The Kingdom of Rarities (33 page)

It wasn't until we entered the buffer zone of Cuc Phuong that the rich Vietnamese forest appeared. At the headquarters we met the park director, Nguyen Ba Thu, a gentle man in his late forties. He gave us a brief introduction to the park, and we then spent the afternoon poking around the forest looking for some of Cuc Phuong's rare primates, among them the Delacour's langur, a highly threatened species native to the park. Of the twenty-one species of primates found in Vietnam, fourteen are endangered. Many have startlingly human faces, especially the bewhiskered red-shanked douc, whose eyes are shadowed in powder blue.

The next day, Mr. Thu took us on a walking tour of the park. Besides its langurs, Cuc Phuong is famous for a mammal endemic to Indochina, the Owston's palm civet. Civets resemble long-snouted weasels with bold stripes. This particular civet is restricted to Laos, northern and central Vietnam, and nearby China. Cuc Phuong is one of the few parks that offer this civet protection so it can pursue its favorite activity—hunting night crawlers—without risking
capture and ending up on a dinner plate. Palm civets are also expert coffee pickers. Civets roam freely about the plantations and harvest only the ripest berries. Their droppings contain select beans that, when picked out, washed, dried, and roasted, sell for a fortune. In Vietnam these beans are marketed as “weasel coffee,” in Sumatra as
kopi luak
or
kopi musang
, “civet coffee.” Either way, some insist civet droppings yield the world's finest java.

But after an entire day of exploration, we had seen neither civet nor langur. Our mammal list had not expanded beyond a few squirrels. We had encountered leeches in great abundance, however. Terrestrial leeches are rare in the New World (although there is a rich diversity of aquatic leeches) but ubiquitous in Asia above 2,000 meters and in moist lowland habitats. One explanation for the dearth of leeches in the New World is that vast blood reserves disappeared when the region's large mammals went extinct in the Pleistocene epoch. In contrast, Asia is still a leech outpost, with plenty of large mammals on the menu, including humans.

Judging by our experience, however, leeches in Cuc Phuong must have had a hard time finding those mammals. Excessive hunting had turned this area into a virtual “empty forest”—a forest without its vertebrates—an increasingly common sight in the tropics by the 1990s. One cause was certainly the pressures exerted by specialized poachers on the persistence of rarities—from jaguar trappers to rhino horn thieves to smugglers of tiger bone and elephant ivory—and feather hunters, as we have seen in New Guinea, Peru, Nepal, Brazil, and Hawaii.

But another group is an even more disastrous contributor to the empty forest syndrome: bushmeat hunters. The term “bushmeat” refers to any wild game caught by locals. Sometimes the meat is for the family pot, but more often and more damaging, commercial hunters capture or kill wild game for restaurants or wealthy urban customers. Commercial bushmeat hunting is particularly pervasive in the tropics. There is practically a subdiscipline in the field of conservation biology devoted to describing its staggering footprint
and how to contain it. We began to suspect that the communes around Cuc Phuong were home to among the most effective bushmeat hunters anywhere, as the forest surrounding us remained eerily silent. What we were witnessing was in microcosm a major challenge facing many former war zones: the soldiers return home with their weapons and the skills to use them.

Two days later, we were back in Hanoi with John MacKinnon to attend an all-day symposium on forests and conservation. We were the only Westerners present. At lunch, we were ushered to a seat next to a distinguished-looking elderly man in uniform, who turned out to be General Vo Nguyen Giap, a famous Vietnamese soldier-turned-conservationist. I knew of his reputation as Vietnam's Eisenhower and as a superb tactician, but I wondered what made the general a conservationist. In his fluent French, he explained, “The forest is our friend. It hid us and provided shelter, food, and water. Now it is our turn to save it.” The forested areas at the borders with Laos and Cambodia had allowed North Vietnamese soldiers to infiltrate the south and conceal their divisions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The dense Vietnamese forest hid more than soldiers and material, though. It had also become the last sanctuary for the region's forest-dwelling rarities.

In 1992, two years after that initial trip, David Hulse was among the first conservationists to return under license from a US government program seeking to build relationships with Vietnam. Along with him, a small army of Western naturalists were eager to explore the Annamites and beyond. MacKinnon would have to hurry if he wanted to beat the pack in sighting the kouprey and other lost species.

There was a silver lining to such earlier unsuccessful kouprey surveys and related searches in the secluded Annamite range. Field scientists had uncovered a seam of rare species that startled the world, reporting new finds across a wide range of taxa: a bovid, a
rabbit, two deer, several birds, and hundreds of fish. It was as if, eons ago, the Asian plate had tilted east, and all the rarities had rolled toward the South China Sea before dropping into hidden valleys of the Annamites.

