Sir Bani Yas is not a surviving wilderness. It is an island in the Gulf off Abu Dhabi, planted with millions of trees from 1971 and closed to hunters in 1977. Then it was stocked, on the decision of one ruler, with the species he thought worth saving. The island is not a sandbank either. It is the top of a salt dome — a deep layer of ancient salt, lighter than the rock above it, pushed slowly upward for millions of years and buckling the layers above. Where the dome breaks the surface the exposed gypsum dissolves away in the rain, leaving the rugged cap of insoluble rubble that makes the island's hills. You cross several landscapes in a few kilometres of driving — open gravel plains, belts of planted forest, then bare rocky hills.
The animals sort into two kinds. Arabian oryx, sand gazelle and mountain gazelle belong on this coast; giraffes, ostriches and Barbary sheep never did, and the island does not pretend otherwise. In the heat of the day you find the oryx gathered under the acacia canopies, scimitar horns catching the light, white coats glaring against the gravel. On the sheltered side you slip by kayak through narrow channels cut into the mangroves, shallow and glassy early in the day, where greater flamingos and waders down the Eurasian flyway feed a few paddle-lengths from you through the winter. Inland, low excavated walls trace a church, cells, a kitchen and courtyard houses, and you can still read the plan of a daily routine in them. Monks of the Church of the East lived here for about 150 years after Islam reached the Gulf, then left without any sign of violence; it is the oldest Christian site known in the Emirates. Four oryx were put ashore here in 1978, two males and two females, at a point when the species had gone from the wild altogether. Their descendants supplied the animals released back into the mainland deserts, and in 2011 the oryx became the first species ever moved from Extinct in the Wild back to Vulnerable.