Photo by Chen Liang/China Daily

He has three daughters and one son. His daughters are married and moved out of the village, while his son now takes care of the family's plot. "Though it's a temporary job, I don't have much time or energy left to take care of the family," he says.

Already attached to the reserve for 25 years, Wang plans to keep working for another three or four years. "I still can walk with a 40- or 50-kilogram basket on my back for a day in the mountains," he says.

Unlike Wang Jiahe, 25-year-old Li Wei belongs to the "elite five" among the reserve's team of 50 patrolmen. "I am responsible for monitoring the gibbons," the farmer of the Dai ethnic group says. In the county-level reserve where he works, live 30 families of more than 100 western black-crested gibbons.

Every month he will spend 20 days in the wild to monitor the gibbons' lives in the reserve from sunrise to sunset. "Actually we have never waited until sunrise to start our work," Li says. "It would be too late to find the gibbons."

According to the patrolman, they have to depend on the gibbons' singing to locate the animals and then approach the forest dwellers silently, and observe and record their behaviors for the rest of a day. "The gibbons always start singing before sunrise," he says. "So we get up at 5 am, cook and have our breakfast before 6 am and reach the ridge line to await their duets."

They would always bring their lunch boxes. As a gibbon watcher, Li Wei takes home 1,800 yuan a month.

He has watched the gibbons for three years since he worked with the reserve. One of his greatest achievements in the three years, he says, is when "a family of three gibbons finally got used to our existence from a distance and became a little easier to observe and record".

In 2011, he co-authored an academic paper about the population and distribution of western black-crested gibbon on the Ailao Mountains in Xinping county.  

Related:

Nature the great educator

Although few participants of the recent trek on the Ailao Mountains (Ailaoshan) managed to hear the western black-crested gibbons' duets, no one seemed to regret taking part. More...