The 67-year-old Shandong Province native, Ge Yuxiu, has lived in Qinghai Province for 51 years. For almost half that time, he has been on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, where he has devoted his life to photographing and protecting wild animals.
Despite serious heart trouble, Ge is determined to stay on the high-altitude Plateau and continue to do something to help protect wildlife in the area.
Ge's enthusiasm for photography grew after his photo of soldiers reading news written on a blackboard was published in Qinghai Daily in 1979. He probably would never have turned to photographing wild animals without a visit to Bird Island in Qinghai Lake in 1995, after he had retired from the army and had begun working in the financial sector.
Covering less than half a square kilometer, the island is home to over 100,000 migratory birds. "I became addicted to the bird kingdom," Ge said, adding that he has so far visited the island more than 200 times to take photos.
He never expected that his attraction to the island would tie his destiny with Przewalski's gazelle (普氏原羚), a relatively small, slender antelope endemic (特有的) to China. Ge went to the island in late 1997 to take photos of swans when he saw seven yellowish-brown animals running across the grass-lands, in a line. On hearing one of his companions shouting "Przewalski's gazelle", he took out his camera and took photos of them. He was later told by wildlife conservation experts that he had captured the world's first image of this kind of antelope.
"I was so excited to hear that," he said. His excitement, however, soon gave way to anxiety after he learned about the animal's endangered status. Only found around Qinghai Lake, there were just 300 of them surviving in the wild at the time. The incident became a turning point in Ge's photography career, as he decided to devote his efforts to saving the gazelle and other endangered animals. He often spent time in the wild observing the gazelle and occasionally visited local herdsmen to learn what they knew about the animal.
Thanks to joint efforts, the population of Przewalski's gazelle has now increased to about 2,700.
