Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

In war's trail, wildlife flourishes

A corner of Cambodia transforms from war zone to animal haven.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published March 4, 2007

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 U.S. 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," says Ed Pollard, the society's technical adviser, standing 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. At least 42 threatened species thrive in the 1,160 square miles of what is officially the Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area, the society says.

A sharp eye can spot a charismatic primate called the black-shanked douc, gorging on treetop leaves. 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, 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 advances with a curious expression, an old male elephant kneels to scoop food from a dirt hole.

It's the kind of detailed, on-the-ground intelligence that would have served an army well in the Vietnam War.

[Last modified March 4, 2007, 01:08:11]