Adam

Gao

Sixteen-year-old teenager Adam, who is born and bred in Beijing, has always hoped to capture an infrared photo of a wild animal with the ancient Great Wall in Beijing as the background. In recent years, due to the improvement of the ecological environment in Beijing, large wild animals such as roe deer, gorals, leopard cats, and foxes, which had been invisible in the northern mountains for many years, have begun to reappear. However, the most precious native species, North China leopard, is still nowhere to be found. Before the 1980s, North China leopard was always found in the deep mountains of the Yanshan and Taihang ranges in Beijing.

When Adam was nine years old, he became the youngest volunteer of a NGO Chinese Felid Conservation Alliance (CFCA). The volunteers have been searching for the traces of North China leopard in the Taihang Mountains. In 2016, CFCA identified about 40 adult leopards in the nature reserve in Heshun County, Shanxi Province, which is the known closest habitat of North China leopard to Beijing, about 400 kilometers away. In Jul. 2020, Adam and CFCA discovered the traces of North China leopard in the nature reserve of Tuoliang Mountain, Hebei Province, which is about 300 kilometers away from Beijing. This news was released at the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) held in Kunming City, Yunnan Province, China the following year. Adam was hailed by the media as the “Chinese Juvenile Leopard Seeker”. Currently, many volunteers of CFCA are still searching for North China leopard in the mountains closer to Beijing.

They have a great vision of bringing North China leopard back to the mountains of Beijing, which is a project called “Bring the Leopard Home” Program. “Bring the Leopard Home” does not mean airlifting leopards into the mountains of Beijing, but rather assessing the food chain in the mountains of Beijing, evaluating the continuity of the ecological corridor of the Taihang Mountains, and eliminating human hunting activities, allowing the North China leopard population in Shanxi and Hebei to naturally extend to their original habitat.

Adam announced this program at the COP29 in Azerbaijan in Nov. 2024. The following year, the People’s Government of Beijing Municipality announced that in the next decade, Beijing, Hebei, and Shanxi would jointly carry out ecological restoration, planting additional 10 million oak trees in wildlife habitats and migration corridors to cleave out the way for North China leopard to return to Beijing.

From 400 kilometers to 300 kilometers and then 200 kilometers, it seems that the footsteps of North China leopard returning to Beijing are approaching. However, unfortunately, in the mountains around Beijing, North China leopard has not been found in the past six years. Despite disappointment among Adam and other volunteers, through their infrared photos and “Wildlife Friends”, Beijing citizens have learned about this animal and got acquainted with more and more wild animals reappearing around Beijing. Perhaps North China leopard will also come back in the coming time.