We spent the whole day sitting in hide, waiting for saiga antelope.
These animals have very dramatic history. They were almost hunted to death in the beginning of the XX century. Then they became very well protected, in addition newly created USSR closed all the borders and it was almost impossible to export their horns (which are very popular in traditional Chinese medicine), so no one hunted them anymore and the population grew up to few millions.
Then in the 1990s everything changed. Borders were open and poachers almost hunted them to death once again. Now (thanks to specially protected nature areas) the population is growing and we have something about seven thousand of them in Russia, but they are still very rare and hard to find.
