Yu Jiahua, a 65-year old villager living on Jiuding Mountain in Sichuan province, was a skilled hunter when he was in his 20s.

After an influx of outside poachers severely curtailed local wildlife populations, he and his brother began patrolling the mountain, confronting poachers and confiscating their rifles and snares.

Eventually Yu convinced other villagers to help, establishing an organization that won outside acclaim and financial support.

Wildlife on the mountain has rebounded, but finances remain thin and patrollers few. As Yu Jiahua ages, it is unclear who will take on his mission.

On a late afternoon in April, 65-year-old Yu Jiahua finished his chores, shouldered a bamboo basket filled with bottles of water and feed, and started up a forest trail to seek his family’s missing pig. Within twenty minutes’ hiking, he noticed turned-over soil under the trailside bushes and some broken vegetation scattered on the narrow dirt trail winding up Jiuding Mountain in China’s Sichuan province.

“He came around here just now and won’t be far away from us,” Yu told Mongabay, pointing at the broken vegetation. Yu deduced which direction the pig had headed and where he had slept overnight from a series of equally subtle clues.

Finally, he left some feed and water on the ground and explained that the pig — an indigenous domesticated breed known as a Tibetan fragrant pig — had consumed provisions left the previous day at the same spot.

“He will definitely come here to eat and rest,” Yu added. “Within a few days, he will make the spot his regular settlement, and then it will be much easier for us to catch him and bring him back home.”

Living in the mountain forest for his whole life, Yu, an ethnic Qiang farmer with hunched back, silver hair, and wrinkled face, has close ties with the flora and fauna of Jiuding Mountain. His skill in identifying species is comparable to that of a professional biologist. Yu said that since he was in his thirties, he has been able to tell from a footprint the species and body size of the animal that made it, as well as number of animals passing through.

When he described previous encounters with wildlife his eyes lit up with delight and enthusiasm.

From hunter to preserver

Yu lives in Chashan village, located 1,900 meters (6,235 feet) up the north slope of Jiuding Mountain, a 4,969-meter (16,302-foot) peak in the Longmen Mountain Range in Sichuan’s Maoxian County. The mountain’s south slope is a tourist scenic area.

Born in the 1950s, Yu remembers clearly that in his childhood the nearby mountains teemed with wild animals that were easy to spot. These included giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), red panda (Ailurus fulgens), golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana), takin (Budorcas taxicolor), tufted deer (Elaphodus cephalophus), golden pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus), and Chinese goral (Naemorhedus griseus).

In his early twenties, Yu was skilled hunter. He said local communities adhered to common rules for hunting in those days. “We did not hunt during breeding seasons and we did not kill female or baby animals. Neither should we kill all the animals in one group,” Yu told Mongabay in the paved yard of his home, a nice house by village standards, built of concrete with two stories.

Things started to change in the 1980s when villagers from surrounding regions started coming to the area to hunt. In addition to using homemade rifles, they began setting wire loop snares to trap wildlife. A loop hung between two neighboring trees catches an animal’s head as it passes by. The loop tightens when the animal moves on, killing it when it can no longer breathe.

Early on, the hunting was legal. But in the late 1980s, both individual ownership of rifles and guns and the hunting of wildlife were outlawed in China. Even so, enforcement was lax, and rampant hunting gradually reduced the abundance of the mountain’s wildlife and caused the local extinction of most large carnivores, including leopards (Panthera pardus) and wolves (Canis lupus).

Yu recalled that the cruelest chapter happened later, when hunters started setting fires to drive and kill the few animals remaining. “The terrible crying of animals was like a nightmare to me,” he said.

Around 200 yaks that Yu and his younger brother, Yu Jiagui, had left to graze on Jiuding’s alpine meadows also suffered losses from the illegal hunting.

In 1995 Yu decided to take action. “If we did not start to protect those animals, they would all disappear and our future generations wouldn’t have the opportunity to see them,” he said. “So my brother and I started an anti-poaching patrol program by ourselves.”

From then on, the two brothers made regular patrols on Jiuding Mountain. They cleared wire snares and stopped people from poaching, either through direct confrontation or by reporting them to the local forest police.

Continuous effort

Depending on their route, a patrolling mission would generally take the brothers over ten days. Each of them carried a backpack with over 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of food and equipment, hiking up to 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) a day to altitudes as high as 4,000 meters (13,123 feet).

After his younger brother died in a traffic accident in 2000, Yu set about persuading other family members, and then Chashan residents, to join the mission.

