The Kingdom of Rarities (35 page)

Nevertheless, moving some animals from Ujung Kulon to Vietnam could also help Indonesia's rhinos. In 1883, the eruption of Krakatoa triggered a tsunami that leveled the Java forest. What had been a mature forest, containing little for browsing rhinos to eat, rapidly became a secondary forest, which grew full of
Macaranga
, a preferred food plant, along with other pioneer plants the rhinos browsed. Forty years later, enough time has passed that the pioneer plants have given way to mature forest species, which hold less appeal for rhinos. So the fifty or so remaining rhinos in Java may have reached a population ceiling imposed by their food supply. As of 2012, plans were under way to translocate a small number from Ujung Kulon to a second destination on Java.

Vy's efforts to show us an orange-necked partridge, his hospitality, and his delight in being with others who shared his passion for birds and nature offered a different kind of marker of the present in relation to the past than did a bomb crater filled with wallowing elephants. Thirty-three years after departure of the last American soldiers, two American biologists followed their Vietnamese colleague through the forest in search of a rare bird, together trying to find a way to save it from extinction. If there is need to find evidence of hope for the human race, I offer this shred from postwar Vietnam.

Such scraps of optimism are important to cling to, in order to imagine that the Asian nation with the highest concentrations of
rare species will manage to preserve many of them. Those cryptic species that remain tucked away in the wettest reaches of the Annamites might be safe from war and its aftermath. But over the seven years that have elapsed since my visit, the string of conservation news from Vietnam has gone from grave concern to tragedy. While writing this chapter, I learned that the last Javan rhino in Vietnam had been killed, shot by a poacher. The official wildlife agency in Hanoi had no comment. Sadly, Vietnam also now has the dubious distinction of being the depot for much of Asia's illegal trade in tiger parts and rhino horn. One reason for the surge in the illegal sale of rhino horn is the emergence there of the false belief that it cures cancer. Beyond extirpating their own rhinos, Vietnam's wildlife criminal gangs are decimating rhino populations in other countries as well. Even the adaptations rare ungulates such as saolas and muntjacs have developed for avoiding leopards, and now humans, will not protect them when commercial hunters carpet the Vietnamese jungles with snares. Snaring for prey is ubiquitous, and in most reserves protection is not enforced. In 2011, for example, three teams of community forest guards in four months collected 7,700 snares from the 220-square-kilometer Saola Nature Reserve in Vietnam's Thua Thien Hue Province.

Do war zones and former war zones always spell decline or disaster for rarities? Sometimes contested areas or the frontlines create no-man's-lands between warring factions where the opposing armies rarely enter. In these buffer zones of relative calm—which also are often heavily mined, as were the borders of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—wildlife can recover. A classic example is the Korean Demilitarized Zone. On this thin strip of heavily mined land, the Korean Peninsula's wildlife, from cranes to deer, has made a comeback. Missing are Amur tigers, but plans are afoot to return them there. An international effort to recover wildlife in former war zones, the Peace Parks Foundation, has as its mission to promote conservation along borders between former combatant nations. There is ample opportunity for this foundation to build a
large portfolio of transboundary conservation efforts in the developing world.

At the end of the day, it is fair to ask: How much of what goes on in Vietnam is the legacy of armed conflict, and how much is a disregard for the intrinsic value of nature and rarities? Is Vietnam that much worse than other countries?

It is impossible to test the counterfactual in Indochina—in the absence of decades of war, would rare large mammals still be so endangered and many common species made rare? To do so, one would need to study several replicate Indochinas and hold all other factors constant except for armed conflict in some and long periods of peace in others. Moreover, separating the aftermath of war from combat itself is problematic. What seems irrefutable, however, is that the combined effects of an armed postwar rural populace, lax governance in remote areas regarding hunting and conservation laws, protein shortage, and widespread loss of habitat would likely leave only the small and inedible rarities safe. Even rare endemic land snails could fill a cooking pot. The evidence so far points to Vietnam creating more ghosts. Meanwhile, an adjacent former war zone in Cambodia stands poised to restore past treasures.

February 2010. Mondulkiri Protected Forest, eastern Cambodia. We were here to see firsthand another Indochinese landscape attempting to recover from the legacy of decades of armed conflict. Barney Long, a young British biologist working for the WWF, sat in the passenger seat of the air-conditioned Land Cruiser and served as wildlife spotter as we drove along the dusty road from the town of Sen Monorom into the Mondulkiri Protected Forest reserve. At the wheel was Nick Cox, who for the past five years had served as regional coordinator of the WWF's Indochina Dry Forests program. I sat behind them, enjoying the cool, dry air and glad that the thick red road dust coated only the car and not its passengers. How different our journey was from the one Charles Wharton had taken
in this same region in the 1950s through the bone-jarring backroads of Cambodia. When his caravan became stuck, the party of sixty members resorted to elephant-back or slogged on foot in search of the wild cattle of backwoods Cambodia.

Suddenly a herd of brown-and-white cow-like creatures galloped across our track—thirteen graceful bantengs, mostly females with calves, and a dominant bull bringing up the rear. By the time we reached the headquarters of the intensive protection area in a village called Mereuch, another herd had crossed our path. “When I first explored this area in 2000,” Barney announced, “I saw only two bantengs in twenty-two days.” The recovery of rare wild cattle was significant—not only because they are in decline across their range but also because bantengs are an important prey species for tigers. The vast Mondulkiri Protected Forest reserve is one of the few places where tigers are thought to persist in Cambodia.

Ancient Cambodia is best known for Angkor Wat, more than 300 kilometers east of where we were. The civilization of Angkor reached its pinnacle in the thirteenth century, when the city was larger than London and the long-reigning Khmer empire stretched across the landscape we were visiting. If the spectacular temples of Angkor Wat present Cambodia in its finest epoch, the Khmer Rouge regime, Pol Pot, and the killing fields epitomize the nadir of Cambodia's recent past. A country of 4 million people lost half its population during the worst episode of genocide in the past fifty years.

