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Oman has become one of the most compelling conservation success stories in the Middle East.
Across deserts, mountains, wetlands, and coastal waters, the country has worked to protect species that once stood on the brink of disappearance.
Across deserts, mountains, wetlands, and coastal waters, the country has worked to protect species that once stood on the brink of disappearance.
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00:00Oman sits on a stretch of desert and coastline that most people fly over without a second thought.
00:05But underneath that quiet landscape is one of the most aggressive wildlife recovery efforts on the planet.
00:11Animals that were hunted to zero, animals down to their last 50, animals clinging on in a handful of mountain
00:18valleys.
00:18Some of these stories worked out, some are still hanging by a thread.
00:22Today we're going through five of them, the oryx, the leopard, the turtle, the tar, and the gazelle.
00:27And we're going to find out exactly how close each one came to disappearing forever, and what it actually took
00:33to pull them back.
00:34Let's start with the animal that basically invented the idea that extinction in the wild doesn't have to be the
00:40end of the story.
00:41The Arabian oryx, a white antelope with long straight horns that from certain angles looks like it only has one,
00:47was the first animal ever to be successfully reintroduced into its original habitat after being declared extinct in the wild.
00:55Here's how bad it got.
00:56By the early 1970s, the animals attracted Sheikh Zayed's attention when it was critically endangered in the 1970s,
01:04when their number began to decline and reached five to seven individuals in the wild.
01:09Five to seven, not five to 7,000, five to seven oryx, total, walking around the entire Arabian peninsula.
01:16The species was hunted for sport and for trophies, and by 1972, there were none left wandering free.
01:22But before that final collapse, conservationists had already seen it coming.
01:27A rescue mission had captured a handful of oryx and started a breeding program.
01:31And years later, the program began with four individuals captured near the border of Oman.
01:37By an expedition led by Major Ian Grimwood, the chief game warden of Kenya, and seven more oryx were donated
01:43for the project.
01:44Those animals ended up at the Phoenix Zoo in Arizona.
01:47And the Phoenix Zoo's breeding program proved highly successful, resulting in numerous births.
01:53And many of the Arabian oryx found in the wild today are descendants of individuals from that herd.
01:59Then came the moment Oman actually gets credit for bringing them home.
02:02Ten years after the species had been exterminated in the wild by poaching.
02:07The first ten founder oryx, descendants of the world herd, were reintroduced to the desert in central Oman in January
02:131982.
02:15That's the headline fact right there.
02:17Ten animals released into the same desert where the species had vanished a decade earlier.
02:21It wasn't smooth, a second release followed in 1984, and the population grew slowly through a three-year drought.
02:28That was broken by rain in June 1986.
02:31Drought is brutal for a desert antelope that depends on scattered vegetation, so those first few years would touch and
02:38go.
02:38But once the rain came back, the numbers followed.
02:41Further years of good rainfall and more founders meant that by April 1919, there were over 100 oryx in the
02:48wild.
02:48Independent of supplementary feed and water, and using a range of over 11,000 square kilometers.
02:55That's the point where you can say the reintroduction actually worked.
02:58Animals surviving without human hand-feeding, spreading out over an enormous stretch of desert on their own.
03:04By the mid-90s, the population had nearly tripled again.
03:08The population continued to grow, and by October 1995, numbered approximately 280 in the wild.
03:14Of which 22 were surviving founders and used over 16,000 square kilometers, Oman had gone from zero wild oryx
03:23to nearly 300 in about 13 years.
03:26The sanctuary built for them became so significant that it earned UNESCO recognition, and the world had its case study.
03:32The Arabian Oryx Sanctuary is an area within the central desert and coastal hills of biogeographical regions of Oman,
03:39and its rare fauna includes the first free-ranging herd of Arabian Oryx since the global extinction of the species
03:46in the wild in 1972,
03:48and its reintroduction here in 1982.
03:51Then it nearly all fell apart again.
03:54As the herd grew, so did the incentive for poachers and collectors.
03:58Between 1996 and 1999, the population of Arabian Oryx in Oman dropped from 400 to 100 individuals.
04:06That's a catastrophic collapse, 300 animals gone in three years, largely to illegal live capture for private collections.
