UNITED ARAB EMIRATES


We’ve just left the Adventure Centre of the Ritz-Carlton Al Wadi,


a 40-minute drive south west of Jebel Jais and inside the gated reserve, and already we’re face-to-muzzle with these Middle Eastern icons — the national animal of the UAE, Jordan, Oman, Bahrain and Qatar. They have ringed horns as high as they are tall, and white, almost luminous coats to reflect the sun’s harsh rays, part of what’s made them so well-adapted to life in these scorched lands. “But it makes it hard to hide,” adds Sisira. “That’s one reason why they almost disappeared.” The Arabian oryx historically ranged throughout the Arabian


Peninsula and beyond. Bedouin hunted it for its meat and hide, but the popularisation of motorised vehicles and automatic weapons in the region, coupled with the rise of trophy hunting, exacerbated threats to its survival. By 1972, it was declared extinct in the wild, persisting only in zoos and private parks. A rewilding process started a decade later, making this the world’s first species to be successfully reintroduced into its natural habitat. Still, protected reserves remain most visitors’ best bet of spotting one


— or dozens. Al Wadi welcomed nine oryxes in 2011; today, there are 113 and counting. We’re here during mating season, which runs roughly from October to May, and families are out in their herds. We spot a pair of month-old siblings scampering behind their parents and a female heavy with the weight of her taut abdomen. “It’ll give birth in less than two days — ah,” Sisira halts mid-sentence, spine tensed, eyes shooting up. “Do you hear that?” The call of the Indian roller is a robotic chack, and when the small


bird flies out from the shrub where it has been resting, I wonder if it is in fact a hologram. From its brown body, it lifts open oversized wings with a plumage so vibrant it looks out of place: bands of bright turquoise and electric blue, with shafts of indigo and grey-green tinges on the tips. “It’s one of the most colourful birds in this desert,” says Sisira. The entire desert is more colourful than I expected. The dunes, damp


from the day’s intermittent showers, are an earthy terracotta, covered in grass that has sprouted in what’s been an unusually wet winter. It’s the result of cloud seeding, locals have told me — the process of releasing chemicals or, as is the case locally, salt particles into the air to conjure rainfall. Countries from the UAE to the US use it to combat water scarcity and other issues, but the jury’s still out on what its long- term effects might be on the environment. When I ask Sisira what he thinks of the green dunes, he shrugs in


a soft manner that’s hard to decipher. What’s clear is his love of the reserve, which he picks apart on the rest of our safari with forensic knowledge. He points out burrows, homes to pharaoh eagle-owls and Arabian red foxes, and tracks Arabian darkling beetles and desert running ants from pinprick prints in the sand. We listen to the warble of the great grey shrike, then purse our lips to emulate the flat hoo-hoo- ing of the Eurasian hoopoe. We stop in a grove of ghaf, the UAE’s national tree, known as ‘camel


umbrellas’ for the shade they provide. As if to demonstrate, sand gazelles — the reserve’s other resident antelope — are walking under the canopy, finding respite from the sun that appears in and out of the cloud cover. “They run, but not for long,” says Sisira. “What they can do is sprint.” Right on cue, they all tense, reacting to a noise, danger or instinct imperceptible to my human senses, before darting away and up a mound, joining some oryxes. On the drive back, Sisira tells me the Arabic word for oryxes is


al maha, meaning ‘beautiful eyes’ — large and black, emphasised by a slit of darker fur that seems to cut through them to the jaws. When I close mine, the image of the herd on the crest of the dune, silhouetted against the glare of the grey sky, replays long after we’ve left.


Clockwise from left: A camel in the Al Wadi Desert; where the desert meets the sea — the Persian Gulf on the edge of Ras Al Khaimah and the neighbouring emirate of Umm Al Quwain; soft, undulating sand, on the side of a dune, exposed after a rain shower


JUL/AUG 2024


95


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