Today Cambodia has the largest wilderness area east of the Mekong River, yet its Eastern Plains landscape is perhaps the best-kept secret among wildlife conservationists in Asia. Covering an area of 18,000 square kilometers, the combined areas of Mondulkiri, Lomphat, Phnom Prich, Snoul, Seima, and Nam Lyr are a remarkable anomaly in this Southeast Asian region characterized by isolated forest fragments. Part of the reason for the integrity of this landscape is that hostilities during the Indochina Wars kept the loggers out. A severe form of malaria common in the area also discouraged
development. Further, even though the population of Cambodia has reached 8 million, three-quarters of all Cambodians live in the capital of Phnom Penh. The sparsely populated countryside that once harbored large stretches of unbroken forest has been changing, however. A few years ago—in 2008—Cambodia had one of the highest rates of illegal logging in the world, and it is still high today. According to one observer, forests west of the Mekong were and still are destined for Thailand. Forests east of the Mekong may eventually be cut and sent to Vietnam. Already, the Vietnamese are trucking out as much timber as they can across the porous border. The forests are still extensive in this region, but recovering this lost treasure will require that illegal logging be ended and forest protection improved.

The dry forest, populated by widely spaced trees in the dipterocarp family, the dominant group of trees of Southeast Asia, appeared more like a woodland or savanna. Most trees had shed their leaves during the dry period, adding to the sense of openness. Only along the streambeds did we pass through dense stands of tropical trees and vines. In 1951, Charles Wharton's two-month excursion in the area around Preah Vihear, near where we were, traversed a region filled with large mammals that were rare or extinct elsewhere. Back then, the four species of wild cattle still flourished here, although koupreys were always rare. Wharton filmed six separate groups of koupreys, producing the only existing footage of this species in the wild. He estimated that there were roughly 400 to 500 living west of the Mekong River, 200 to 300 in Lomphat Wildlife Sanctuary, and 50 in the Samrong District of Kratie Province. In 1964, Wharton presented a copy of the film to Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who had a special affection for this rare creature. As a child, Sihanouk had kept a pet kouprey in the Royal Gardens. He subsequently named the kouprey Cambodia's national animal and established Kulen Promtep, Lomphat, and Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuaries to protect the last kouprey herds.

Wharton became the champion of efforts to save this species.
After his visit with Sihanouk, he staged another expedition to capture live koupreys for captive breeding as a hedge against extinction in the wild. Although he captured five animals, Wharton ended up with none. Two of them died during handling, and three bolted to freedom. Wharton once said, half joking, that an ancient spell had been cast over the kouprey, shielding it from human efforts to learn about it and save it. In any case, outbreaks of war between the 1960s and the 1980s precluded further kouprey-seeking expeditions. In 1982, a herd was reported near the Thai border, but according to a Cambodian researcher, the effort to find it was called off after a land mine critically injured the group's guide.

New explorers have emerged in the postwar period to walk in Wharton's boots, among them Barney Long. When Barney first visited Mondulkiri, in April 2000, he had the good fortune of working with Lean Kha, a famous resident hunter, former poacher, and veteran of the Cambodian army, which had ousted the Khmer Rouge from this stronghold. Now Kha complained that wildlife was fast disappearing from the forest and suggested that someone pay him to protect the animals rather than shoot them.

On that first survey trip, Barney spent twenty-two days crisscrossing the Mondulkiri forest with Kha and Steven Swan, another British biologist based in Vietnam. Although wildlife was scarce, he sensed potential for recovery. Such a vast, unbroken tract of lowland forest was impossible to find east of the Mekong. If rare cattle and Eld's deer, and along with them the tiger, were to recover anywhere in Cambodia, this would be the place. And recovery seemed possible because tracks of wild cattle were abundant, and tracks of Eld's deer and what could be wild water buffalo were evident, too. The travelers logged their first sighting of the elusive giant ibis; sightings of several species of vultures, populations of which had been decimated across Asia; and slide marks of the rare Siamese crocodile. On the final day of the survey, Barney and his colleagues also saw a tiger track. These promising signs helped to build support for an area wildlife recovery plan. Two years later, the World
Wildlife Fund started working in this Asian wilderness, hiring Kha as a lead ranger to protect the species of Mondulkiri. Reformed poachers often make the best trackers and park guards. They are comfortable with few amenities, and the rough life of the bush is as familiar to them as the morning commute is to urban dwellers. More to the point, they know guns and the mind of the poacher.

A rapid survey in 2010 gave Kha and Barney a chance to reunite and enabled the rest of our group to meet Chana, a Cambodian tiger researcher, and Tom Gray, an ornithologist from the United Kingdom who was transforming himself into a tiger prey specialist. Also with us was Craig Bruce, a wildlife enforcement and protected-area specialist who for the past three years had headed the conservation program in Mondulkiri. Despite the mountains of international funding flowing into Cambodia, little went to wildlife protection: the salaries of the ninety-five-person protection staff in their bright green uniforms, even the uniforms themselves, were courtesy of the WWF and Craig's efforts.

Early the next morning, Kha, Chana, and Barney led our group on a two-hour march across burned stubble to a
trapeang
, or natural water hole, to check on the camera traps. One of Kha, Tom, and Chana's tasks was to map every depression and determine which held permanent sources of water. Permanent water holes are excellent places to set up camera traps to photograph species during the intense dry season. We straggled across the landscape accompanied by two domesticated elephants attached to the patrol staff. Above us, two species of minivets flashed in the morning sunlight. Black-headed orioles chortled their songs and red-breasted parakeets sailed by.