The Kingdom of Rarities (36 page)

Within a kilometer of the trapeang, a penetrating rolling bugle caught our attention. “Some kind of woodpecker,” offered one of the hikers. I knew it was no woodpecker, but I had to click through my memory bank for a few seconds before remembering the unforgettable sound of the sarus crane from my days in Nepal. The cranes had departed before we got to the water hole, but another
large silvery-gray bird flew up from a marshy area—a giant ibis! Our early luck was astonishing for even the most jaded in our party.

Tom and Chana walked over to the camera trap and retrieved the footage. They had relied on Kha, who could read game trails invisible to others, to place the cameras for best effect. We were all curious to see the results. With the sun rising in the morning sky, we returned to base.

Back at the station, Tom plugged the memory card into a reader and downloaded the most recent pictures. We gathered around his laptop like eager children waiting to open a new video game. The first images revealed the waterhole regulars: wild boars, barking deer, and civets. There were also carnivores: several kinds of small cats, more civets, and a leopard! No tigers yet, but the team was hopeful, looking forward.

The number and variety of images were impressive. Of particular interest were the pictures of the tiger's prey—gaurs, bantengs, and especially Eld's deer. For decades, first the Vietnamese, then the Khmer Rouge, and then the Cambodian army had used the Mondulkiri area as their larder, living on the meat of the same species tigers prefer to hunt. Therefore, just like the tiger, Eld's deer is endangered. Since the doe usually has only one fawn every two years, it would take some time for this species to recover from overhunting even if given sufficient protection.

As director of the Mondulkiri conservation program, Craig was responsible for protecting the park's wildlife, which primarily meant keeping the animals safe from poachers. Later that day over coffee, Barney recounted how effective that protection had apparently been. When he and Craig went out for a walk in 2008, for example, there they were—bantengs, out in the open during late morning, as calm as could be.

Seeing bantengs lose their fear of grazing in the open during the day was something Barney couldn't have dreamed possible in 2000. He added, “It is amazing what five years of effective law enforcement can do—species can start to recover and even change
their behavior.” When the human hunters disappear, as they had in this part of Mondulkiri, some formerly common species, such as bantengs, go back to being diurnal. Feeding out in the open without worrying about hunters probably reduced their energy demand and perhaps gave them access to more nutritious grazing areas. The ability to shift back to diurnal grazing might put them on a higher nutritional plane and allow individuals to produce more offspring.

Spotlighting for game at night—as we had in the Cerrado with Carly Vynne (chapter 6)—is always a good way to find rare mammals that move close to roads. We piled into the back of a pickup just before 9:00 p.m., when nocturnal activity is at its peak. The beam of the powerful spotlight arced across the jeep track, seeking reflective eyeshine of whatever might be out there. “There!” whispered someone looking to the left. The light showed a jungle cat intercepted on its evening prowl. The beam was bright enough to illuminate the dark tip of its tail. Along the track we encountered plenty of barking deer but no more Eld's deer: we had all hoped to see a large buck with a dramatic set of antlers. Perhaps once the charred grass layer flushed with new green shoots, the Eld's deer and herds of bantengs and gaurs would be more visible.

The next day, Barney, Nick, and Craig were keen to take us on an afternoon trip on the Srepok River. We stepped into long-prowed boats with extended propeller shafts, the ideal craft for navigating the shallows. As we headed upriver, tree swifts swooped over us, mixed in with needletails, the latter resembling flying cigars. Wreathed hornbills and the more common oriental pied hornbills flapped over the canopy of the riverine forest. Moving between trees were gorgeous red-billed blue magpies, while green malkohas shimmied up the branches. Barney directed us to the best place to see the unusual silver langur monkey. As if on command, a small troop appeared in a fig tree along the river.

The drivers stopped the boats to afford us a better view of the rare primates. Most monkey species love figs, and some hunters
attribute monkeys' tasty meat to heavy fig consumption. Consequently, fig-eating monkeys are usually the first mammals to be hunted out of tropical forests. Yet the silver langur seemed locally abundant. I asked, “How did a rare fruit-eating primate prosper in a forest once filled with hunters?” Silver langurs enjoy ingesting the poisonous seeds of a tree, Kha replied. Therefore, local hunters wouldn't waste a bullet on them. The tree species is
Strychnos nux-vomica
, and its seeds contain strychnine. Like the seed-eating saki monkeys of Peru that Sue Palminteri studied, the silver langur makes its flesh toxic to predatory mammals and to humans by eating seeds laced with nasty chemicals.

The presence and future of wildlife in the shadow of war, in Cambodia and beyond, is challenging to predict. Certainly in some buffer areas between warring factions, virtual no-man's-lands laden with mines and dangerous to enter, wildlife hung on. When wars ended, these became source populations to replenish emptied forests. One excellent example is the flooded grasslands of South Sudan, which for much of the year are impenetrable by armies and thus have escaped heavy fighting. The white-eared kob and other large mammals are still abundant there. But in many other war zones in more open areas, where intense fighting has raged, wild animals have been easy targets. Although wars and violence have appeared to decline over the past centuries, according to author Steven Pinker, the diffuse effects on endangered wildlife populations have yet to be realized.

Vietnam and Cambodia seem to be on different trajectories. Vietnam has abundant conservation plans, but infighting among departments and lack of support from the central government stymie restoration of rarities. Cambodia is more conservation friendly and has more habitat to work with. Cambodia is poised to recover past treasures, but both nations will require more aggressive conservation measures to speed recovery.

