Tigers prowl where bombs fell in Cambodia's Ho Chi Minh Trail
- From: "Chim" <ChimS1@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 18 Mar 2007 12:30:51 -0700
Sunday, March 18, 2007 - Page updated at 02:02 AM
Tigers prowl where bombs fell in Cambodia's Ho Chi Minh Trail
By Jerry Harmer
The 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 trees that once hid communist forces from U.S. pilots.
Much of the credit for this swords-into-plowshares story goes to the
New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), 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 thrive
within the 1,160 square miles 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 - abounds. So many
Germain's Peacock-pheasants have been spotted that conservationists
have scratched the species from the world endangered list.
Pollard, 33, an 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 come 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 1,500 miles of old roads, jungle paths and
waterways. Hanoi officials claimed after the war that the trail
actually had been twice the size of 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
airstrikes 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 sounds: 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.
Copyright © 2007 The Seattle Times Company
.
- Prev by Date: Cambodia's first rock opera inspired by Broadway hit 'Rent'
- Next by Date: UI students help entrepreneurs in developing countries
- Previous by thread: Cambodia's first rock opera inspired by Broadway hit 'Rent'
- Next by thread: UI students help entrepreneurs in developing countries
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
