The Kingdom of Rarities (34 page)

The search for further evidence of the Javan rhino in Indochina picked up in earnest in 2003, when an energetic Dutch biologist, Gert Polet, began supervising fieldwork in Cat Tien National Park. His team looked for rhino spoor, any sign that this elusive creature persisted in the former battleground. Cat Tien, about 100 kilometers south of the terminus of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, had
been an important staging area for soldiers going into the south. US and South Vietnamese regulars came here to stop them. There is no record of any encounter with Javan rhinos during the battles, and Polet's team found no evidence on the ground.

Polet's team's use of infrared camera traps had an important precedent in an attempt to catch the phantom mammal on film. One of these traps, set in 1998 by WWF scientist Mike Baltzer, captured on film a Javan rhino reaching up to nibble a tree branch. The image was seen around the world, but depressing news accompanied it: Gert and Mike's final surveys in 2006 put the total number of Javan rhinos at fewer than a dozen in Cat Loc. Interestingly, Cat Loc, a forested area with no formal protection, is very close to Cat Tien National Park. A dense, thorny thicket of spiny palm draped the hilly terrain of Cat Loc. Professor Giao's rhinos had become ghosts within it. Of concern was that no one had seen small footprints signifying a calf. Biologists sought explanations for the population's perilous drop from the dozen or more thought to still be resident in Cat Loc. One immediate speculation was that they had been poached for their valued horn. Another was collateral damage from the bombardment some years earlier. But in order to understand what happened to them and the other rare large mammals, we need to revisit the war years and make inferences based on a bit of human epidemiology.

Defoliant. The soft, gentle sound of this noun suggests a home beauty product rather than a deadly toxin that kills tree leaves. As General Giap mentioned over lunch in Hanoi during my first trip to Vietnam, he and his troops used the forest strategically and hid within it; defoliant was designed to expose them. The American strategy from the mid-1960s to 1971 included an unprecedented spraying campaign intended to halt the infiltration of soldiers from the north and shift the course of the war. By 1971, more than 75 million liters of a defoliant dubbed Agent Orange (from the identifying orange stripe on the steel storage containers) had descended on about 57,000 square kilometers of inland tropical forest, an area
about twice the size of the state of Massachusetts. Almost 1,300 square kilometers of coastal mangroves were also affected.

Agent Orange did much more than strip leaves from trees. Dioxin, a chemical generated during the synthesis of the growth hormone forming the defoliant's major ingredient, turned out to be highly carcinogenic. Soldiers on both sides of the conflict absorbed Agent Orange and stored it in their tissues. Because dioxin remains stable for decades, it is a persistent public health risk. Worse, it is able to cross the placental wall into the embryo, so postwar offspring were often affected.

Exposure to dioxin is linked to at least twenty-eight serious diseases, including a fatal type of leukemia. Because symptoms can take years to develop, government officials at first dismissed the claims of veterans who reported severe health problems from exposure. An out-of-court settlement between the companies producing Agent Orange and the 2.4 million Vietnam veterans filing suit against them led to a $180 million fund to pay veterans' health claims. The fund was quickly exhausted, however. A 2003 US Supreme Court decision enabled many more veterans to receive treatment.

So little was known about the effects of Agent Orange on wildlife that a survey was called for, to the displeasure of the US government. Among the first to investigate the ecological effects of the war was one of the leading ecologists of our day, Gordon Orians. Traveling as a correspondent for
Science
magazine, Orians sought to uncover the lasting effects of defoliant on nonhumans and particularly on rare species already at risk of extinction. In 1970, Orians and his colleague E. W. Pfeiffer published a paper in
Science
titled “Ecological Effects of the War in Vietnam.” The defoliated upland areas he saw had been converted not to grasslands but rather to “bamboo forests.” Bamboo, a grass, is not killed by Agent Orange. (The US Army used a different defoliant to target grasses in its “Resource Denial Program,” which focused on spraying rice fields to starve the enemy and which could have affected the bamboo groves as well.) This defoliation of forests must have displaced
species that depended on forest cover. Quantitative data on forest wildlife during the war were absent; there was one grisly anecdote, though. Unlike other rare vertebrates that fled battlegrounds, wild tigers headed toward gunfire. They had learned that combat zones meant encounters with mortally wounded and dead soldiers.

