A Doctor of Conservation

By: Dr. Wang Qi

Translated from Chinese by: Meg Xu

Honestly, 12 years ago, I never expected to take this path. 12 years ago, I was pursuing a PhD in biology at a university in Texas, focusing on genomics. Specifically, I was using computers to compare the genomes of known primates, hoping to uncover key evolutionary events and related genomic elements. However, at some point, my research hit a towering wall, which I found myself unable to surpass. Mentally, I spiraled. One day, it struck me: after years of studying mammals, I had never even seen one in the wild as I had spent all my time staring at lab computers and test tubes.

Eventually, I asked my advisor for a year-long leave to travel. That journey took me across all 48 contiguous U.S. states. I drove alone, hiked in every national park, and camped with a tent and sleeping bag. At night, I read about the history of U.S. national parks and conservation, from John Muir to Rachel Carson. Gradually, my anxiety and frustration dissolved in nature. When I returned to school, I calmly told my advisor, "I’ve found what I want to do—I want to be a doctor of conservation!"

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In 2012, I got the chance to join the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Scarlet Macaw conservation project in Guatemala. This stunning bird has two subspecies, distinguished by the width of the yellow feathers on their wings. The Central American subspecies, with its broader yellow feathers, is particularly prized in the pet trade. This demand fueled poaching and illegal wildlife trafficking. A Central American Scarlet Macaw could fetch $2,000–$3,000 in North American markets, while locals in northern Guatemala could be paid just $100 to capture a chick. This relentless hunting caused the subspecies’ population to plummet, and experts warned that without intervention, it could face extinction.

Our project aimed to explore the macaws’ largest wild habitat—the Petén rainforest in northern Guatemala—and increase the wild population. Back then, drones weren’t available, so we used a single-engine propeller plane to scan the 30,000-square-kilometer rainforest from 1,000 meters up. We removed a door from the plane, mounted a DSLR camera, and set it to take photos at fixed intervals along a predetermined flight path. My seat was next to the open door. From the aerial photos, we identified tall acacia trees (locally called cantemu) that rose above the canopy. Every January, macaws would nest and breed in these trees. We then located these trees on the ground, observed nesting signs, and monitored the macaws throughout the breeding season.

In the wild, macaws typically lay 1–4 eggs per nest, but parents can only raise up to two chicks. The youngest chicks often die due to competition for food. To boost the survival rate of the third or fourth chick, we intervened. From February to March, we climbed 20–30 meters up the trees (about 8–9 stories high) using single-rope techniques while the parents were away foraging. We collected the extra eggs and brought them to our rainforest camp for artificial incubation.

After 28 days, the chicks would hatch. Watching the eggs crack open and the tiny, featherless chicks emerge was a magical experience. I hand-fed them a specially formulated liquid diet at 36–38°C using a feeding syringe.

Scarlet macaws are altricial birds, meaning they’re born helpless—blind and featherless. By the third week, they grew rapidly, though their eyes remained closed. By the fifth week, their eyes opened, and by the sixth week, their vibrant red, yellow, and blue feathers began to emerge. By the eighth week, they resembled adult macaws, though their tail and neck feathers weren’t fully grown. By the eleventh week, they could climb out of their artificial nests and start flapping their wings. After two more weeks of practice, they could fly. We then placed them in natural tree cavities near the original nests. By late May or early June, the macaws would leave the forest, and our hand-reared chicks would join them.

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I spent three unforgettable years in the rainforest, living what I thought was the perfect life—surrounded by exotic wildlife and getting paid for it. Through our efforts, we increased the macaw population by 7 chicks in the first year, 7 in the second, and 15 in the third. But a harsh reality shattered my dream: poachers from a nearby village captured 16 macaws and smuggled them to the Mexican border before being caught. I realized that our $120,000 annual budget and six-person team couldn’t even offset a single poaching incident. The scale of illegal trafficking was overwhelming, and it hit me that these beautiful creatures needed more than a few people living in a rainforest utopia—they needed broader efforts to address human threats. From that day on, my approach to conservation changed entirely.

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After returning to China, I began working with communities near protected areas to change behaviors—a far more challenging task than hand-feeding macaws. In 2019, I joined Taohuayuan and started managing August Forest, a reserve in the Yi ethnic region of southwestern Sichuan. The area is economically underdeveloped, with limited resources. Locals rely on the forest for medicinal plants, bamboo shoots, hunting, logging, and grazing—almost every form of primary resource use exists here.

To address this, my team and I started by creating four-panel comics illustrating reserve regulations, as many villagers were illiterate. However, the first question we got was, "Why are only Yi children in the comics? Do Han Chinese not have to follow the rules?" This made me realize that before any change could happen, I needed to earn the locals’ trust. I befriended the village’s Bimo (a traditional Yi religious leader). When the elder Bimo passed away, I participated in the funeral rituals, carrying firewood up the mountain for the cremation. His son, who inherited the role, even performed a blessing ceremony at our office. Gradually, I became less of an outsider.

We categorized villagers based on their reliance on the forest. One man, Jianwo Jiti, was among the most dependent. Every year, he and his young son would forage for medicinal plants, bamboo shoots, and even log trees. He also acted as a middleman, buying and selling foraged goods. In 2019, when we tried to stop him from entering the reserve, he moved his 200-pound motorcycle over the gate and threatened to build a new path along a cliff if we interfered again.

Instead of confronting him, we started visiting him regularly, learning about his family, income, and social connections. Over time, we found common ground: he wanted to ensure his family’s income, while we wanted to prevent uncontrolled entry into the reserve, which often led to hunting and trapping. In 2021, we convinced Jianwo Jiti to organize a meeting with other villagers to discuss rules for entering the reserve. They agreed on a few basic rules, like registering entry and not bringing lighters. By 2022, the rules expanded to 11, including using GPS tracking to monitor movements. At a village meeting, Jianwo Jiti announced the rules in Yi, declaring, "If you don’t follow these rules, you’re disrespecting me and yourselves!"

These community-driven rules gained more acceptance than official reserve regulations. While villagers still enter the reserve, they now follow the rules, and incidents of hunting, trapping, and littering have decreased significantly. This slow, hard-earned progress is just the beginning, and there are still setbacks. Some friends joke that I’ve become more like a village committee director than a conservationist, but I feel more fulfilled than I ever did raising macaws.

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Reflecting on the past 12 years, I realize I’m no longer the person staring at AGTC sequences on a computer screen. I’ve traveled through forests in the U.S., Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, encountered rare species, and witnessed breathtaking landscapes. Now, in a remote Yi village in Sichuan, I’ve found a place where I can make a tangible difference. For me, conservation started as a way to heal, then became a lifestyle of close contact with nature, and now it’s about slowly influencing communities. This has been my 12-year journey in conservation.