly on the flowers and fruits of various plants, usually living in mountainous forest areas, mainly distributed in the large mountainous forest areas of Hainan Island.
Original title: Youyou deer singing in the depths of the forest