How do you bring back a species that vanished nearly a century ago – and relocate them across more than 2,000 kilometers of open steppe?
In the autumn of 2025, a convoy of specially equipped trucks began a second ambitious journey: transporting wild kulans from Altyn Emel National Park in southeast Kazakhstan to the Altyn Dala State Nature Reserve in the country’s central steppe.
Once widespread across Central Asia, kulans – a swift, shy, and endangered subspecies of Asiatic wild ass – disappeared from the Altyn Dala region nearly 100 years ago. With their extinction, the grassland ecosystem lost a key species that once played a vital role in seed dispersal and nutrient cycling.
Since 2017, efforts to reintroduce kulans to their native range have formed part of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative – an ambitious, multi-partner effort to restore the Golden Steppe.
Kulans are not just charismatic megafauna – they are crucial engineers of the steppe. Their return helps reestablish natural processes and ecosystem resilience, making them essential to the long-term restoration of Central Kazakhstan’s grasslands.
This year’s journey mirrored the route of the 2024 operation: more than 2,000 kilometers by road, nearly 50 hours of continuous travel. It began with a night-time capture in Altyn Emel, followed by sedation, sorting, and loading into custom-built containers designed to ensure ventilation, feeding, and video monitoring.
The operation was led by Conservation Solutions, a wildlife transport specialist, with veterinary oversight provided by Dr. Julia Bohner of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW).
Despite robust measures and a method refined over years of practice, the translocation faced a setback. Two animals sustained injuries during the journey and could not be saved. Incidents like these are a sobering reminder of the complexities involved in working with wild animals. For the team, they remain emotionally challenging – and continue to drive efforts to refine procedures and reduce risks.
The convoy arrived safely at the Wild Equid Reintroduction Center “Alibi” in Altyn Dala, where the kulans are now settling into a 54-hectare acclimatization enclosure. There, they will remain over the winter under close observation, before joining the free-ranging population in the spring.
“The ecosystem services that we expect to be provided by this keystone species will be crucial for the long-term restoration of the Golden Steppe,” says Stephanie Ward, Kazakhstan Programme Leader at Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS).
This effort is part of the broader Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative – a long-term, multi-partner program to restore steppe biodiversity in Kazakhstan.
The transportation is carried out within the framework of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative — a partnership between the Committee of Forestry and Wildlife of the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity of Kazakhstan (ACBK), the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), and Fauna & Flora.
Veterinary support is provided by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW). Technical and financial support is provided by Nuremberg Zoo. The kulan capturing was conducted by the Altyn Emel State National Park and the ranger enterprise “Okhotzooprom” and the loading and transport overseen by the South African wildlife transportation company Conservation Solutions.
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