04:13It got so severe that hunting remains a serious threat to this day, particularly in Oman where, ironically,
04:20the population has been decimated by illegal live capture for sale to private collections.
04:25Rangers scrambled to save what was left.
04:28Nearly 40 Oryx were moved into protected enclosures to keep them safe from the same poachers who had already gutted
04:34the free-ranging herd.
04:35The species survived that scare, just barely.
04:38And the wider Gulf effort, with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and others running their own reintroductions,
04:45kept the overall population climbing.
04:47By 2011, the global status had improved enough that further advancements led to its reclassification as vulnerable,
04:54demonstrating a remarkable recovery and inspiring hope for its future.
04:58The Oryx that Oman first set loose in the desert in 1982 became the return of the Arabian Oryx to
05:05Oman.
05:05That symbolized the success of a new approach to species conservation and established reintroduction as a conservation tool.
05:13It's still not safe.
05:14Overgrazing, drought, and poaching remain constant pressure.
05:17But it's alive, it's breeding, and it's roaming free in the same desert it vanished from,
05:22which 40 years ago nobody thought was possible.
05:25If the Oryx is Oman's flagship success, the Arabian leopard is the one still hanging on by its claws in
05:32real time.
05:32This is the world's smallest leopard subspecies, and Oman's Dofar Mountains in the south of the country
05:38are essentially its last real stronghold anywhere on Earth.
05:41The scale of the crisis here is staggering compared to the Oryx.
05:45We're not talking hundreds of animals, we're talking dozens.
05:48According to one study, the global wild population is estimated to comprise 100 to 120 individuals,
05:56with the largest known subpopulation in the Dofar Governorate of southern Oman.
06:01A more recent genetic study narrowed, but even further just for Oman.
06:05Researchers combined genetic and ecological data to estimate the wild population at just 51 individuals,
06:11and found that captive leopards retained genetic variants, now missing in the wild.
06:1651 leopards, that's the entire population researchers could account for in the country,
06:22holding the largest share of the species on the planet.
06:24The leopard's range collapse tells the story of how close this cat came to vanishing entirely from the region.
06:30It once occurred throughout the mountainous regions of Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia,
06:35the United Arab Emirates, Palestine, and Jordan.
06:38But by the 1990s, the leopard became locally extinct across most of that range.
06:43Today it survives in just a sliver of territory.
06:46The largest felid found in the Arabian Peninsula now clings to just 2% of its former range.
06:52So what did Oman actually do?
06:54Unlike some neighboring countries that leaned on captive breeding facilities, Oman took a different route.
07:00Although Oman also has a captive center for Arabian leopards,
07:03it has focused on the conservation of wild populations.
07:06Protecting the animals that were still out there, rather than betting everything on zoo-bred releases.
07:12That meant declaring reserves, like Jabal Samhan,
07:15which was declared a nature reserve in 1997, through a royal decree.
07:20It also meant working directly with the herders, whose livestock sometimes crossed paths with the cats.
07:26Officials leaned on compensation schemes,
07:28so that farmers wouldn't retaliate against leopards for killing goats.
07:32And by 2018, wildlife officials were reporting that the Office for the Conservation of Environment
07:37worked very closely with citizens, in order to compensate any cases of predation on their livestock.
07:43And in the past few years, they compensated many people for their loss of livestock.
07:48That single policy shift, paying people, instead of letting them shoot the leopard responsible,
07:52is credited with easing tension in leopard country.
07:56And it appears to be paying off.
07:58Camera traps, the primary tool researchers used to track an animal too shy to ever really be seen,
08:04started picking up encouraging signs.
08:06In 2018, officials reported a leopard had turned up somewhere it hadn't been recorded before.
08:12The Arabian leopard has been sighted by the public in the eastern and western parts of Dofar.
08:17And the recent recording of the leopard in the northern part of Taka, holds special significance,
08:22because it is for the first time the species has made an appearance in the area.
08:26A manager working for Oman's Environment Authority,
08:29summed up what that kind of sighting means for a species this fragile.
08:33Noting that despite the encouraging signs,
08:35there is still a lot of work to be done to secure its future.
08:38Then in 2023, came a sighting that stunned even veteran researchers.
