Sunday, December 20, 2009

Dog blanket!

In the forest it is hot and sweaty during the day, but it gets really cold at night. Icicles form on your eye-lashes and your clothes freeze to the hammock. Well maybe it’s not that cold, but it certainly is cold – we wear four layers of clothing at night and we’re still chilly. So what to do?



Well…there’s a big warm dog lying there on his little platform just next to your hammock, so you invite him in…



 

 

Chevy can't get enough of the hammock, he'll jump in any time he gets a chance!




 

 

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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Fresh dung!

This week we found some fresh dung! Up till now all the dung we have found has been a little older, and dry. This should not be a problem, the dogs can still sniff it out and we can still collect samples for analysis, but it is just more exciting to find fresh dung. You can almost taste the rhino.

The action centred around a large swampy area which the rhinos like to visit. Sarah and her team first found some footprints and a rhino trail up on a ridge above the swamp.



Damp mud on a bamboo stem indicated that the rhino may have been here quite recently!



They followed the tracks and signs until they found the spot where the rhino had slid into the wallow.



We found the dung amongst the tree ferns, in a boggy area next to a small stream. The gleaming heap is in the foreground:




Back up on the nearby rattan covered ridges, Chevy also found two old piles of dung, this one is almost gone:



That makes 18 piles of rhino dung found during the first phase of the survey, here’s hoping for more in 2010!



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Wednesday, December 9, 2009

No dung here. Part 1.

This week we found no dung, and no footprints. This was no surprise, since we were surveying in an area where rangers and local people had not recorded any rhino signs for 5-10 years. Up until this week we have been surveying in the part of the national park which rangers and local people regard as the only place where rhinos persist, there we had found rhino footprints every day. However, in the interests of scientific rigor, we are doing some surveys in adjacent forest as well. This was one of those weeks.


It was 6 km to our first camp, deep in some good broadleaved evergreen forest close to this stream where we and the dogs washed and swam.



Although the forest was good, there was a trap line along most ridges. Hunters had constructed knee-high drift fences out of brush to guide animals to gaps in the fence where snares were set. The snares are made of bicycle brake cable, a loop tied to a nearby sapling catches round the animal’s foot as it passes through a gap in the fence. Although the wire is too thin to catch a rhino, they do catch most other things, including civets, pangolins, small deer and wild pigs.


Here Sarah and Pepper are walking close to a drift fence:



This is a close up of the snare wire set over a gap in the fence, ready to catch an unsuspecting creature. I know it just looks like the forest floor, but then that's the point.



Not all trap lines are checked often enough to find everything that gets caught. These are part of the remains of a mouse deer which must have died and rotted away before hunters came back to check the trap.



Rangers responsible for protecting this part of the national park only patrol for up to five days in each month. In the part of the park where rhinos definitely persist, the Asian Rhino Project and WWF fund an additional five days of patrol effort each month, to reduce the risk to the rhinos. Although we have found snares in the rhino area, numbers of snares there were much lower than in the area where we have just been, Mr. Hai from the technical staff said that this was due to the extra patrolling effort funded by donors.


Whenever we found them, park staff and local guides removed the snares:





We also found a number of larger snares, which local people said had been set to catch Gaur (see also here). Here, Mr. Hai is removing a snare constructed from 0.6 mm (¼ inch) steel cable, similar to the one which we found on a rhino and Gaur trail on our previous trip into the forest. According to the internet (keeper of all truth), ¼ inch steel cable has a breaking strength of nearly three metric tons, so this snare could be a threat to a one ton rhino.




Here are all the snares found by one rhino searching team during the first day of this trip (there’s about fifty in the picture, including the thick one). We found many more on subsequent days.




Since this was to be a split site trip, we spent a day traveling to a new campsite a couple of kilometers away. Along the way we removed well over 100 snares along many kilometers of drift fence. We broke the journey at lunch time at a conveniently located hunters camp, a good place to take a break and eat some rice.



And then we destroyed it.



 






For reasons of space the story continues in part 2. Don't fret, you don't have to wait long for it, it's just below.

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No dung here. Part 2. (for reasons of space)

In a nearby stream we found a plastic drift fence running down the middle of the stream for about 100 meters with nets at either end, set to catch turtles, snakes and frogs. Vietnam’s turtles are amongst the most threatened in the world.



Once again the rangers set to work:




Enforce that!




