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A canvas camp sits beside a small patch of woods. Three camp beds, a low table, a stove and a heap of firewood take up most of the room.

The crude shelter, built in March, is the first and only observation station of Gexigou Nature Reserve and has been home to three rangers for the past three months.

The station in Yajiang County, Ganzi Tibet Prefecture, Sichuan Province, is found across a log bridge and 300 metres down into a gully carved out of hills covered with pine and spruce trees.

The rangers, Jiang Wei, Li Xingwu and Li Ming, are monitoring the Derbyan parakeet, a rare bird under State protection. They have also been learning to identify other animal and bird species living in the provincial reserve and monitor their activities.

"During this season, the parakeets are hidden in forests most of the day," said Li Xingwu. "Only in the early morning do you have a chance to see them fly across the gully."

So, in mid-June they got up at 5:30 AM and began cooking breakfast rice porridge while waiting for the rain outside to stop.

The heavy rain slowly turned to drizzle and they set out at 8 am for a gully near State Highway 318.

At the entrance to the gully, they met Hani, a Tibetan villager who lives nearby. At 44, Hani has been a part-time forest ranger for over 22 years and knows the area better than most.

Responsible for stopping poaching and fire prevention in the county, rangers like Hani earn about 100-180 yuan (US$12-22) a month and were the major force behind the area's conservation until very recently.

Together, the four walked along a mountain path into the gully. After a two-hour climb, they reached a stretch of alpine meadow. There, they spotted three blood pheasants and then, a white-eared pheasant, a marmot and two black-bodied woodpeckers with red crowns, whose name they did not know.

Around noon, the three rangers wished Hani goodbye and made for home.

Back at camp, they carefully recorded what they saw that morning on a special form.

"It was designed by a biologist with Sichuan University," said Jiang Wei. He visited the site about a month ago and taught the rangers how to fill it out.

The insight provided by the information entered on the form is all part of an international nature conservation project initiated by US-based Conservation International (CI), to improve the reserve's management.

Slow start

Covering an area of over 200 square kilometers, Gexigou lies in the northwest of Yajiang County, about three kilometers west of the county town.

The area was designated a nature reserve mainly for the 15 species of birds under State protection found in it, including the parakeet, chestnut-throated partridge, Chinese Mongal and white-eared pheasant.

Several of them are indigenous only to western China.

Besides, leopards, black and brown bears, forest musk deer, alpine musk deer, Serow and seven other species of wildlife under State protection are also found in the reserve.

"To be honest, we don't exactly know what we have," said Li Bajing, director of the reserve's management office.

"We published a survey report four years ago, but we worked in the wild for only six days. The results mainly came from analyses of historical records."

He said the reserve has yet to attract enough funding for a comprehensive scientific survey.

"A lack of funds and hands are two factors that have stopped the reserve becoming fully functional," he said.

According to Li, Ganzi Tibet Prefecture is the poorest region in Sichuan Province and Yajiang is a poverty-stricken county. The annual revenue of the county, which has a population of 40,000, is often less than 3 million yuan (US$360,000). The local government cannot afford to staff the reserve with enough workers.

In fact, the reserve has never had a full-time manager, though the authorized size of its staff is 30.

Since his appointment as reserve director two years ago, Li has continued to take on tasks from his previous job as director of the forest fire prevention office under the county forest bureau.

But changes began to happen last year when specialists from CI cast their eyes on the reserve.

The conservation organization considers the mountains of Southwest China one of the planet's 34 "Biodiversity Hot Spots," and has recently been pouring funds and expertise into the region.

Ganzi Tibet Prefecture sits at the center of this "hot spot," with nearly 40 nature reserves, the most of any city or prefecture in Sichuan.

Li Shengzhi, head of the Chengdu Office of CI China Program, said that although most of the reserves in the area were still short of funds, hands and management, they chose Gexigou to help it become a model of better conservation.

The state of conservation in the reserve is impressive, Li Shengzhi said, partly because 93 per cent of local Yajiang residents are Tibetan and devout followers of Tibetan Buddhism.

"You can easily see such rare birds as chestnut-throated partridges and blood pheasants in the reserve and meet forest musk deer crossing the road," he said.

More importantly, "staff with the local forestry bureau are really eager to learn and co-operate."

A step forward

In November 2004, the organization gifted US$10,000 to the reserve for a one-year project to monitor the rare parakeet.

And in the first half of this year, CI supported the reserve in the completion of its entrance and organized for the reserve's managers to go on a study tour to several well-developed nature reserves in northern Sichuan.

In turn, the reserve built its first observation station and completed fencing along highway 318, which cuts through the reserve for 28 kilometers.

From CI, the rangers also got a digital camera, a telescope and field guides to the birds and animals of Sichuan Province their textbooks in the wild.

Checking the Guide to the Birds of Sichuan Province, they discovered that the woodpeckers they had seen were black woodpeckers and felt happy with their finding.

Though the job is quite hard, they said it was better than doing nothing at the forestry bureau.

But they also long to know what lies ahead.

A few weeks ago, experts and local reserve managers moved a step closer to formulating a master plan.

"We hope to produce a more practical plan than the one drawn up by experts from the outside world," Li Shengzhi said.

There were brainstorming sessions for local Yajiang people to share their own ideas. They posed questions to the experts like, "What will the reserve look like after five years of development?" "How do you improve the managers' know-how?" and, "How will the infrastructure of the reserve be improved?"

During the discussions, the reserve managers and experts came to a consensus that making a comprehensive survey and strengthening daily monitoring are two priorities for the reserve's future development.

They expected that the final version of the master plan would be released later this year.

"We hope that the plan helps us to develop Gexigou into a national nature reserve with characteristics of the Tibetan region," Deng Guanghua, director of the local forestry bureau, said. "It can coordinate our conservation with the development of local communities."

(China Daily July 14, 2005)