Sir Bani Yas holds one of the world's largest herds of Arabian oryx — an animal hunted out of the wild altogether by the early 1970s, and alive today only because people carried it back. Four of them, two males and two females, were brought over from Al Ain in 1978, onto an island Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan had begun planting in 1971 and closed to hunters in 1977. Their descendants graze the open plains in the hundreds now, and in 2011 the oryx became the first species ever to climb from Extinct in the Wild back to Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. The ground beneath them is odd in its own right: the island is the crest of a salt dome, a mass of buried salt forced slowly upward until it lifted 87 square kilometres of gypsum and rubble hills clear of the sea.
You cross the Arabian Wildlife Park in an open safari vehicle, and the roster takes a moment to place — giraffes and ostriches from Africa browsing beside Arabian sand gazelles and Barbary sheep, on pale gravel plains with the Gulf glinting past the acacias. Predators live here too, a handful of radio-collared cheetahs and striped hyenas being taught to hunt for themselves, but they are few and most visitors never see one. The herds are the show. Down at the shoreline, salt flats and mangrove creeks pull in waders and greater flamingos through the winter months. Inland stand the excavated walls of a Christian monastery of the 7th and 8th centuries, found in 1992 and now open to walk through — the oldest known church in the Emirates. You arrive by ferry from the mainland at Jebel Dhanna, and the island's resorts run every drive.