In 2004, with help from Liu Zhigao, the director of Maoxian County’s poverty alleviation office at the time, Yu registered and set up an NGO called Jiudingshan Friend of Wildlife Association. Over the following decade, news of Yu and his fellow members’ patrolling initiative spread widely within China’s wildlife conservation circles.

Yu received public attention, frequently attended seminars, and won a number of awards and titles on both local and national levels. The overnight fame also brought him and the association financial and technical support from outside sources.

Local poachers from neighboring villages, hearing about the existence of an anti-poaching patrol team on Jiuding Mountain, pulled back from the area.

Today, community protection initiatives much like Yu’s are common across China; in Sichuan alone there are almost 300. But most of them are run by the local government or receive guidance from NGOS. What makes Yu’s project unique is that it is completely self-directed and independent.

Since 1995, Yu said his team has confiscated a total of 25 rifles from poachers during patrols. In the Yu family’s courtyard, there is a large stack of removed wire snares.

“During the past two decades, we removed a total of more than 110,000 wire loops. Most were directly buried on site,” Yu said. “The steel or nylon wires don’t decompose well, so they will threaten animals’ lives for many years if they don’t get cleared.”

The patrols’ have resulted in some visible improvements in the forest. Yu estimates, based in part on monitoring by camera trap, that the number of takins has revived to over 20, Chinese gorals to around 1,500, alpine musk deer (Moschus chrysogaster) to 150, and Chinese forest musk deer (Moschus berezovskii) to 140. The enchanting Chinese monal (Lophophorus lhuysii), an iridescent pheasant, revived from dozens to hundreds. The Jiuding Mountain patrol team has grown, too, to 30 members aged 19 to 65, with most members over 40.

Since 2013, the Maoxian County Forestry Bureau has given the association an annual subsidy up to 40,000 yuan ($6,250). Today, patrol team members can earn 150 yuan ($23.50) per day of patrolling. Additionally, with support from various sources, including individuals and philanthropists, the patrol team received free outdoor gear as well as training in basic wildlife monitoring and setting camera traps to monitor for poachers and wildlife.

Some environmental NGOs have also chipped in to help the association. For example, Beijing-headquartered NGO baohudi.org helped to attract eco-tourism programs into Jiuding Mountain and also to market the Yu family’s yak meat through an organic food platform in 2014.

Uncertain future

For all the support and acclaim, there are a significant number of obstacles ahead of the association. One is the association’s lack of strong management, which is compounded by a dearth of educated young people living in the area. Most patrol-team members are farmers without much schooling, with the exceptions of Yu Biao, Yu Jiahua’s 19-year-old grandson, and Yu Youqiang, his 30-year-old nephew. However, in interviews with Mongabay neither of them expressed an interest in helping to manage the association and put it on a sound development track.

For now, Liu Zhigao, the 58-year-old retired county-government officer and the association’s chairperson, acts as mediator between the association and the outside world. “I am old now, and the association really needs someone with an educational background to take charge of coordination and management issues,” he told Mongabay at his apartment in Maoxian County.

During interviews with Mongabay, Yu and several patrol-team members expressed dissatisfaction with the level of outside assistance the association receives, saying the pay for patrollers isn’t enough to motivate members to drop their usual work and participate regularly. Patrollers Tang Shubin, 40, Shun Zhaolong, 46, and Yu’s nephew Yu Youqiang repeatedly emphasized the need for more financial support to sustain the association’s conservation efforts.

Yu said ideally an annual support of some 100,000 yuan ($15,625) would be sufficient to motivate more young villagers to participate in the patrols. “If we relax, poachers will come back, so we need more financial support to continue to stimulate the young generation’s enthusiasm to participate,” he said.

Acting as the secretary-general of the association, Yu remains the heart and soul of Jiudingshan Friend of Wildlife Association. He serves as the team leader on almost every patrol, since no one with his level of expertise has been willing to shoulder the responsibility.

“So far my physical condition still allows me to patrol, but I am not sure how many years it will last,” sighed Yu. “I hope more young villagers can have the volunteer spirit to contribute to the conservation efforts.

Liu Zhigao echoed his feelings. “The association requires immediate upgrading to secure its future, and I hope more young locals will continue the anti-poaching initiative,” he said.

For now Yu said he is pinning his hopes on his youthful grandson Yu Biao, an educated and capable patroller who he hopes, with maturity, will agree to take over as lead defender of Jiuding Mountain’s wildlife.