Following the Antelope’s Seasonal Route

The Tibetan antelope’s seasonal movement is often pictured as one great arrow across the plateau. Research in Qiangtang gives a more particular shape to that journey. A 2018 report from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Xi’an Branch describes a team that used field investigation alongside Beidou satellite collars placed on 15 antelopes in Qiangtang in 2013. Researchers checked the locations on the ground, mapping routes, stopover places and calving areas. Their account describes groups approaching major calving grounds from different directions, rather than every animal following one shared track. The image of migration becomes less like a line on a map and more like a network of seasonal passages, resting places and destinations.

A collar can send a location; it cannot by itself explain what an animal encounters there. The CAS account pairs satellite tracking with field checks and aerial surveys. The team used a fixed-wing drone to record herd density, numbers and age structure, and reported identifying a major calving area around Sewu Snow Mountain and Tienshui River in western Qiangtang. The account gives its central area as roughly 80 to 100 square kilometres. This is the scale at which a point on a screen becomes a place that researchers can verify: a movement record is compared with terrain and observations on the ground.

A separate peer-reviewed study published in Oryx describes UAV surveys south of a known calving ground at Sewu Snow Mountain in July 2016. Researchers assembled about 4,000 aerial photographs into twelve orthomosaics and identified more than 23,000 antelope observations across the flight areas; the authors caution that overlap could produce double counts. The study also compared overlapping images taken thirty minutes apart, revealing groups moving in different directions. The method did not turn the plateau into a spectacle. It made movement countable while showing why counting is difficult: animals overlap, terrain changes, and every image has a date and a bounded survey area.

The 2024 report from Tibet’s culture and tourism department, republishing Xinhua, shows pregnant females gathering and moving toward familiar calving grounds in northern Qiangtang. Its photographs are explicitly dated May 8, 10 and 12, 2024, and credited to Xinhua photographers Dingzeng Nida and Jiang Fan. They are a record of that migration season, not a live view of today’s herds. Together, the tracking work, field checks and dated photographs offer a grounded way to read the movement: not as a promise of an easy wildlife encounter, but as a recurring passage studied through patient observation.