The Kingdom of Rarities (32 page)

Map of Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Annamite (Truong Son) range

The first Western biologist to reach postwar Vietnam in the mid-1980s was John MacKinnon, Southeast Asia's most acclaimed field man. The Oxford-educated MacKinnon was England's answer to Indiana Jones, a superb biologist but at heart a devoted rarity hunter. His impressive body of work includes a guide to the birds of China; books on the birds of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Bali; and his most comprehensive opus, a review of protected areas in the Indo-Malayan faunal realm, a vast region stretching from Pakistan to the eastern edge of Indonesia. Many of the park systems of Southeast Asia have John's fingerprints on their design. His guiding principle: it is crucial to protect examples of all the habitat types in a country so as to conserve the widest array of species. To help develop Vietnam's new protected-area plan, John had received permission to search every habitat of this long, narrow nation lying between the Annamites and the South China Sea. At a time when most Westerners were prohibited from exploring zones most directly affected by the fighting, MacKinnon's freedom was envied by the global community of biologists.

The next arrival, in May 1990, was a younger conservator of rarities. Twenty-six-year-old David Hulse was responsible for fashioning the training program for future staff of the new park system being designed by John and his Vietnamese counterparts. David's party included Bernard Masters, an Australian education specialist with the World Bank, and me. I was new to fieldwork in Indochina, as was just about everyone but MacKinnon, but I had spent a few years in the region as the World Wildlife Fund's Asian conservation scientist. Our field visits would be limited to reserves near Hanoi, far from the places bio-explorers such as MacKinnon planned
to go. Still, on this trip we would at least be able to interview Vietnamese biologists searching for the wild orphans of war.

During our flight, David had been going through an Englishlanguage version of a Vietnamese newspaper he had found at the Bangkok airport. As our plane approached Hanoi, an unusual story caught his eye. He examined the grainy photograph of Asian elephants immersed in a jungle wallow and handed it to me. It was striking not because of the behavior captured in the image—large tropical mammals frequently slip into wallows to prevent heat stress. Rather, it was the symbolic nature of the makeshift wading pool: it was a crater left from a B-52 bombing raid thirty-five years earlier.

Before the trip, I had visited the Smithsonian Libraries to gather what information I could about rare Vietnamese species. The darkened stacks held one obscure book,
Three Kingdoms of Indo-China
. Published in 1933, it described a natural history expedition led in 1927 by the late Harold J. Coolidge Jr., a Harvard mammalogist, and Theodore Roosevelt. Their journey along the Mekong River and its tributaries cataloged the biology of a region covered in a brocade of tropical forests, remote mountains, and secluded valleys that supported unusual animals found nowhere else in the world. The expedition collected many small vertebrates, but the biologists were most interested in the four large mammal species—the elephant, a wild water buffalo, a wild ox called the banteng, and another called the gaur, also known as the seladang or Indian bison.

Other nuggets on Vietnamese rarities emerged with a bit more detective work. I read, for example, of a wild animal shipped in 1937 from Saigon to the Vincennes Zoo in Paris that turned out to be not the calf of a gaur, as assumed, but something entirely new to Western science. As a result, the regal-looking kouprey, a gray ox that roamed in small herds across the savannas and woodlands of Indochina, was first described. Larger than Brahma bulls, at 900 kilograms the males carried such an impressive rack that they could be called the Cambodian longhorn. Their magnificent horns often sported a ring of abraded splinters known as a “crown of thorns,”
the result of the bulls' frequent digging into the earth with their pointed headgear. The reason for this behavior is unclear, but it might have been a form of dominance display. The captive kouprey in Vincennes never had the chance to show off its imposing profile, though. It lived for only three years before starving to death during the German occupation of France in World War II.

Another discovery was a monograph published in 1957 by biologist Charles H. Wharton, who led an expedition to Cambodia and became the first to film wild koupreys. His planned decadelong field study ended prematurely when the war of independence against the French broke out in the early 1950s. What we know about this creature in the wild comes largely from Wharton. For decades, conservationists ranked the kouprey among the thirty rarest mammals in the world. Although few people read Wharton's monograph, many saw his remarkable 1957 film about his Cambodian journeys. A wildlife classic, the prosaically titled
Forest Cattle Survey Expedition to Southeast Asia
is a tour de force among nature documentaries. The film describes the eastern plains of Cambodia as Asia's Serengeti, harboring high densities of large mammals. Some of the scenes are priceless: Wharton, bare-chested at the wheel of a Willys Jeep bouncing through malarial jungles; sharpfeatured guides using cigarette smoke to test the wind while tracking big game; and the images of large mammals Wharton captured for posterity on film—gaurs, bantengs, wild water buffalo, Eld's deer, and koupreys.

All of these pieces of biological history replayed in my mind during the two-hour flight from Bangkok to Hanoi. I returned to reality when, with a sharp bounce, our plane hit the tarmac. Minutes later, we were inside the terminal and soon we were through customs. A young man sporting a Beatles-like mop of hair held up a sign with our names on it. Although his attire suggested Asian disco—a flashy safari suit and shiny black shoes with platform heels—he was our chaperone and translator, Mr. Tam, now smiling broadly and waving. “Welcome to Vietnam,” he offered in excellent English.

