After two centuries, a foal stands up on the golden steppe

In a fenced paddock in the Altyn Dala State Nature Reserve, a mare called Tessa gave birth to a male foal in late August. He is the first Przewalski's horse born in Kazakhstan in more than 200 years. Nine days later, a mare called Umbra did the same.

Both foals are male, and both were sired by the stallion Zorro. Their species, Equus ferus przewalskii, is the only living wild relative of the domestic horse, and it survived the twentieth century by the narrowest of margins. Every Przewalski's horse alive today descends from roughly a dozen foals captured near the Gobi around 1902 for the German animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck. Most died on European estates without breeding. The last free-ranging animal was seen in Mongolia in 1969. Until 1996 the species was classified as extinct in the wild.

Kazakhstan lost its horses earlier and more quietly, somewhere between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries — shot, crowded out by farmland, and absorbed by crossbreeding with domestic horses, which produce fertile offspring and eventually leave nothing recognisably wild behind. Returning them took three years of careful logistics: 22 horses moved from Prague Zoo and Tierpark Berlin, the first group flown in June 2024 by Czech Air Force aircraft to Arkalyk airport, then several hours by road across Kostanay region to the enclosure.

The birth of these two foals is important because it shows that the horses are adapting to this climate, to this territory. This is the proof of success.

Krivosheyeva's caution is earned. A transported animal can survive; only a breeding animal belongs. An August birth sits at the late end of the season, after a gestation of roughly eleven months, which means both mares conceived on Kazakh ground and carried through a Kazakh winter.

Eighteen more horses are needed to reach forty. Once released beyond the fence, they will do the work the steppe has missed: grazing dry vegetation down so wildfires have less to take, breaking the soil crust with their hooves so seeds can settle, and carrying those seeds in their guts across distances no plant could manage alone. Saiga antelope and Asiatic wild asses are being recovered in the same reserve, on the same reasoning.

Altyn Dala means golden steppe. For two centuries the name described a landscape missing one of its animals. It no longer does.