Xi's plane touches down at Tarbes airport

Chinese President Xi Jinping landed in Tarbes in the Hautes-Pyrenees Department of southwestern France on Tuesday, as he continues his state visit to the country.

Xi was welcomed by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, at the airport.

The Chinese president arrived in Paris on Sunday afternoon for the state visit at the invitation of his French counterpart.

France is the first leg of Xi's three-nation Europe tour, which will also take him to Serbia and Hungary in the coming days.

The endangered Tibetan antelopes have started their annual mass migration after the first batch of 47 female Tibetan antelopes passed through the Hoh Xil National Nature Reserve in northwest China's Qinghai Province on May 7.

To protect the rare species that are under top-class state protection, the management team of Hoh Xil in the province's Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture has set up the Wudaoliang protection station along the migration route. As of noon on Sunday, over 700 Tibetan antelopes had been spotted passing through the station.

The Tibetan antelope, known as the "fairies of the plateau", undertakes a migration from May to July each year. Female antelopes from the Sanjiangyuan region of Qinghai, parts of Qiangtang Terrane in Tibet, and the Arjin Mountains in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, would travel to the Zhuonai Lake in Hoh Xil to give birth before returning to their original habitats with their newborns.

"For Tibetan antelopes, we divide them into six species groups according to their geographical distribution. For example, Qinghai and Xinjiang have one group each. For Xizang (Tibet), there are three species groups in the east, central and west of the Qiangtang Terrane. And there is also one group in southern Qiangtang Terrane, which don't migrate," said Lian Xinming, researcher at the Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

With an average altitude of over 4,600 meters, the Hoh Xil Nature Reserve is known as a "no-life zone" due to its thin air and low oxygen levels.

However, it is an important habitat for Tibetan antelopes, which can reach top speeds of up to 80 kilometers per hour while running. Lian explained the reasons behind the antelopes' remarkable speed.

"I think one of the reasons why they run so fast is that they've got underfur. The warmth of its underfur is one of the characteristics of its ability to adapt to alpine cold and high altitudes. The diameter of its fur can be as thin as about one-seventh of our human hair on the temples. Secondly, its has been found in physiology that the hemoglobin of Tibetan antelope has a blood oxygen capacity that is more than 30 percent higher than that of other plain animals, which proves that the same number of red blood cells has stronger ability to carry oxygen. That should enable the Tibetan antelope to reach 70 or 80 kilometers per hour in a short time," Lian said.

After years of conservation efforts, the Tibetan antelope population in the Hoh Xil region has increased from less than 20,000 in the late 1980s to currently over 70,000.