Wildlife on the Ho Chi Minh Trail Is Making a Comeback

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Wildlife on the Ho Chi Minh Trail Is Making a Comeback

 

 

 

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Wildlife on the Ho Chi Minh Trail Is Making a Comeback

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March 02, 2007 — By Jerry Harmer, Associated Press

 

KEO SEIMA, Cambodia -- Four decades after U.S. warplanes plastered it with

bombs, a remote corner of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia is making a

comeback as a treasure trove of endangered wildlife.

 

Tigers prowl imperiously down tracks where weapons-laden North Vietnamese trucks

once rolled. Elephants shepherd their young past giant bomb craters to drink at

jungle water holes, and rare apes call from treetops that used to hide communist

forces from American pilots.

 

Much of the credit for this swords-into-plowshares story goes to the New

York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which has managed and protected this

forest in southern Mondulkiri Province since 2002, in partnership with the

Cambodian government. A former free-fire zone is now a strictly policed

no-hunting preserve.

 

" It's quite moving, I guess, " says Ed Pollard, the society's technical adviser,

standing in the dappled light beneath a canopy deep inside the jungle.

 

" Only 30 years ago this was a hotbed. There were arms coming along this trail

around this area and now it's all overgrown and it seems like this untouched

wilderness. In what used to be a cauldron of war, we've now got tigers and

elephants and bears trotting backward and forward almost unmolested. "

 

And much more. According to WCS, at least 42 threatened species now thrive

within the 1,160 square miles (3,000 square kilometers) of what is officially

the Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area.

 

A sharp eye can spot a charismatic primate called the black-shanked douc,

gorging on treetop leaves in the late afternoon. Once it was thought their main

home was Vietnam, but it's now believed that half the world's population lives

in the once devastated forest. Large herds of gaur, magnificent horned wild

cattle, roam the area as do muntjac deer, banteng ox and wild pig, all vital

prey for tigers.

 

Bird life -- ibis, vulture, eagle and hornbill -- abound. So many Germain's

Peacock-pheasants have been spotted that conservationists have scratched the

species from the world endangered list.

 

Pollard, a 33-year-old Englishman, concedes that some of the apparent growth in

animal populations may be due to better counting, but he believes the evidence

is strong that " All these species have grown in number. "

 

Some of the hardest data comes from scores of motion-sensitive cameras bolted to

trees and triggered when an invisible beam is broken. The cameras caught several

shots of tigers in 2002, including one that stared into the lens with its mouth

open in an apparent roar.

 

There have been no more tiger shots since, he says, because he is focused on

measuring the abundance of tiger prey and set his cameras where deer, pig and

wild cattle are known to feed.

 

But even without tigers, the cameras are producing equally striking results; a

leopard snapped as it advances toward the alien contraption with a curious

expression; a nighttime shot that lights up the eyes of a horned, black-coated

gaur, giving it a demonic air; an old male elephant kneeling to scoop food from

a dirt hole, a single yellowing tusk jutting out beside its muddied trunk.

 

It's the kind of detailed, on-the-ground intelligence that would have served an

army well in the Vietnam War.

 

Huge amounts of bombs were dropped on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an ultimately

futile effort to choke off Hanoi's military supply line through ostensibly

neutral Laos and Cambodia to battlefields in South Vietnam.

 

The trail was not a single roadway but a network estimated by U.S. officials to

encompass some 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) of old roads, jungle paths and

waterways. Hanoi officials claimed after the war that the trail actually had

been twice the U.S. estimate.

 

Dao Pil, now 58, lived in the Cambodian sector at the time, and vividly recalls

the North Vietnamese convoys and the frequent air strikes that drove him to hide

in the forest.

 

" There were wild animals in the jungle, " he says, laughing. " But I wasn't scared

of them; I was scared of the bombs. "

 

Today, the sounds of war have given way to the mesmerizing pulse of soft

tropical sound: the calls of yellow-cheeked crested gibbons fill the cool dawn

air, and birds such as blue-eared barbets and white-rumped shamas sing through

the day.

 

But threats remain; the wildlife and timber poachers and illegal loggers. To

counter them, armed Cambodian police run checkpoints and patrols right up to the

Vietnam border. Arrests are common, and the police have an extensive collection

of confiscated chain saws, snares, homemade crossbows and log-carrying vehicles.

 

The WCS hopes education will ensure the zone's future.

 

There are already clear signs the ethnic Phnong people living within its

boundaries are on board the conservation effort. They are animists who believe

the trees and animals are sacred, and not only abide by the no-hunting rule but

act as an early-warning system, according to the Cambodian project's deputy

manager, Khiev Rithypoin.

 

" When they're out in the forest and they see people who've crossed the border

from Vietnam they come and tell the police teams so we can send a patrol to

catch them, " he says.

 

Close to a watering hole, in a clearing where he has just set up a camera,

Pollard is fired with a vision of the future -- " that in 20 years people will

come here and drive along the road and there's a distinct chance there'll be a

tiger trotting along in front of you, and elephants will be grazing right in

front of the camp. I really don't think that's an unachievable dream. I think

that's very much in our grasp. "

 

Source: Associated Press

 

 

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to

tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of war, corporations have been

enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money

power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the

prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and

the republic is destroyed. I feel, at this moment, more anxiety for the safety

of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my

suspicions may prove groundless. " Lincoln in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins

on November 21, 1864