For much of his life, Mao Rizhao was a skillful hunter, but now he protects the animals he used to kill for food or profit. He recently found a seriously injured antelope, nursed it back to health, and returned it to the wild.

Like many of his fellow residents in the Shennongjia Nature Reserve in central China, Mao has joined in the drive started by local communities in the 1990s to save wildlife from the threat of man.

To give the animals more space in their natural habitat, more than 5,000 villagers have voluntarily moved out of the reserve and resettled outside the mountains.

Xie Dengfeng, a local government official, said that villagers participating in the community's efforts to protect wildlife have alleviated the conflicts between man and nature, and the relocation will help preserve the nature reserve, home to 70 kinds of animals under State protection.

Twenty years ago, the residents in Shennongjia Nature Reserve existed on hunting, herb collecting and logging, activities which were pushing the wild animals to near extinction.

In 1986 when Shennongjia Nature Reserve was set up, hunting, tree cutting and herb collecting were banned in a zone of 70,000 ha, permanently changing the fate of the wildlife there.

But illegal hunting occasionally occurred. In 1987, several peasants were imprisoned for selling 22 golden monkeys.

As the number and varieties of wild animals increased, they ate more and more livestock and crops, which created hardship for the farmers. Villagers fought back by building fences, setting up scarecrows, and beating gongs to frighten off the beasts, but about 40 percent of their crops were spoiled.

"Wild animals should be protected, and we can no longer make a living here," said a worried villager.

In the past few years, more and more residents have decided on their own to move outside the reserve.

"In a period of 20 years, there have been fundamental changes in villagers' attitudes toward the wild animals: they gave up hunting to protect wild animals, and people are now making way for beasts in all regards," said Hu Hongxing, an ecologist at Wuhan University.