The other Dubai: defending the emirate’s last patch of pristine desert and its rare residents

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Wright here dune meets sky, sketched in the sand like a hieroglyph, we discover our first signal: the jagged ‘w’ of two talon prints.

These prints are contemporary, and they justify our 5am begin. By noon, the sand’s diary of crisscrossing tracks left by nocturnal hunters like the pharaoh eagle owl have been erased by the remorseless wind. A species virtually extinct on this area, the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve (DDCR) has helped to reintroduce it. But to show the owl’s presence – and the worth of the reserve’s efforts – we want greater than prints; we want proof.

Silhouetted earlier than me is Naswa, a cathedral of rock lined in crevices that would nicely shelter owl nests. “I’ll look into this one, you take the one on the left,” says Pete, who’s been on this expedition 3 times earlier than, gesturing to 2 gaping crags. Like bathers dipping toes into boiling bathwater, we check every step – duly sending showers of stones down the mountainside.

Within minutes Pete has discovered a pellet: a thumb-sized clump of undigested bone and hair, regurgitated by an owl after breakfasting on a rodent or two. We file the coordinates on the GPS, and clamber round spires of stone, scorching on the scent. Eventually the dawn illuminates one thing much more particular: a shapely feather, in the pharaoh eagle owl’s regal livery.

“This is why the data you guys collect is so important,” says Basil Roy, one of the reserve’s conservation officers, as he examines the feather again at the DDCR workplace. “Dubai is coming closer. There’s only so much coastline to build on. And then…” We all know what comes subsequent.

For the DDCR, the approaching wave of highways, concrete and vacationer traps isn’t simply an eyesore. It’s an existential menace. A haven for wildlife and a beacon for biodiversity, the reserve is one of the most profitable conservation initiatives in the Middle East – representing 5 per cent of Dubai’s complete territory. Yet with the Emirati economic system booming, each sq. metre of territory is a possible Ferrari World or Barbie Land. After all, it’s solely desert, proper?

“Overcoming the myth that the desert is empty is one of our biggest hurdles,” says Roy. “We have to prove that there is something worth protecting here.”

Read extra on sustainable journey:

Dubai’s desert is residence to 560 species of flora and fauna. Properly maintained, it’s a wealthy habitat. But overfarming and unrestrained growth have decimated the native ghaf timber and firebush, destabilising the ecosystem. Today, it’s so depleted that even locals dismiss it as a wasteland.

Roy, together with colleagues María José Martín and Gerhard Erasmus, are right here to show in any other case. But monitoring 225 sq km with simply three scientists is demanding. If the reserve is to exhibit its value and resist makes an attempt to encroach on its pristine sands, it wants empirical, up-to-date proof of its biodiversity.

It wants, in other phrases, Biosphere Expeditions. Biosphere supplies conservation initiatives like the DDCR with budding citizen scientists from throughout the world, individuals who want getting caught in quite than getting away from all of it. The award-winning charity trains volunteers to be the boots on the floor, gathering the knowledge upon which conservation relies upon. In return, expeditionists get to contribute whereas on the frontlines of world wildlife conservation.

Since 2012, Biosphere’s volunteers have helped the DDCR survey its wildlife, from taking DNA samples of Gordon’s wildcat to mapping the dens of sand foxes. As nicely as this yr’s survey of the pharaoh eagle owl, the DDCR can also be counting on us to finish the annual quadrat survey of its wildlife – dividing the whole reserve into 64 two-kilometre squares and dispatching us volunteers to file the wildlife in every one, quadrat by quadrat.

“If we can prove that fewer animals are seen at the perimeter this year compared to last,” Roy explains, “we can fight back against the development happening on the reserve’s borders.”

That’s why I’m standing on a dune with three Brits, two Germans and an Italian, in the mid-afternoon warmth. Sweat drips onto my binoculars and my arms are shaking, however I maintain my eyes fastened on the creature posing atop a distant dune: an Arabian oryx.

You can see them from a mile away. With no pure predators, they perch up excessive to catch the wind’s moisture, their good white coat deflecting the solar. Thanks to the DDCR’s conservation efforts, the oryx is the solely species to have gone from ‘extinct in the wild’ to merely ‘vulnerable’.

Arabian gazelle and sand gazelle are more durable to identify, and more durable nonetheless to inform aside: “Always look at the neck, it’s a lot thicker on the sand gazelle,” advises Pete, our four-tour veteran. Both at the moment are so ample that you may barely drive a couple of metres in the reserve with out your coronary heart melting at the sight of a swan-necked Bambi, ears akimbo, watching as you cross.

The skies are teeming, too: a southern desert shrike, a hen that impales its prey upon spiky branches, oil-black desert ravens and even a critically endangered Egyptian vulture. But commonest are invasive doves, sparrows and pigeons. A decade in the past, the stretch of freeway linking the DDCR to Dubai was two-lane; now it’s eight, with housing estates mushrooming out round it.

“And with people,” Roy tells us, “come scavengers like pigeons and sparrows, who are flocking into the DDCR and outcompeting native species.”

The subsequent morning, we head to Al Faqa in the reserve’s distant southwest for a hen survey. The quiet is absolute. Waves of mist make islands of the dunes, their oryx marooned like explorers shipwrecked amid uncharted oceans.

But we’re detained by a rarer sight. A step away from the observe, the sensible eyes of an Arabian purple fox, trying again at us over its slender, silvery shoulder.

The wind blows. The fox stares. Time stops.

Its ears twitch this manner and that; the whiskered dignity of its expression suggesting it is aware of greater than it may possibly inform us. Can we perceive?

A hen cries and the fox leaps away to its den at daybreak, because it has for a thousand centuries. We, not it, are the interlopers.

After per week in the reserve, we cross the perimeter again into the “real” world. Soon the horizon erupts with sci-fi skyscrapers, inconceivable as a mirage, the dream of a desert individuals eager for lots.

Dubai’s unimaginable megacity is increasing. It turns desert into wealth, wealth into carbon, and carbon into intensifying, lethal warmth. And standing in its path: scattered oryx, a heard of gazelle, a fox at daybreak. Three scientists and some volunteers with clipboards.

The DDCR turns desert into the residing ecosystem it as soon as was. But it doesn’t make a lot cash. It’s not Ferrari World or Barbie Land. How lengthy can a ripe chunk of virgin land survive?

Through rivers of tarmac and acres of concrete, Dubai’s glass-and-steel shimmer appears to supply the whole lot. But there’s no gazelle, no oryx, no pharaoh eagle owl. In phrases of wildlife, Dubai’s city sprawl is – there’s no other phrase for it – a desert.

As to which riches are value defending? Our reply to that can form the century.

Travel necessities

Biosphere Expeditions gives an eight-night go to to the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve, together with meals, coaching and partial transfers, for £1,704 per particular person. The charity runs an additional eight expeditions worldwide, in nations together with Malawi, Sweden and Thailand.