For the Javan rhinos in Vietnam, the best short-term strategy for preserving the species after the war was to hold on to the rhinos that had survived; the best long-term strategy combined vigilance and patience. As a first step, David and his Vietnamese colleagues worked through the 1990s to build up Cat Tien National Park through Dutch funding and create a conservation program in Cat Loc, where the rhinos actually lived. The second step was to design a viable future for the species by promoting conservation-friendly activities in a 2,500-square-kilometer buffer zone between Cat Tien and Cat Loc and to lay the groundwork for turning the entire area into a biosphere reserve under the auspices of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme.

In 2005, fifteen years after our first visit, David Hulse returned to assess the progress of Vietnam's recovery of its rare species. David invited me to accompany him to see one of his favorite conservation projects in the southern part of the country. Nguyen Tran Vy, a former protégé and now one of the top young ornithologists in Asia, was our host, and he was eager to show us some of the extraordinary birds in the Tan Phu State Forest Reserve in southern Vietnam.

On a hot, muggy November morning, Vy motioned for us to take cover behind a copse of bamboo. He pressed the “play” button on his recorder and the rising whistle of an orange-necked partridge arced over the forest. From the shoulder of the hill came a return volley. This was the fifteenth bird to answer his playback, but none had dared to come into our view. David and I stared hopefully at a gap near the forest floor, waiting, listening, sweating, while Vy's
tape let loose more whistles. We hid, drenched in perspiration, blind to the male partridge examining us from a termite mound right next to us. Only our young guide saw the bird before it vanished.

For the past decade, Vy had kept watch over this bobwhitesized hermit, known only from a few hillsides northwest of Ho Chi Minh City. But even if we didn't glimpse a single partridge after four hours of searching, we had encountered a multitude of vigorous singers—babblers, barbets, drongos, tailorbirds, flycatchers, orioles, shamas, trogons, and even rare Siamese fireback pheasants—all survivors of the shock of war.

We had arrived in Vietnam this time on Ho Chi Minh's birthday, May 19. Billboards with Ho's image were posted around the city renamed in his honor, exhorting the masses to make new sacrifices for the good of the motherland. The Communist-style message boards stood in stark contrast to the sights and sounds of roaring capitalism. Alongside the road into town stood a life-size statue of Colonel Sanders, taller than most of the Ho Chi Minh statues I noticed, welcoming patrons into a packed KFC franchise.

The trajectory of the rebounding economy was quite different from that of wildlife recovery. Reports to David from Cat Tien suggested that, by the new millennium, the number of Javan rhinos there was still dangerously low. According to local rumor, only four adults remained—all females. We would get a firsthand report from Cat Tien, which was our next destination after this interlude in Tan Phu.

To crouch motionless in the moist heat and mud seemed more like jungle warfare training than birding. Ironically, this former combat zone had recently become an important conservation area. Vy's surveys had found the highest recorded density anywhere of orange-necked partridges here in the forest reserve, and, thanks to his efforts, logging in the area had ceased. Beyond Vietnam, this shy bird had made international headlines by joining the list of the world's rarest vertebrates as an Alliance for Zero Extinction species (chapter 1). And this site was listed as the only place where it was found.