08:43In a rare sighting, three critically endangered Arabian leopards were seen together in Oman's Dofar government.
08:50And the Environment Authority announced for the first time since it started monitoring wildlife
08:54that three adult Arabian leopards were sighted by camera traps walking together in the mountainous region.
09:00Leopards are famously solitary.
09:02Catching three adults together on camera was treated as close to a miracle by the people who study them.
09:08And the range expansion kept going.
09:10In early 2025, researchers documented the cat pushing back into territory it hadn't occupied in years.
09:17The Arabian leopard made a remarkable return to the Nejd in Dofar, Oman,
09:22extending its known range by 40 kilometers northwards.
09:25That study was released to coincide with World Arabian Leopard Day,
09:29and researchers called it heartening news for the critically endangered species facing numerous threats.
09:35One of Oman's own environmental affairs managers, who has spent over a decade watching this cat cling to survival in
09:41the mountains around Salala.
09:43Put it about as plainly as anyone could when talking about the population.
09:47It's relatively stable and shows signs of expanding its range.
09:51And prey animals like ibex and gazelle are bouncing back in Dofar right alongside it.
09:56The leopard is still critically endangered.
09:58It is still one of the rarest big cats on earth.
10:01But in a country where it was once assumed to be gone from entire mountain ranges, it's now walking new
10:07ground.
10:08Now we go from mountains to the coast,
10:10because Oman's beaches host one of the largest turtle nesting events left on the planet.
10:15And it very nearly didn't happen at all.
10:17The green turtle's Omani stronghold is a stretch of coastline called Raz al-Had,
10:22along with the neighboring beaches of Raz al-Jits.
10:25This isn't a minor nesting site, it's one of the biggest gatherings of green turtles anywhere in the Indian Ocean.
10:31This 120-square-kilometer protected area, with a 40-kilometer coastline,
10:36is home to over 30,000 sea turtles annually, making it one of the most significant nesting sites in the
10:43world.
10:43Every summer, thousands of females haul themselves out of the surf,
10:47under cover of darkness to dig nests and lay eggs.
10:50Exactly the way their ancestors did for millions of years.
10:53Except now, they're doing it with rangers watching over them, instead of hunters waiting for them.
10:58That protection didn't happen by accident.
11:01Oman's government moved decades ago to lock the beaches down as protected territory.
11:06Raz al-Had Nature Reserve and its wildlife are protected by Royal Decree 2596,
11:12issued in 1996 by His Majesty Sultan Qaboos.
11:16Since then, patrols have been a constant presence on those beaches.
11:19Since 1991, park rangers patrol the area, and turtle-watching activities are restricted to Raz al-Gint's North Beach
11:27to reduce the impacts of ecotourism on nesting females who are easily spooked by lights or noise.
11:32The scale of what rangers manage today is enormous.
11:35In just the first half of 2026, specialists at Raz al-Had Turtle Reserve rescued 56 stranded sea turtles
11:43and documented more than 12,000 turtle tracks along the reserve's beaches in six months alone.
11:49And it's not just green turtles.
11:51Oman's coastline supports the full suite of regional species.
11:55Established in 1996, the reserve hosts four turtle species,
11:59the green turtle, olive ridley, loggerhead, and hawksbill.
12:02But the most remarkable evidence that this program actually works isn't a population count.
12:08It's the turtles themselves coming home.
12:10Green turtles imprint on the exact beach where they hatched
12:14and will travel unbelievable distances to return their decades later to nest.
12:18Oman's tagging program has caught this happening again and again.
12:22In 2025, officials confirmed a green turtle had returned to its nesting site
12:27on Say al-Mari Beach in Raz al-Had.
12:30More than 15 years after it was first tagged by the Environment Authority,
12:34and that wasn't even a record.
12:36In previous years, Raz al-Gintz documented similar cases of turtles returning after long absences,
12:42including one tagged in 1991 that came back 29 years later,
12:47and another that reappeared 31 years after being recorded.
12:51Think about that.
12:52A turtle swims the open ocean for three decades
12:55and finds its way back to the exact patch of sand where it hatched.
12:58Researchers point to this as proof of something bigger than luck.
