Dwarf Bharal Tour. China, Yunnan, Rini Mountain 2018
Hi all, I am back from Yunnan, China, where I was looking for Dwarf Bharal. It is probably one of the least documented ungulates in the world. In fact, until yesterday you wouldn’t find a photo of a life animal in the internet at all. Now this gap is closed: My trip report and a chapter on the species is available here: http://www.wilddocu.de/dwarf-bharal-tour-china-yunnan-rini-mountain-2018/; http://www.wilddocu.de/dwarf-bharal-pseudois-schaeferi/
What is really cool is the feeding behaviour of the the Rini Mountain population: Only at this site the bharals have specialized on cacti and learned how to remove the spines with their horns.
Enjoy! Ralf
4 Comments
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Emma
Very nice shot!
We love watching wildlife.
We’ve just bought a new binoculars from this review
http://www.pirt.org/best-compact-binoculars/
Hope it make more clearer.
Thank you for sharing.
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Vladimir Dinets
The feeding behavior is interesting because cacti have only been introduced to Eurasia in the 16th century, and made their way to Sichuan less than a hundred years ago.
Recent genetic data shows that dwarf blue sheep is genetically pretty much identical to common blue sheep of Sichuan subspecies. See Zeng et al. 2008 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18565767) and Tan et al. 2012 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22821360). IUCN no longer recognizes it as a separate species.