Between the pesky mosquitoes, the dense heat and humidity, the mud, and the leeches, that day in Tan Phu was about the most uncomfortable I had ever experienced in the field. Yet the more difficult the terrain became, and as the trail seemed to disappear into the sharp-stemmed bamboo, the happier Vy seemed. He noticed the mosquitoes preferentially attacking David and me despite our superstrength US-purchased repellent. “Try this one,” he said, handing us a Vietnamese knockoff of Avon Skin So Soft that proved amazingly effective. I didn't want to ask what was in it but was thankful it worked. This part of Vietnam still suffers from a mosquito-borne cerebral malaria.

By afternoon, after many near observations of the reluctant partridge, our stomachs were growling for our adopted staple of pho, so we headed back into town. As we walked to the open-air restaurant, locals stopped to greet Vy. We were traveling with a celebrity, it seemed. Vy had his own television show for children to nurture their interest in Vietnamese nature; he knew as well as anyone that the next generation would need passion and dedication to carry on the work of saving the unique species of the country.

At the restaurant, we chose a table directly across from a countertop laden with large jars of seahorses, insects, lizards, and flowers suspended in rice-based alcohol. These were specialty cocktails thought to be infused by the essences and powers of the creatures within. One vat filled with baby king cobras sported a name on the label: “One Night, Five Times.” Perhaps here was an insight, in the bottle, that locally held perceptions, however misguided, trumped scientific rationales. Vietnam was rapidly becoming the end point for Asia's rarities, which ended up in a bottle or as a cream or powder. If the mind-set here is to change, it will be people such as Vy, dedicated local scientists who can connect with a larger audience in their native language, who will lead the way.

The main purpose of our visit was to check on the rhinos, so the next day we headed with Vy to Cat Tien National Park. In the village of Cat Tien, we drove to the edge of the Dong Nai River and waited for a barge to ferry us across. On the way there, we had
traversed part of what was seen as the “buffer zone” between Cat Tien and Cat Loc. It offered little cover for a passing rhino; that much was clear. In fact, in this section the buffer zone was a string of villages with hardly a tree in sight. Progress was being made on paper in establishing a legal buffer zone, but the effects on wildlife restoration seemed invisible.

Once across the river and inside the park, however, we found ourselves in a green wall of thick forest exploding with the sounds of birds. Several species of kingfishers wailed from the riverbanks; parrots and parakeets flew overhead; hornbills announced their arrival in the fig trees. By the end of our morning's walk, we had recorded nearly seventy-five bird species, thanks largely to Vy, who instantly recognized the songs of whatever was hiding in the tangles of vines ahead of us. He pointed out a scaly-breasted partridge walking along the forest floor. Other avian highlights in this former battle zone were an Asian paradise flycatcher and a host of black-and-red broadbills. That the words “paradise” and “former battle zone” could be used in the same sentence is a testament to the powers of nature to recover. Paradise flycatchers are exquisite birds, with males bearing long white tails that flutter like ribbons when they fly through the trees. Common across Asia, they sit on tiny cup nests that seem much too small to support the female and her eggs. The black-and-red broadbill, which boasts a pattern of bright crimson and a broad bill the aqua-blue color of a robin's egg, made me think of a small crow that had agreed to a total makeover.

At lunch, we resumed a discussion we'd been having of the Javan rhino. The Cat Loc population was already what biologists term “ecologically extinct” because they no longer played their natural role as landscape engineers. They were also, it seemed, about to pass from ecological extinction to true oblivion. A last-ditch proposal to keep that from happening involved an influx of new blood from Indonesia. If it turned out that the remaining individuals in Cat Loc were all female, it might be possible for the Vietnamese to negotiate with the Indonesian government for stud service or even
permanent residence of several males and females that could be shifted from Ujung Kulon National Park in western Java to Cat Tien. However, the chances of a successful agreement were slim. For the past twenty years, conservationists had been unable to persuade the Indonesian government to move rhinos from western Java to two other parks just across the narrow strait that separated Ujung Kulon from southern Sumatra. Moreover, opponents of the proposed transfer from Java to Vietnam had argued that the Javan population is a different subspecies and should remain separate from the Indochinese variety.