A squat, brown horse named Brandy quickly pulls away from the other “girls” in the harem. Ambling straight up to two familiar visitors—veterinarian Wynne Collins and wildlife biologist Melissa Songer—Brandy accepts a pat on the muzzle. She searches open hands for snacks as her four female companions, all sporting caramel-and-gray coats topped by push-broom manes, watch from a distance.

“We’re keeping them in groups of four and five,” Collins explains. “A group of nine tends to fight more.”

At home in the lush Blue Ridge Mountain fields of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park’s Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Va., Brandy and her “sisters” are a world away from their native land. They are rare Przewalski’s horses (Equus ferus przewalskii), native to the steppes and deserts of central Asia and a true breed apart. Descended from a primitive and hardy line that represents a discrete species, Przewalski’s (pronounced sheh-val-skees) horses have 66 chromosomes, two more than the common domestic horse.

Extinct in the wild since 1970, today some 1,600 of these horses live in small captive populations around the world. Their growing numbers—built up from 14 wild horses captured at the beginning of the 20th century—are the result of a carefully managed breeding program, called the Przewalski’s Horse Species Survival Plan, organized by a number of zoos and wildlife organizations around the globe. Brandy is on loan from the Bronx Zoo, and other members of her group hail from partner organizations in San Diego, Nevada and Germany.

The Przewalski’s horse-breeding program keeps meticulous track of the lineage of each animal. Males and females are paired so their offspring will maximize the genetic diversity of the species. In July, two foals were born at the Conservation and Research Center, sired by a nine-year-old stallion considered the most genetically valuable Przewalski’s horse in North America.

Back to the wild

One benefit of the growing numbers of Przewalski’s horses in captivity is that researchers are able to send horses to sites in China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan for reintroduction to the wild. In China’s Kalameili Nature Reserve, for example, 50 horses have been released. Using battery-powered transmitters and Global Positioning System coordinates, Songer and her Chinese colleagues are tracking the movements of these horses through the reserve, collecting information that may increase the odds for their survival in the wild.

Examining a topographical map of the Kalameili Nature Reserve, Songer pores over details of this rugged 4.2 million-acre expanse in far-western China. A blue square marks the location of the Chinese Wild Horse Breeding Centre, where about 140 horses live, bred from 25 captive horses from around the world. Of the 50 horses released to date to run wild in the reserve, six are wearing tracking collars that Songer and colleagues attached to them in China. Each collar collects daily locations through GPS; positions are transmitted via satellite and received at the Zoo lab in Front Royal by e-mail.

The map only hints at the Kalameili’s unsettled landscape of rocky hills and sparse vegetation, but it does allow Songer to track two wandering horse harems, revealed in a series of different-colored dots showing their positions over time.

On the map, a group of yellow dots meanders back and forth across a bright-red line—a relatively new road populated with heavy trucks and carloads of nature-loving Chinese travelers. For Songer, the road is a cause for concern, in part because its roadside ditches may offer hard-to-find watering holes for Przewalski’s horses.

“We also think people might be stopping to feed them,” Songer says. Once the horses get attracted to the road as a potential food source, they run the risk of being hit by cars.

Sheep and goats

Scarce water, searing summers, harsh winters, livestock development and hunting all contributed to the 20th-century demise of the Przewalski’s horse in Asia’s Gobi Desert. Today, encroachment by humans tops the list of threats to its future survival. Aside from trucks and well-meaning tourists, scores of nomadic Kazakh families drive some 300,000 sheep, goats and other livestock through the reserve each winter, Songer explains. These domestic ruminants take a heavy toll on wild-grass forage available to the wild horses.

In addition, the Kazakhs ride and keep domestic horses, which must be kept from the Przewalski’s horses if the latter are to stay genetically pure. The good news is that international and Chinese conservationists are working closely with local herdsmen, who are enthusiastic about the Przewalski’s return.

“The local Kazakh families are interested in and excited about the reintroduction of Przewalski’s horses,” explains Peter Leimgruber, director of the National Zoo’s Conservation Geographic Information Systems Lab. “The Kazakhs are horse people. Horses are so much a part of their culture that, for them, the wild horses are a representation of their heritage.”

Competing uses

A zoologist with a high-tech background, Leimgruber is fascinated by the movement of animals across a landscape and by the relationships they maintain with one another. He is particularly interested in grassland desert ecosystems, the animals that live there, and what holds each animal to a place and what makes it migrate.

“The Mongolian steppes are the only remaining large-scale temperate grasslands in the world,” Leimgruber says. “They are really very similar to what the American prairie once was before it gave way to agriculture. Our own migrating organisms, such as bison and pronghorn, are now gone because land management didn’t allow for this kind of coexistence.”

Today, Chinese authorities are weighing multiple, potentially competing uses for the lands of the Kalameili Nature Reserve. Valuable water, is being diverted for livestock and agriculture; and, not too far away, coal, oil and gas reserves are being mined. Still, perhaps inspired by a Przewalski’s horse ecotourist program in Mongolia, the Chinese have added a tourist center and gift shop to the horse-breeding station.

“The Chinese have a large, growing population,” Leimgruber observes. “They have huge energy and natural-resource demands to fulfill. How can this be combined with nature conservation? That’s going to be a challenge.”

Songer adds that zoos and other organizations around the world have maintained substantial public interest in the welfare of Brandy and her kin, and Chinese conservationists reportedly compare the potential “star power” of the Przewalski’s horse to that of the hugely popular giant panda—another Chinese native. Like the panda, Songer says, Przewalski’s horses will likely remain a “conservation-dependent species” for some time. She and Leimgruber are optimistic, however, about this spirited creature’s future in the wild.