Earlier this year the UK-based International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) listed the Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) as one of 15 species saved from extinction over the last few decades. Considered by some to have been the inspiration for the mythical “unicorn”, it was believed to be fast approaching oblivion by the early 1960s - reportedly due to the expansion of oil industry infrastructure encroaching on its native habitat together with an increase in oil-derived wealth, car-borne hunting and the much wider distribution of guns.
In a seminal 1960 report published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) titled A Look at Threatened Species, US ecologist Lee Talbot stated that by “1800 the oryx was still found in Sinai, lower Palestine, Transjordania, much of Iraq, and virtually all of the Arabian peninsular”, but by 1950 it was almost entirely confined to parts of northern and southern Saudi Arabia. He blamed British, American and Arab hunters.
“Motorised slaughter was introduced by foreigners and is still practiced by them,” Talbot wrote. “Hunting from a car was first practiced by British clerks on off days when they did not have time to go out and hunt in the “proper manner.” Subsequently the American oil companies brought in fleets of desert cars; then the royalties from oil production financed the Arabian princes who followed the American and British example in a grand manner.”
“Before one flatly condemns the Arab people for their attitude towards conservation and wildlife,” Talbot continued, “one should consider their historical and cultural setting, the example set by foreigners in their country, and the not unparallel [sic] histories of wildlife slaughter in other countries.”
Stimulated by Talbot’s report, a colonial officer named Michael Crouch living in what was then the British-ruled Eastern Aden Protectorate, today Yemen, drew the attention of the Fauna Preservation Society (FPS) in London to the fact that a number of oryx were regularly spotted each year in the very north-east of the Protectorate. The FPS decided to launch an expedition to capture some of them - the immediate aim being to snare enough animals to establish a captive breeding program, before releasing some of them back into the wild when their survival as a species could be guaranteed.
“Thus the oryx could be saved from extermination and when circumstances became favourable reintroduced into some part of its original habitat,” wrote Ian Grimwood, a British wildlife conservationist who led what became known as “Operation Oryx”, in his December 1962 account of the expedition.
That decision by the FPS turned out to be a remarkably prescient one given that, by the early 1970s, there were reportedly no Arabian oryx in the wild anywhere in the world. It was only in 1982, after the breeding program’s success and the release of the first captivity-raised animals into south-central Oman, that they were grazing again across parts of their native range.
Today there are an estimated 1,200 Arabian oryx in the wild and another 6,000-7,000 in captivity, according to the IUCN, following further reintroductions to other countries from the “world herd”, as it became known, and other breeding programmes. According to Fauna and Flora (FF), as the FPS is now known following various name changes, there are wild oryx in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as well as Oman.
In a recent history of FF, the Arabian oryx was the very first “iconic species” cited in the Foreword by vice-president David Attenborough owing its “survival to timely and imaginative interventions by FFI and its partners.” Elsewhere the NGO describes the Arabian oryx as “the first animal ever to be successfully reintroduced into its original habitat after being declared extinct in the wild.” According to the IUCN’s “Red List”, it is the first ever species to have gone from being considered “extinct in the wild” to merely “vulnerable.”
Held in 1962, at a time of high political and military tension in Aden and just months before civil war broke out, “Operation Oryx” was a truly extraordinary endeavour. It involved Grimwood and his team, including a vet and pilot, venturing into 8,000 square miles of sandy and stony desert to see if they could locate and lasso a tiny, rapidly dwindling number of extremely hardy, mobile animals - which they concluded numbered no more than 11. Crucial to the expedition were two Bedouin trackers, Tomatum bin Harbi and Mabkhout bin Hassanah - “without whom no oryx would have been seen or caught”, as Grimwood later put it.
In the end, only four animals were captured, one of which quickly died, which wasn’t enough to constitute a viable breeding nucleus, although that didn’t stop the FPS and many media outlets from declaring the expedition a success. It was only after Grimwood - who personally thought he and his team had failed abjectly - spent the next two years trying to convince the owners of other oryx already in captivity to donate them to the breeding program that the creation of the “world herd” became possible.
Indeed, Grimwood believed, somewhat ironically, that getting his hands on those already captive oryx was much more challenging and interesting than the 1962 expedition into the remote, inhospitable desert. The Zoological Society of London and Emir of Kuwait donated one female each, while the Municipality of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia donated two females and two males - meaning it was the Saudis who really sealed the success of the initiative.
“The getting of those four oryx from King Saud was a much more exciting story than the preceding capture operation,” Grimwood told a correspondent at the Bronx Zoo in 1983. To another in the 1970s: “I don’t think anything has ever been published on [obtaining the captive oryx from the Saudis and Kuwaitis]. . . Most of the more hilarious details are quite unpublishable.”
As Grimwood emphasised in an address at a 1987 symposium marking 25 years since the expedition, a huge number and variety of organisations and individuals had been involved with the capture effort and breeding programme, which initially was headquartered at the then brand new Phoenix Zoo in the US, now called the Arizona Center for Nature Conservation. “No less than six governments or heads of state had become involved,” he said, “including units of the armed forces of three of them.”
“In addition,” continued Grimwood, who led the expedition while on leave from his regular job as Chief Game Warden in Kenya, “five zoos and a score of societies [including the World Wildlife Fund, founded the year before], government and international agencies, and major commercial organisations had all played significant parts, as had literally hundreds of individuals in Arabia, Africa, Europe and America.”
Grimwood died 35 years ago in Kenya, leaving an archive of personal and professional papers that I’ve been trawling through. That archive includes all kinds of fascinating things about what he once called his “oryx catching lark”, including confirmation - as sometimes previously hinted at - that the animals weren’t caught in the Eastern Aden Protectorate at all, but actually across the border in independent Muscat and Oman, as it was then called.
