Raiders in the Barley Fields

By Darla Hillard

Authorities in Tibet could not afford to keep repaying the villagers for crops eaten by the kiang, shown to the right.

The highest mountain on earth, Mount Everest, is known as Chomolangma to the people of Tibet. The Chomolangma Nature Preserve takes its name from this famous mountain, which marks the eastern boundary of the preserve.

Most of the preserve is more than 14,000 feet above sea level, so high that trees do not grow there. Stony plains rise gently to rolling hills and low mountains. In winter, snow covers this land, and in summer, thin grasses tinge it green. The whole preserve is about the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts together.

The preserve is home for the wolf, a cat called the lynx, a type of wild sheep, and even rarer animals, such as the gazelle, the snow leopard, and a wild cousin of the donkey called the kiang (KEE-yahng). About 70,000 people live in small villages throughout Chomolangma Nature Preserve.

Three years ago, the people of Khoryak village, population 208, had a big problem with the kiang. In summer, the area’s natural grasses turn dry and brown. The kiang could not resist grazing instead on Khoryak’s lush barley fields. The villagers’ irrigation system kept the fields green through the dry season.

Families spent every summer night guarding their crop. But there were not enough people, and the kiang were expert at finding the gaps. The kiang ate almost half the barley.

Dr. Rodney Jackson is a wildlife biologist with The Mountain Institute of West Virginia. He visited Khoryak as part of a team that was trying to solve the kiang problem.

“Before the preserve was established in 1989, the people would shoot several of the crop-raiding kiang,” he explains. “The other kiang would get the message, and most of the barley would survive until harvesttime.”

But since 1989, it has been illegal to kill wildlife living in the preserve. Villages on the edge of kiang habitat had been losing more and more of their most important crop.

“We couldn’t blame the villagers for wishing the preserve had never been created,” Dr. Jackson says. “We needed to make the preserve benefit the people and help them find suitable ways to earn money. Only then might they begin to value their wildlife.”

Two other team members came from Nepal: Lamu Sherpa, who helped the villagers decide which new skills would be most useful, and Tinley Lama, who translated. The villagers welcomed these two because they had Tibetan ancestors.

The team traveled by jeep to Khoryak, but still it took half a day to get there from the main road, eleven miles along a dirt track that had been built for horses. No villager could afford a car.

Most of the people had never been to school. But they knew their “neighborhood” so well that they could draw maps showing every hill, stream, and patch of useful plants.

They told of their history, important local events, and the good and bad things about living in Khoryak. All this information helped Rodney and Lamu study the problem.

“Why don’t your dogs chase the kiang?” the team asked. The villagers laughed and said: “They are best of friends.”

The villagers said giant firecrackers had worked for a while. The blasts scared the animals away. But soon the kiang learned that a few yards were enough to run, a few minutes enough to wait before returning to the feast.

Since nothing else worked, the best solution seemed to be a fence around the barley fields. But it would be too expensive to enclose all the fields of Khoryak and of the many other villages in the preserve that needed fencing.

The question then became how to get the most benefit from a grant of $7,000. This was the amount given by the Canadian government for the project.

The villagers agreed to spend the money on partial fencing, to install it themselves, and to keep it repaired. They would take their own livestock out of some of the natural pastures they had been using. That way the kiang would have more wild grasses to eat and would not go hungry.

Now, it has been three years since about half of Khoryak’s fields were fenced in. The villagers have had full barley harvests, and for the first time they have planted vegetable gardens. They have built a better road into the village, and they have established a weaving business.

But Khoryak’s best idea was to use the time saved from guarding their fields to build a school of handmade adobe bricks. A teacher now lives in the village, and students have finished their first year of school.