Trail cameras in China's Mangshan National Nature Reserve have captured footage of a unique musk deer, according to China Daily.
The musk deer is an endangered species, facing threats of poaching for its scent and territory fragmentation. The animals don't have antlers like most deer and signature downward-pointing canine teeth. Musk deer have also been spotted recently thanks to trail cameras in Vietnam, but this sighting in China was a little different.
"It was lucky to capture footage of a forest musk deer with an infrared camera, but there might be an even bigger surprise," said one researcher, according to China Daily (if you cannot see the images, visit the article there for some pictures).
The bigger surprise was that the musk deer captured on video was missing some of the usual characteristic markings on its coat, suggesting the discovery of a new kind of subspecies.
The musk deer discovery was made possible thanks to a robust network of infrared trail cameras, the images of which are sometimes colorized, throughout the park. The 20,000-hectare reserve was broken into a grid with 100 areas, each with cameras that needed to be checked on twice each year. Maintaining this monitoring required significant manual labor by local staff, but it has clearly borne worthwhile fruit.
Such efforts had also revealed previously that the park was home to an endangered bird, Cabot's tragopan. Since then, the Mangshan was upgraded from a provincially protected park to a federal park.
Trail cameras can help to gather data on rare and sensitive wildlife populations without being intrusive. Monitoring techniques like human photographers and drones can disrupt natural habitats in unintended ways. Trail cameras have captured rare sights like wolverines in the Yukon, water buffalo in Thailand, and lynx in Colorado.
Chinese researchers remained hopeful about the future of musk deer in the Mangshan National Nature Reserve, but evidence besides video has been challenging to come by.
"Years have passed, and we have yet to find any physical evidence of the animal," said park engineer Chen Desheng, per China Daily.
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