Back at the ranger station at Mereuch, we came upon the casing of a cluster bomb dropped by US forces during the Vietnam War. Such sores remain, but the landscape is healing; the soldiers have gone home or, like Kha, have become the backbone of the wildlife protection units. In Cambodia, the ghosts of Indochina can come out of hiding now and regain their lost homeland. The ruins of Angkor Wat feature bas-reliefs of the wild cattle of Cambodia—the banteng, gaur, wild water buffalo, and kouprey. Three of the four remain and have a great future in Mondulkiri, if the conservation world steps up to assist. Cambodian conservationists are taking concrete steps to rebuild the tiger prey base. Once a solid prey base is restored, the government of Thailand, India, or Nepal could, as a goodwill gesture, offer Cambodia a nucleus of adult tigers. Cambodia's Eastern Plains landscape could be the first wild cattle wilderness in the world that is home to a core breeding population of tigers. We can almost see the recovery happening before our eyes. The wildlands sleeping east of Angkor may be about to reawaken.

W
E WERE flYING FROM
Calcutta on Druk Air, the national air carrier of Bhutan. When the pilot quietly announced, “Mount Kanchenjunga is now visible from the left side of the plane,” the passengers pressed against the windows to photograph the world's third-tallest mountain. Kanchenjunga, whose Tibetan name means “Five Treasures of the Snows,” straddles the border of Nepal, the former kingdom of Sikkim (now part of India), and Tibet. The breathtaking panorama of the Himalayas and, just beyond, the beckoning high-plains vista of Tibet kept us glued to the port side. A spirit of serenity wafted like incense through the cabin. In a onehour flight, the plane had ascended from steamy, sea level Calcutta to the sparkling roof of the world. The next landmark was Mount Jhomolhari. Its gleaming white summit signals entry into Bhutanese airspace and was the cue to return to our seats. The airborne quietude evaporated instantly when the pilot executed a rollercoaster
plunge into the tight seam of the Paro Valley. Even among the placid Bhutanese on the plane, this rapid maneuver produces beads of sweat across the brow. Minutes later, the grateful passengers exited the airbus and stood firmly on the tarmac, bathed in the cool, pine-scented breezes of western Bhutan.

This was my second journey to this remote Himalayan kingdom. Most visitors come here to experience the rich cultural heritage or to trek through one of the least disturbed parts of the Himalayas. I came for both purposes, but my main aim on this trip was to inspect a new cultural model in which humans try to live in harmony with nature's rarities rather than contribute to their demise.

Like any other visiting naturalist, I longed to tick off some of the rarities on my list of quest species, in which Bhutan abounds. And then there was Bhutan's fabled conservation program, as progressive, at least on paper, as any in the world, ripe for either an exposé or a paean. But conservation programs go only so far. To the occasional vexation of biologists, the lasting solutions lie in mainstreaming conservation into cultural, economic, and even religious norms. I was here to look at the links between the three: to explore how certain traditions and the norms they embody can protect the habitats of rare species and their populations, enabling them to persist in the modern world. Cleared through passport control and customs—a simple table staffed by one lone, robed official—I was about to find out.

We jumped into a waiting jeep and began the winding hour-long drive from the airport in Paro to the capital, Thimpu. The forested landscape seemed unchanged from my first visit, sixteen years earlier. Two hundred years ago, the Himalayan region was dotted with small kingdoms such as Bhutan, Sikkim, and Gorkha, largely inaccessible to the West and covered, in varying extent, by primeval forest. Nowadays, Himalayan old-growth broad-leaved forests are uniquely preserved in Bhutan, other such examples elsewhere having been chopped down over the past few millennia. Consequently, many animal species that reside in these broad-leaved forests were
once widespread along the eastern Himalayan chain but are now greatly reduced in range.

Map of the country of Bhutan and the surrounding region

Advocates of the Bhutanese way claim that this tiny kingdom of fewer than a million inhabitants offers its neighbors and the rest of the world an inspiring model for living with nature and, by extension, its rarities. Roughly the size of Switzerland, Bhutan was the first nation to establish a permanent fund to finance the long-term protection of its native and rare flora and fauna. More than sixty countries now boast such conservation trust funds, but Bhutan's prototype, capitalized in 1992 with a $1 million seed grant from the World Wildlife Fund, contained a unique feature: the government committed to maintain at least 60 percent of the country under native forest cover, which in turn provides habitat for many rare species.

Along these protected Himalayan slopes, one can still find such rare mammals as red pandas, two species of musk deer, takins, and tigers stalking their prey at timberline, just below where snow leopards roam. The lower reaches of the lush Bhutanese forests are home to golden langurs and beautiful nuthatches, rare species any naturalist longs to see. The golden langur is one of the world's rarest
primates, noted for its expressive black face set off by a robe of dense golden fur. These forests are also filled with such splendid birds as brightly colored pheasants and sunbirds and a cacophony of babblers and laughing thrushes, the engaging troubadours of Asian forests. Some say that the rarest primate of all lives here, our apelike cousin the yeti.

The desire to uncover such rareties by several of the most famous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western expeditions to the Himalayas to visit Bhutan met with rejection, as have many since. Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the famed British botanist, explored neighboring Sikkim in the 1860s but never crossed Bhutan's border, or at least he never admitted to it. William Beebe, an American field biologist, wrote extensively about the magnificent pheasants of the Himalayas, but he had to look for them outside Bhutan. Government policy still discourages foreign-led expeditions today and severely restricts access by individual researchers. Of this they are certain: if there is a rare species that awaits discovery or study, a biology-trained Bhutanese will have the honor.