And that! Another hunters camp gets the treatment.



We never did find the campsite we were aiming for, after scaling many steep hills to find somewhere which the local guides recognized, we gave up just before dark and camped by a stream:




Getting out of the forest from this mystery location wasn’t easy. We found a stream and followed it until it became a river, and then followed the river all day until we got to a road to a nearby village.




Pepper looks less than convinced by this plan of action:




All in all, it was a pretty depressing trip, lots of evidence of hunting, no rhino signs and hardly any signs of other animals. It was also physically tiring with plenty of really steep hills to contend with. Afterwards, everyone needed to cool down in any way they could:




 






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Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Who lives in a house like this?

Those idle enough to be at home during the day-time in the UK in the 1990s will remember the day-time TV classic “Through the Keyhole”. For those who have never seen the show (and for many of those who have), this will be a bit lame. Basically the premise of the show on which this blog post is based is that panelists (who in this version are to be played by you the blog reader) are shown a number of parts of the inside of a d-list celebrity’s house (although in this case the house does not belong to a celebrity), and using clues gleaned from various items in the house they guess who lives in a house like this (i.e. who’s house is it).


So join us as we go through the keyhole (put the emphasis on “through” and “keyhole” for the full effect). 



 
 The front (and only) door opens directly into the front room. The front room appears to be some sort of bedroom/kitchen/study. The bed has a tasteful pink mosquito net. What’s more, all of the furniture appears to be made of plastic, and is of a size suitable for a children’s picnic or a bia hoi.





There is what looks like dung in the oven (and a trapped man holding a camera)!



 And there’s more dung in the freezer! And ratatouille.





Is the pattern on the bed sheet a clue? Perhaps not. Above the text “Intimate Partners” it is decorated with a picture of two dogs, one wearing a flouncy hat and the other sporting bows in its head fur. This raises all sorts of questions about the animals depicted and what they symbolise: are these two cross-dressing male dogs, or two female dogs, or one cross-dressing male dog and one female dog? More importantly, animals should not wear clothes, regardless of their sex or sexuality.





Moving on from the front room, there is an attractive guest bedroom, with country cottage style curtains.



Throughout the property the walls are a relaxing shade of mint-green. The corridor has a number of functional but rustic touches, such as the use of aged bamboo for the equipment rail and clothes rail.





These people have a lot of dog food. Perhaps they have dogs?



The bathroom contains what looks like a home-made sink. A remarkable piece of bathroom furniture, it appears to have been ingeniously constructed by cutting a hole in a table and sinking a bowl into the space. This high-end item looks like the work of a master craftsman.


Consider the clues carefully - who lives in a house like this? Please remember, in rural Vietnam you rarely have a choice of decor!
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Week of Dung

We’re back from another few days in the forest. We found another eight dung piles, all of them were at least a few weeks old, and some had rotted away to almost nothing. This was one of the best specimens:



And here I am in a rattan thicket sampling the heap:




We had our best results close to this forest pool, which local people said was regularly used by rhinos and Gaur. It looks good for White-winged Duck too…




Sure enough we found plenty of rhino tracks coming down from the ridge to the pool, although park staff thought that all of them were at least three weeks old. We followed the rhino tracks along the ridge (where there were also many Gaur tracks), and here we found six dung piles. We also found (and removed) a thick metal snare along the trail which Mr. Dung (pronounced yung in the south of Vietnam, it would be more like zung in the north), one of our local guides, said had been set to catch Gaur. Here’s Chevy taking a forced break during the search for rhino dung – searching (or rather the thought of getting his ball after finding some rhino dung) gives him crazy eyes:




And here’s Pepper working for Sarah, searching for rhino dung close to a wallow.




It wasn’t always easy going for either of us. Most of the trails are through bamboo, like this one, featuring Mr Long of the technical staff:




Many of the trails also feature a lot of rattan, one of the evilest plants in the whole wide world. Dense stands of this spiny palm cloak many of the ridges in this part of the national park, often with very few trees rising above it:




It can take hours to hack through the rattan, Sarah and her team often have the misfortune of spending whole days in the rattan, but the rhinos love it, so we can’t ignore those ridges. Here Mr. Hai is sending Mr. Dung on ahead to clear the way for a dog team:




After all that we’re often glad to be back at the camp at the end of the day. Here’s a photo of the camp, it was almost the end of the day when I took it (that’s my excuse anyway).



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