When talking about my Chinese name, the people who know us will associate us with Hoh Xil, chiru, headwaters of the Yangtse River, and beautiful leopards in northern China.
      When talking about Three-North Feline, we refer to not only one person, me, but a group of people. These people are doing the most dangerous work (staying with tigers and leopards) in forests but without payment. They are called the leopard photographers by civilians. Of course, we are crazy. In this society, very few people can understand us, so most people think that we have this crazy habit. People may ask why we try to take photos for leopards. At first, we had several choice to take photos, but finally, we choose feline, which is at the top of the food chain. Why? Five-extreme: extreme mysterious, extreme clever, extreme beautiful, extreme dangerous, extreme risk. And also because there is no other people doing this now in China.
      In the decade before 1993, we ever met big cats, which seemed to be horrible to other people. However, it was very attractive to us. We wanted to meet them again so much that we took cameras to try take them photos. However, we did not meet them again. This let me know that we, and not only we, knew so little about them.
      After August 1998, we took a general investigation within a 340-kilometer-square area in Taihang Mountain. It continued nearly 3 years and inluded dozens of routes.
      It is nearly 9 years. We have known many details about these big cats. We have videos for 9 big cats and photos for 10 big cats. These materials seems to be unbelievable for many people, even for experts. However, now, we are so familiar with them that they are like our kids. In nature, feline is at the top of food chain no matter how small they are. Feline plays an important role in nature.
      The life of feline is not only important for themselves, also important for us human beings. We all belongs to the great nature. The study of feline also stay an important part in ecology.
      Since wild feline are very aggressive, the study of feline is really highlighted. Even though, we still know only a little about them, espeically in China. We have only a few sources to learn this knowledge, such as zoos and shelters. Observations directly from the nature is too few. Because of their beauty, many people enjoy hunting them, as a result, they have struggled in a suffering life since long long ago. The feline population has decayed rapidly; and some of them are extinct or in critical risk situation. In some cases, they are extinct before people know them. It is a tragedy for the earth, for human beings.
      Shanxi province is one of the provinces that have the most species and biggest population of feline in China. Many species of feline has been recored in history by civilian, such as North-China-Tiger (popular name: Yellow leopard, or yellow stick), leopard, leopard cat, Chinese-Zongwen-Tiger (Ai-ye leopard), Horse-Tiger (donkey-head animal), Stone-Tiger (Tu leopard), lynx etc. How about them now? How are they living? How can we protect them? That is our task. Maybe some people will ask: "What is your purpose to do this?" Here, I will answer this question for all of us：

      Maybe 300 or 500 years later, our offsprings will evaluate us. We only want to make them happy through our task: Feline Protection.

      We will try our best to do this task.
　

                                                                      Boping Wang

                                                                      May 28, 2007