«If you come at dawn and dusk, it's magical,» says E.J. Milner - Gulland, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford who has studied saigas for 27 years.
Friday morning, I began sifting the literature on saiga mortality and found strong hints of a possible cause in a study of smaller saiga die - offs in 2010 (12,000 animals) and 2011 (just 450) in the animal's westernmost population, in the Urals.