Hustai National Park

The takhi once ranged across the steppes of Central Asia, but by the 1960s the last herds survived only in the Dzungarian Gobi along Mongolia's border with China, and the final confirmed wild sighting came in 1969. The species endured in zoos, descended from just 12 wild-caught horses. From 1980 the Foundation Reserves Przewalski Horse bred carefully selected groups in semi-reserves in the Netherlands and Germany, and in 1990 it joined the Mongolian Association for Conservation of Nature and Environment to bring them home.

The first flight landed in Ulaanbaatar on 5 June 1992 with 16 horses, and by 2000 five transports had delivered 84 takhi to Hustai. Each group spent time in acclimatisation enclosures before release. The park counted 150 horses by 2002 and 422 in its 2022 count, and it aims for 500 by 2030. With sister projects at Takhin Tal in Great Gobi B and at Khomiin Tal, Mongolia now holds about 1,000 wild takhi, and the IUCN moved the species from Extinct in the Wild to Critically Endangered in 2008 and to Endangered in 2011.

Hustai became a nature reserve in 1993 and a national park in 1998, covering about 50,600 hectares of the Khustain Nuruu, a south-western outlier of the Khentii range. The name comes from khus, the Mongolian word for birch, and birch woods still shelter on the northern slopes. The land falls from about 1,840 metres to the willow thickets and wetlands of the Tuul River on the southern boundary, taking in dry steppe, rocky hills and a small field of sand dunes.

The park has recorded 55 mammal and 223 bird species. Red deer have grown from about 50 in the early 1990s to more than 1,300, and Mongolian gazelle, roe deer, wild boar, argali, Pallas's cat, lynx and Siberian marmots are all present. Grey wolves are the takhi's main predator and take a share of foals each year, a relationship studied here since the 1990s. Livestock no longer graze inside the park, and herders from the surrounding buffer zone move their animals along a fixed route under ranger escort.

People grazed and buried their dead in these hills long before the takhi returned. A 2000 survey by the Mongolian Academy of Sciences recorded more than 160 Bronze Age slab graves, 19 large stone burial mounds and a deer stone in the Khuurai valley. The most striking site is Ungut, a Turkic memorial complex of the 6th to 7th centuries with about 30 carved stone figures, a stone lion and ram, and a long line of balbal stones running east.

Since 2003 the park has been managed by the Hustai National Park Trust, a Mongolian non-governmental organisation that receives no state funding and relies mainly on its camp, entry fees and donations. Rangers track the harems daily, a research unit hosts Mongolian and international students and volunteers, and a buffer-zone programme works with herding families in the three surrounding districts. A visit here pays directly for the work.