Meanwhile, MacKinnon continued his quest for the kouprey. “It's a bit like looking for the Yeti or Bigfoot, this animal,” he told a reporter who had come to cover his story. “First, it was just extremely rare and then it was shrouded in mystery through 30 years of warfare. It's become sort of a symbol of conservation in Indochina.” After extensive surveys in the company of Professor Giao and other Vietnamese field men, MacKinnon's team struck gold that year, though not in the form of his original quest species. During an expedition to the Vu Quang Nature Reserve in Ha Tinh Province, they were invited into some hunters' houses. The hunters placed three skulls on the table of something entirely new to the Westerners. The sharp, saber-like horns resembled the weapons of Africa's scimitar-horned oryx. And so
Pseudoryx
, or, as it became known, the saola, entered the annals of the mammal kingdom.

News of the saola spread fast. Further surveys of the Vu Quang region turned up more than twenty specimens, and at last a wild saola was caught in 1994. An account in the journal
Nature
raised its profile. David Hulse made his own trip to the area, and his stunning photographs of this peculiar ungulate gave a face to the name. All of this attention raised an obvious question. How could a large herbivore weighing more than 90 kilograms and with formidable horns stay hidden from scientists, Vietnamese or Western, for so long? The answer was that the saola, as the Javan rhino once did in its own range, lived deep in the forests of Vietnam and Laos along the Annamite chain. The area was wet and malarial, had poor soils, and had a very low human population in an otherwise densely populated country. And saolas seemed to survive best in the higher steep valleys, where few locals lived or hunted. By heading straight for this dense, wet region of forest that Coolidge and Roosevelt had circumvented in their 1927 expedition, MacKinnon had seen his
hunch pay off. The best place to find rare species during postwar recovery was in the biggest, wettest block of unsurveyed intact forest. The saola's success at adapting shows another coping mechanism. Selection for being a habitat generalist when a species first evolved, long before the human era, allows it to persist in remote habitats on poor soils, on ground too nutrient poor and too steep to grow crops. In Vietnam and elsewhere, this becomes the definition of a modern refuge.

Saola (
Pseudoryx nghetinhensis
), the most recently discovered large mammal

MacKinnon never found a kouprey in the wild, nor has anyone since. Soon after, though, members of his intrepid field team announced the discovery of another new species, the large-antlered muntjac, a member of the ungulate group known as barking deer. Also known as the giant muntjac, the thirty- to fifty-kilogram reddish-brown deer is considered endangered and is known from only a few locales. The next few years of searching yielded another
muntjac, this one named the Annamite muntjac. The taxonomy of muntjacs remains shaky, and further genetic analyses may reveal four or more species in the Annamites alone. These were the first new large mammals identified by Western scientists in Indochina since 1936, when the kouprey was first described. This rich vein of new species was hardly what the French naturalist Georges Cuvier had in mind when he proclaimed in 1812 that “there is little hope of discovering new species of quadrupeds.”

In the past decade, Western biologists have come to recognize what great natural wealth is packed into the Annamite Mountains, the rest of Vietnam, and neighboring Laos, and they have been on a quest to explore every secluded valley and mountaintop in the region. The windfall of endemics and newly discovered species made some scientists wonder how so many early naturalists could have missed so many novelties. One explanation is that many of these habitats had been too dangerous for outsiders to visit. Local people repelled visitors, often violently. Deadly malaria in the remote and rainy Annamites was also a serious problem. Finally, the Annamites were so steep, and walking along their sharp limestone trails so challenging, that early naturalists were more attracted to the deltas and flat terrain full of birds and plants.

The cryptic nature of the saola and the muntjacs—and, by extension, of other small, territorial forest-dwelling Asian and African ungulates, such as duikers (tropical Africa), chevrotains (South and Southeast Asia), and musk deer (Himalayan regions)—may be the result of another strong selection pressure. The ability to avoid detection by prowling leopards would be a behavioral trait that natural selection would reward. So perhaps a feature that was selected for eons ago serves well today. A muntjac or saola skilled at evading detection by leopards must be hard to find for predatory humans, too.

As was true in New Guinea, understanding a bit of the area's geologic history can explain a lot about the current concentrations of rarities in Indochina. About 350 million years ago, the Annamites
arose during collisions of Earth's plates. They are truly ancient mountains—much, much older, for example, than the Nepal Himalayas, at about 55 million years old. The Himalayas emerged when what is now India broke off from the ancient supercontinent known as Gondwanaland and rammed into Eurasia. Initially, the joining of the subcontinent of India with Eurasia opened a vast new landmass for the invasion of novel species. Then the uplift of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau sealed off Southeast Asia from the northern part of the continent, preventing new invasions. This event isolated the Annamite fauna and flora.

Other mountain chains arose in the northwest of Vietnam, followed by the emergence of highlands in the northeast. Changes in river courses and, along the coasts, the rise and fall of sea levels successively isolated and rejoined populations of plants and animals. When sea levels were low, connection by land bridges to the south allowed an Indonesian influence to reach the flora and fauna of Indochina. In addition, cyclic weather patterns featuring winter monsoons and summer rains drenched some areas and passed over others.

In sum, we can see in Indochina all the ingredients for a rarity stew. Ancient mountain range developments and shifting patterns of water and land promoted conditions of physical isolation conducive to speciation, as did variegated patterns of warm temperature and precipitation. The narrow bands of wet and dry forest resulted in a rich mosaic, offering a diverse range of habitats where species could settle and might remain in isolation from one another.