13:02It's the scientific value of Oman's turtle conservation efforts
13:06because none of that data exists without decades of consistent tagging.
13:10Even earlier cases made headlines internationally.
13:13Back in 2018, Oman's own Environment Ministry reported
13:17that a turtle originally tagged in the 1990s had shown up again,
13:21noting the animal had swam thousands of miles around the world
13:25before returning to the sultanate again.
13:27The reserve isn't just surviving,
13:29it's actively expanding its scientific footprint.
13:32With satellite tracking now layered on top of the old tagging system,
13:36specialized teams monitor nesting beaches during breeding seasons,
13:40protect nests from threats, collect scientific data,
13:43and track turtle migration routes using satellite technology.
13:47It's a program that turned a stretch of empty desert coastline
13:50into one of the most important turtle sanctuaries on Earth.
13:54And turtles that hatched there are still finding their way back,
13:57one tagged flipper at a time.
13:59This next one is the quiet, mountain-dwelling relative of the goat
14:02that most people outside Oman have never heard of.
14:05And it's arguably in more danger right now than any other animal on this list.
14:10The Arabian tar lives exclusively in the rugged Hajar mountains
14:14that run through northern Oman and into the eastern UAE.
14:17The Arabian tar occurs only in the mountains of northern Oman
14:21and the United Arab Emirates.
14:23It's a small, sturdy, goat-like animal that survives on steep rock faces
14:28most predators can't be bothered to climb,
14:30which is basically its only real defense mechanism,
14:33because everything else about its situation is precarious.
14:37Decades of research to paint a species clinging to survival by a thread.
14:41One of the earliest detailed surveys found Arabian tar confined to Oman,
14:46with a population of under 2,000.
14:48Of that already small number,
14:50most weren't even living in areas where conservation could realistically help them.
14:54The total population was less than 2,000 animals,
14:58and of these only 950 were in well-defined areas suitable for conservation.
15:03That means roughly half the entire global population of this species
15:07existed scattered outside any protective boundary,
15:10exposed to every threat with no buffer at all.
15:12And the threats haven't slowed down.
15:15Unlike a leopard or an oryx,
15:16the tar's biggest enemy isn't a hunter with a rifle, it's a goat.
15:20Negative impacts caused by anthropogenic disturbances
15:23are the main cause of tar absence in areas that otherwise appear to be suitable.
15:28And of these, the displacement of tar by domestic goats is the most serious.
15:33Domestic herds compete directly for the same food and terrain,
15:36and because they're everywhere across the Hadjo range,
15:39the tar keeps getting pushed into smaller and smaller pockets.
15:43Poaching hasn't disappeared either.
15:44Poaching still occurs in Oman,
15:46as indicated by the periodic prosecution of poachers.
15:50Recent genetic work has made the picture even more urgent.
15:54Scientists studying the species' DNA found the population isn't just small.
15:58It's fragmented into isolated pockets that barely interact with each other anymore.
16:03Analyses of landscape connectivity supported the genetic results showing poor connectivity
16:08between populations in the far south of the study area and those in the north.
16:12That kind of isolation is a slow-motion crisis.
16:15Over the long term, reduced connectivity results in increased extinction risk,
16:20particularly for endangered species with small populations.
16:24And as population size decreases, allelic variants drift to extinction,
16:28resulting in an erosion of genetic diversity.
16:31So what has Oman actually done about it?
16:34The government has focused on habitat protection rather than mass-captive breeding,
16:38proposing new reserves specifically to safeguard remaining tar strongholds.
16:43The government of Oman has proposed two new protected areas
16:46that would safeguard Arabian tar populations in the Jabal Abu Daud area
16:51and the mountains between Rustak and Nakhl,
16:53with a further protected area proposed in Al-Burani to safeguard a northern population.
16:59There's also a longer-term ecological safety net being built quietly in the background.
17:04A seed bank has been established by the Oman Botanic Garden
17:07that includes the tar's major forage species,
17:10so that destroyed areas can be revegetated
17:13if habitat is ever lost to drought or overgrazing.
17:16Researchers are blunt about how much work remains.
