Male chiru in the Chang Tang highlands of Tibet. Credit George B. Schaller

In the course of half a century of observing wild animals, the field biologist George Schaller has been gradually moving higher, heading toward thinner air and lonelier places. And few places are lonelier than the Chang Tang highlands of the Tibetan plateau, the setting for the work described in “Tibet Wild,” a high desert that resembles an image beamed back to Earth from the Mars rover Curiosity. This bleak landscape seems to match Schaller’s nature. “The desolation calms,” he remarks, “it does not intimidate.”

Schaller is best known for his highly readable books about lions, gorillas and pandas, creatures of the savanna or forest. The animals he finds inhabiting Chang Tang are far less familiar: the kiang, the wild yak and the chiru. The yak is, of course, easy to picture; the kiang is a wild ass with a white belly; the chiru is a particularly charming antelopelike creature. Over the past 30 years, Schaller has spent months almost every year in their habitat, whose average elevation is roughly 15,000 feet. His way of working is scrupulous and slow. Indeed, he fears that he may be a “scientific fossil” at a time when many biologists work in labs analyzing genes or sit at desks tracking collared animals sending back signals via GPS: “I console myself that natural history remains the cornerstone of conservation, that it must be learned on the ground, asking questions, observing, listening, taking notes, getting the boots muddy.”

Getting your boots muddy here can mean frozen toes. Winter on the plateau, with lows in the negative double digits Fahrenheit, is brutal, but it’s easier for traveling than summer, when vehicles simply sink into the muck. No one comes to this part of the world for the cuisine, but even by trek standards Schaller’s meals are a hardship — it’s instant noodles most of the time. (Though once he reports the enlivening addition of Army rations five years past their expiration date.)

Schaller gives a good idea of how frustrating it is to work in such an inhospitable place, but he mutes the drama in his story. It takes a while for him to get to the fact that thousands of the chiru have been massacred. This matters not just because it’s wrong to slaughter wild animals but because the chiru defines the ecosystem by its migration, the way the wildebeest does the Serengeti. Once they could be seen in herds of thousands, but in the last decades of the 20th century the population took a nosedive.

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It’s dangerous to be worth more dead than alive, and the chiru’s extraordinarily fine wool is six times as valuable as cashmere from goats. Poachers kill the animals and sell the pelts to smugglers who take them to northern India. There the underwool is woven into very light, warm shawls known as shahtoosh — a sort of super pashmina — that can sell for thousands of dollars apiece. (The trade has been banned, but they are still available under the table.) Schaller estimates that at least three animals must be killed to make one shawl — and that about 20,000 a year were killed in the 1990s. Early on, buyers were fed the comforting fiction that the wool was shed onto bushes, then gathered by shepherds.

The chiru are most concentrated and most vulnerable in the calving grounds. It was known that in spring the females headed north, then returned with calves in the summer, but precisely where they gave birth was a mystery it took nearly 20 years of expeditions for Schaller to unravel. The answer raised another question, still unresolved: Why do the females travel 200 miles from a grassy area to a barren one? Hunting is now reduced. And in a huge nature reserve created by China partly in response to Schaller’s work, the chiru population is increasing.

For all their gracefulness, hoofed animals like the chiru don’t generate the same passion as lions or gorillas. We identify with predators and primates; who would choose to be a wildebeest? Schaller’s most gripping books, alive with the excitement of discovery, are “The Serengeti Lion,” which won a National Book Award in 1973, and “The Year of the Gorilla.” But toward the end of “Tibet Wild” he circles back to a predator that’s been a longtime obsession — the snow leopard. In Peter Matthiessen’s classic account of a 1973 trek with Schaller in Nepal, “The Snow Leopard,” Matthiessen, who found only paw prints and scat, remarked, in his Zen style: “Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn’t that wonderful?” But, Schaller notes, “I am not quite able to achieve a similar attitude.” After Matthiessen went home, Schaller tracked the leopards and then was instrumental in persuading Nepal to designate more than a thousand square miles as a national park.

Establishing havens for herds of ungulates or for solitary big cats takes a kind of politicking that has to be tough on this lover of solitude. It’s crucial work, but the book bogs down in describing these negotiations. Schaller is still twisting arms to save habitats. He’s currently aiming to establish a reserve shared by Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and Tajikistan. Is it possible, North Korea aside, to find more challenging partners?

The reader perks up when Schaller leaves global affairs to engage in some uncharacteristic personal revelation. His father was a German diplomat who, as consul in Chicago in 1932, met and married Schaller’s American mother. Schaller was born in Berlin in 1933 and the family was posted to Denmark during the war, which couldn’t have been easy. “I became perhaps an internal exile with a detached and reticent character,” he notes of the experience of moving among countries. Shortly after the war, Schaller recalls, he used to wait outside a building that housed American troops: “When a soldier came to dump uneaten food from his mess kit, I snagged pieces of pancake, slices of bread, fragments of omelet, and other bits which then became our family meal.” In 1947, Schaller came to America: “As someone from a country that had inflicted unspeakable horrors on the world, I was not cordially received by everyone.” Life got better after he was accepted at the University of Alaska, a good place to plunge into the wild.

To protect unspoiled places, Schaller must shed his natural reticence to negotiate with his fellow human beings. In the case of the high steppes, these include families putting out poison for animals wrongly perceived as pests, herders trading horses for motorcycles and, more threatening, gold miners. He’s willing to sit down and educate people, sometimes even to compromise, but he has no sympathy for those who get a charge out of reducing the number of his beloved animals one at a time. Late in “Tibet Wild,” Schaller briefly shares a camp with a foreign hunter who’s grousing that he had to wait three whole days to get his final shot at a Marco Polo ram, whose massive curved horns are a coveted trophy. Schaller, the man who spent 17 years trying to find the chiru’s calving ground, has little patience for such behavior. “Hunting is not a sport,” he notes. “Animals don’t just lose, they die.”


A Naturalist’s Journeys on the Roof of the World

By George B. Schaller

Illustrated. 372 pp. Island Press. $29.95.

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