That was because the expedition had done what one of Grimwood’s correspondents, based in Aden, called a “spot of frontier jumping” - and a decision was taken to never reveal the “real whereabouts” of where they had gone. In one letter Grimwood joked he had effectively stolen the oryx - “it would be rather embarrassing for a Chief Game Warden to be caught poaching!” - while the FPS’s secretary Leofric Boyle, who probably did more to coordinate the expedition than anyone, even Grimwood, later wrote to Oman’s ruler, Sultan Said Bin Taimur, “to apologise for any such accidental invasion.”
“Even [the oryx] we hunted and caught were all well on the Oman side of the border, though that fact cannot, of course, be published,” Grimwood admitted to the IUCN two years later.
Other things in Grimwood’s papers are even more startling and, as far as I’m aware, have never been made public before, let alone hinted at. These include the fact that at the last minute the FPS wanted to cancel the expedition and organise an “aerial reconnaissance” instead after it was discovered that a hunting party apparently led by the ruling family of Qatar had possibly killed all the remaining wild oryx, leading the main financial backer, the Daily Mail newspaper, to withdraw on the grounds that failure was inevitable. That idea was abandoned after pushback from Grimwood and others.
Later, after the expedition’s return, the FPS changed its mind again and wanted to donate the three surviving, captured oryx to European zoos, rather than hold a second expedition to try and capture more wild oryx and/or approach the Kuwaitis and Saudis for their already captive animals in order to follow through on their initial intention to start a breeding program. That idea, also subsequently abandoned, was met with disgust by Grimwood et al.
“I found it difficult to make FPS realise that the capture attempt had been a failure and they were proposing and content to add one [of the newly-captured males to a female already] in the London Zoo and deposit the remaining pair with Ernst Lang [the director of Basel Zoo in Germany],” Grimwood wrote to one correspondent in 1987.
“We of the capture party were not at all satisfied with that,” he went on. “So the getting the one female from Kuwait and the two pairs from Saudi Arabia was a somewhat defiant or mutinous personal effort, as was arranging for the Phoenix Zoo to accept charge of the whole group and the Shikar Safari Club [in the US] to foot the bill for getting the animals there. All this was presented to FPS more or less as a fait accompli requiring only a rubber stamp, although I had obtained their go ahead at various stages.”
Another expedition member, Captain G A Shepard, stationed in Saudi Arabia, called the FPS’s decision to give the oryx to zoos a “bombshell” and threatened to go public with it. Three years later he published a book, The Flight of the Unicorns: An Expedition to Preserve the Arabian Oryx, which made no mention of any of this.
“I wish you could have seen the impression which the first news of your decision caused among the party gathered to see the colour slides of the expedition,” Shepard wrote to the FPS’s Boyle in September 1962. “That [our] efforts on behalf of your society should have resulted in two European zoos getting rare animals at the expense of all those individuals and bodies who contributed to the funds of your society is a betrayal of the name and aims of your society.”
“What about “Oryx in a favourable climate”?” Shepard continued. “Does your society really want to see the animals we captured deteriate [sic] until they are in the same state as the male in the London zoo?”
However, perhaps the most potentially incendiary revelation of Grimwood’s papers is that the FPS’s original - and secret - plan had been to start the captive breeding program in Israel, after the Eastern Aden Protectorate itself and Muscat and Oman had been mooted but considered impractical. Boyle informed Grimwood - who thought it a mistake - that was the idea almost a year before the expedition set off, and their correspondence strongly suggests no other expedition member was aware. It was this that explains why the captured oryx were initially transported off the Arabian peninsula to Kenya, where Grimwood lived.
“We foresee great political difficulties in moving them straight from the Aden Protectorate (Arab) to Israel,” Boyle wrote to Grimwood in June 1961. “Would it be possible to look after them in Kenya temporarily? . . . We would ourselves know that the eventual destination of some or even all of the oryx was Israel, but to the public they would merely be going to Kenya. This is very important.”
It was Dr Heinrich Mendelssohn, a prominent zoologist at Tel Aviv University, with whom the FPS had been liaising. “[Mendelssohn] made special arrangements for the Oryx in the Sinai area,” Boyle wrote to Grimwood in September 1962, but then “the Foreign Office confirmed your opinion that to move the oryx from an Arab country to Israel would be politically inadvisable.”
Mendelssohn was obviously disappointed, having received a letter from Boyle saying no live animals would be coming his way “the very same day I was also informed that the transport by air of the three oryx from Nairobi would be guaranteed.”
“We regret the situation,” the zoologist wrote to Boyle, “as here everything has been prepared for the arrival of the oryx: the pens in our research zoo; the area at Yotvata where the eventual offspring should be liberated; the funds for the fencing of the area, which have been assured through the kind offices of Mrs H Lane” - otherwise known as Miriam Rothschild, the esteemed author and natural scientist.
Of course, none of these revelations should detract from the ultimate success of saving the Arabian oryx from apparent extinction. “By the middle of the 20th century, [it] was well on the way to becoming a footnote in the natural history books,” says an FF spokesperson now. “The plight of what was then a relatively obscure desert antelope was not seriously addressed until 1962, when the FPS devised and executed an ambitious rescue plan.”
“The intervening years have witnessed further vindication of the original captive-breeding and reintroduction initiative that helped bring this beleaguered antelope back from the brink,” the spokesperson continues. “This represented a remarkable conservation achievement, and it’s one of Fauna and Flora’s most enduring legacies.”