Goitered gazelle  (Gazella subgutturosa)

The goitered gazelle once ranged widely from the south of the Arabian Peninsula across Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Transcaucasia, former Soviet Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan), and western China to southern Mongolia. However, this range has contracted rather drastically since the beginning of the 20th Century, and the species is now locally extinct in many regions, including Georgia, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria and Yemen, and near extinct in Jordan (1).

Subspecies: Hillier’s goitered gazelles or Mongolian gazelles (G. s. hillieriana) live in the Mongolian Gobi, Yarkand or Xingjian goitered gazelles (G. s. yarkandensis) inhabit the Western Xingjian of China, Persian gazelles (G. s. subgutturosa) inhabit the vast areas of Middle Asia (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan), Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Arabian Sand gazelles (G. s. marica) live in the Arabian Peninsula (7) (8).

A wide variety of desert and semi-arid habitats are occupied (11). They occur in flat and rolling areas, but prefer foothills with broken grounds, and mountain valley and plateaus, avoiding rocky cliffs, thick woody vegetation, and lands used for agriculture or intensive livestock grazing and areas devoid of gullies and ravines (11) (12). The northern distribution is limited by snow depth in winter, because these gazelles cannot reach food where snow cover reaches depths of 10 to 15 centimetres (13). Here, aggregations of several thousand may form at lower altitudes in winter to avoid the snow, but disperse to higher altitudes in summer (9). Goitered gazelles can live from sea level up to around 3,000 metres in China, and can even climb to elevations of 3,500 metres during the warmer months in Kazakhstan (4) (11) (12) (14) (15).