17:19Even as new protections roll out,
17:22one recent review of the species outlook
17:24made clear that intensifying droughts are already testing the tar's limits,
17:28with rising temperatures approaching 50 degrees C in summer,
17:32limiting thermal refugia in higher elevations.
17:35Unlike the oryx or the leopard,
17:36there's no single dramatic rescue story here.
17:39No captive herd shipped in from a foreign zoo.
17:42No viral camera trap photo.
17:43It's slower, harder work.
17:45Protecting mountains slopes one valley at a time,
17:48and hoping the tar can hang on long enough for it to matter.
17:51Last up is an animal that shares its home turf
17:54with almost everything else on this list.
17:56The Arabian gazelle,
17:57which roams the exact same desert sanctuary in central Oman,
18:01where the oryx made its comeback.
18:02The gazelle's story starts with a status that sounds almost reassuring
18:07compared to the leopard or the tar,
18:09but hides a slower, quieter kind of crisis.
18:11Today, the Arabian gazelle occurs only in small,
18:14scattered populations on the Arabian peninsula,
18:17and is classified as vulnerable,
18:19due to intensive hunting and competition with livestock.
18:23Scattered is the key word.
18:24This isn't one healthy population.
18:26It's fragments of one spread across a huge desert region.
18:29Each pocket's small enough to be wiped out by a single bad drought
18:33or a single wave of poaching.
18:35Oman's central desert sanctuary,
18:37the same protected stretch built to save the oryx,
18:40turned out to also be the gazelle's best remaining refuge
18:43anywhere on the peninsula.
18:44The sanctuary is home to the only wild breeding sites in Arabia
18:48of the endangered Barra Bustard,
18:50as well as Nubian ibex, Arabian wolves,
18:53honey badgers, caracals,
18:54and the largest wild population of Arabian gazelle.
18:57That's a remarkable fact on its own.
19:00The single largest wild gazelle population left in Arabia
19:03exists specifically because Oman fenced off a stretch of desert
19:07to save a completely different animal.
19:09And the gazelle rode along on those protections.
19:12Scientists have also been racing to sort out a basic problem
19:15that's held back formal recovery plans for years.
19:19Taxonomists still can't agree on exactly how many distinct populations
19:22of Arabian gazelle even exist,
19:24which makes breeding and reintroduction complicated.
19:28The taxonomy of this threatened species is still under debate,
19:31hampering conservation efforts.
19:33While ex-situ breeding programs could be an appropriate conservation measure
19:37to prevent the species from going extinct,
19:40researchers have been using genetic testing
19:42to try to answer that question properly,
19:45comparing wild populations against captive breeding stock
19:48to make sure any future reintroductions actually match the genetics of the animals
19:53meant to receive them.
19:54Researchers used mitochondrial markers, microsatellite markers,
19:58and intron markers to identify conservation units
20:01to match them with genotypes found in the captive breeding stock
20:05and to ensure that genotype diversity of potential founder individuals
20:09corresponds to that prevailing at targeted reintroduction sites.
20:12It's slow, unglamorous science,
20:15but it's the kind of groundwork that determines
20:17whether a reintroduction actually succeeds
20:19or just wastes a captive population
20:21that never should have been released into the wrong valley.
20:24The gazelle also isn't alone in benefiting from Oman's desert protections.
20:29It shares its sanctuary with a bird that's just as endangered
20:32and just as reliant on that same fenced-off land.
20:36The Hubara Bustards only guaranteed wild breeding grounds
20:39anywhere on the peninsula's city,
20:41inside that same sanctuary boundary,
20:44meaning the protections built around the orcs
20:46effectively created a lifeline
20:47for at least three other species
20:49stacked on top of each other in the same patch of desert.
20:52That's really the throughline across everything Oman has done here.
20:56From the mountains of Dhofar
20:57to the beaches of Ra's al-Had
20:59to the fenced desert of the central plains,
21:02the recovery of one flagship animal
21:04kept dragging quieter,
21:06less famous species back from the edge right along with it.
21:09The oryx got the fame,
21:10the turtles got the tourists,
21:12but the leopard, the tar, and the gazelle
21:14have all been fighting the same fight in the shadows.
21:17And in Oman, at least for now,
21:19that fight is still going in their favor.