The elusive, probably extinct, kouprey (
Bos sauveli
)

After exchanging pleasantries, we piled into a waiting van, which turned out to be one of the few cars in the city at the time. On the crowded thoroughfare to town, hordes of bicyclists swerved around us at intersections. We turned off the main road and the scene instantly changed. French colonial villas bordered wide, quiet boulevards shaded by overhanging trees. This charming historic district had somehow survived bombardment. I briefly entertained the image of relaxing on an elegant balcony draped with showy blue-flowered
Thunbergia
vines, jasmine, and multicolored sprays of bougainvillea. Instead, we arrived at the Ministry of Defense Guest House. Our meager accommodations would never grace
Fodor's Vietnam
, but they were close to the Ministry of Forestry, where we would be working. The guesthouse cafeteria provided our daily rations: fried spring rolls and
pho
, the famed noodle soup of Vietnam. Female soldiers served us at the guesthouse. They smiled but kept a watchful eye on perhaps the first Americans they had seen since the war ended.

The next morning we dressed in coat and tie and set off to meet ministry officials to obtain approval for our proposed conservation program and the necessary permit to travel outside of Hanoi. We entered a large room crowned by a reluctant ceiling fan that, even at full throttle, was no match for the humidity of early May. Bernard, David, Mr. Tam, another interpreter, and I sat on one side of the long rectangular table, and the department heads sat across from us. After three days of meetings, we finally won permission to start our work, and we were itching to talk to local scientists and conservationists.

Our first appointment was with Professor Pham Mong Giao, who had led expeditions to areas that were off-limits to us, where it might be possible to see the Javan rhino. A remnant population of fewer than a dozen individuals had somehow survived the hostilities by hiding in dense forests defended by the thick canebrakes of Cat Loc, close to Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. “I have found tracks of the Javan rhino,” he told us excitedly, “and dung piles, but unfortunately, no sightings.” Weighing about 1,000 kilograms, Javan rhinos are perhaps the sixth-largest living land mammal, but spotting one, like spotting a kouprey, seemed improbable.

How circumstances had changed for this now rare megaherbivore. Until several hundred years ago, the Javan rhino ranged far from its namesake island all the way to northeastern India. Biologist George Schaller once told me that, surprisingly, before the French Indochina War in the 1950s more Javan rhinos may have roamed in Indochina than on Java.

As Professor Giao explained more about his field studies, it occurred to me that Javan rhinos possessed a trait that had served the species well during wartime. Their ability to adapt their behavior from a diurnal feeding cycle to one that was nocturnal and silent equipped them to take shelter in the daytime. They survived on the browse available while hiding in an impenetrable thicket of spiny rattan that even guerillas shunned. As long as the Javan rhino's energetic requirements could be met by eating only at night, it could avoid being seen.

We made plans to meet John MacKinnon, who was also in town, at a cafeteria favored by university students. It wasn't hard to spot our man—a tall, pale Westerner with gray hair, the only person there over the age of fifty. He would be headed next, he said, to a mountainous section of the Vu Quang area northwest of Hue. “Satellite photos show this to be the largest block of intact forest in the country,” he noted. “It's very wet, it's a highly restricted area, and no Westerner has been in there.” Biologists have long suspected that the wettest tropical forests hold the greatest hotbeds of rarities. The scientific rationale for the rarity distribution: superwet forests probably served as refuges for numerous species during dry epochs, and when the wet periods returned, many stayed put.

John's brilliance far overshadowed his reputation for being difficult. In addition to helping to set up Vietnam's new park system, he was also here to find koupreys and other rare large mammals rumored to be lurking about. Drawn into a tense competition with several Western biologists to find these missing species, he planned to reach them first.

After meeting with John, we headed to Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam's answer to Yellowstone. Reaching the park would require driving for five hours on a rough track and ferrying across several rivers. During our first hour or so out of Hanoi, the landscape revealed little of interest. As we drove on, the eroded limestone cliffs we saw rising from the plains resembled the foreground of an ancient Asian landscape painting. A copse of lowland forest was hard to find in the vast panorama of paddy fields and limestone pinnacles between Hanoi and Cuc Phuong. Vietnam was well on its way to challenging Thailand as the world's number one exporter of rice.

Sadly, our tight schedule and government chaperone gave us no time to stop and explore one of the world's greatest yet least known reservoirs of rarities. Had we ascended the limestone cliffs, we would have found enough specimens on their rich flanks to spend years cataloging an impressive new collection. When Tony Whitten, an expert on animals in limestone habitats, surveyed land
snails along our route and in northern Vietnam, he discovered that almost one-third of the 270 species he encountered were new to science. Besides land snails, many species of plants and insects are also limestone specialists; searching a previously unexplored outcrop can yield a haul of invertebrates of which 90 percent will be new to science. Ha Long Bay, made famous in the film
Indochine
, is studded with more than 2,000 breathtakingly sculpted limestone islands, many holding rare orchids, balsams, and begonias found nowhere else. The limestone bluffs in Vietnam offered in miniature a pattern that has emerged across many limestone-rich areas in the tropics: hotbeds of species with extremely small ranges on unusual soil types that have been reproductively isolated for long enough periods to allow for speciation. Tragically, we observed dump trucks backing up to the base of a limestone tower. The rarity-rich mountain of accessible limestone was being mined for building materials. It was the first visual sign of our journey that nature conservation would take a backseat to building the new Vietnam.