by Susan Lumpkin, GTI Consultant

Park entrance

Monsoonal rains nearly drowned out a Global Tiger Initiative team’s visit to Chu Mom Ray National Park, one of Vietnam’s highest priority areas for the recovery of wild tigers in that Southeast Asian nation. But after a delayed flight out of Hanoi and an unplanned stop in Danang for emergency plane repairs, Keshav Varma, Andrey Kushlin, John Seidensticker, and I landed in the Central Highlands city of Pleiku and headed for the park about 60 kilometers away. We were accompanied by Vuong Tien Manh of the Vietnam Forestry Administration.

We finally arrived at the park’s headquarters at dusk in the midst of torrential downpours. The cluster of beautiful burnt-orange French colonial-style buildings trimmed in white are a welcoming sight. Built in 2000 with funding from the Netherlands, they include a large administration building, a guest house, and living quarters for staff, a small museum, and other office space set among well-tended gardens. Chu Mom Ray hosts few visitors, however, and we were fortunate to get permission to go there.

Wild gibbon, Courtesy: Vietnamese
Journal of Primatology

Park Director Ho Dac Thanh graciously hosted a dinner for us at a nearby wedding hall cum restaurant where we were the only patrons. Between courses, he and his staff answered our questions about the park’s biodiversity, reporting that the park was home to 115 mammal species and 275 birds. He promised a detailed briefing in the morning.

Continued heavy rain clattered on the guesthouse roof overnight but the morning broke slightly less drenching, if not exactly dry. We thrilled to the morning songs of gibbons, which we learned later belong to a newly described species of crested gibbon found in the park. A new langur species and a new tree species were also found there 2010 and a new snake in 2011.

Following a breakfast of Vietnam’s famous noodle soup known as pho, we settled in for our briefing by the park director and his young and knowledgeable staff.

Biodiversity Hot Spot

Rare Annamite striped rabbit

Chu Mom Ray is in the Truong Son Range, a string of mountains, foothills, and lowlands that straddles Vietnam’s border with Cambodia and Laos. All known as the Annamites, this range is hot spot for seekers of new wildlife species. Scientists started to explore this area in the 1990s after a long war-driven hiatus and have been handsomely rewarded. Among the many finds is the Annamite striped rabbit, whose nearest relative is found in Sumatra. According to local reports, this rare rabbit occurs in Chu Mom Ray. Only known from such reports, carcasses found in local markets, and few photos from camera traps, this rabbit is also threatened by snare trapping as are many of the species found in Chu Mom Ray, which end up on dinner tables and in local markets.

Snaring is just one of the challenges facing the wildlife of Chu Mom Ray. While no people live in its 56,000 hectare core areas, the 188,000-hectare buffer zone is densely populated and packed with rubber plantations. Local communities are reliant on forest products such as fuelwood, rattan, and honey, and forest is cleared for shifting cultivation.

Restoration Landscape

Rubber plantation in Vietnam’s Central
Highlands

Chu Mom Ray is contiguous with Cambodia’s Virachey National Park and Dong Ampham National Protected Area in Laos and together they form a 700,000-hectare conservation landscape. The entire area may harbor only a handful or so tigers at best so it can be considered a restoration landscape. No formal surveys have recently been conducted in Chu Mom Ray, although one is planned for the later part of 2011 but recent evidence of tigers is scarce. A ranger heard a roar in 2005. A worker glimpsed a tiger in 2009. And a tiger scrape was detected in 2010. That’s it.

Nonetheless, tigers could recover or be restored here because good habitat exists and there is evidence of prey whose number could also rise if trapping and other threats can be contained through effective protection and the creation of alternative livelihoods for local communities.

Vegetation maps displayed in the briefing showed large areas of evergreen and semi-evergreen forest interspersed with patches of secondary forest and bamboo and a large central swathe of grassland in the park’s core area. While the habitat historically was dotted with small glades in forest clearings, Chu Mom Ray’s large grassland was created when the United States military sprayed the defoliant dioxin (better known as Agent Orange) along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the 1970s and killed the trees.

We were able to make a short foray into the core area grassland for a glimpse into what is now the park’s best potential habitat for tigers because it attracts tiger prey as the 1,000-kilogram wild cattle called gaur, sambar deer, and other hoofed mammals such as muntjac. In fact, this area has emerged as important to the conservation of gaur, which are in serious decline in Vietnam and other parts of their Southeast Asian range.

Dr. Seidensticker and his Chu Mom Ray
journal notations

The existence of this grassland, however horrific its origins, may be a boon to wildlife, but it is not without problems. Slowly the grassland is being invaded by trees and has shrunk from 16,000 hectares when the park was founded in 2002 to about 10,000 hectares today. Park Director Mr. Thanh reported that active management, through burning or otherwise removing the invading trees, has been recommended but is not yet being implemented.

Somewhat confusing the picture is the existence of a road running straight through the grassland, and roads provide easy access for poachers. John Seidensticker speculated that the grassland may have actually contributed to declining numbers of gaur and other hoofed mammals because they are concentrated near the road rather than being widely dispersed in forest glades. In turn, the concentration of prey may have turned the area into a sink for wild tigers. Dealing with this paradox will be a major challenge to restoring tigers to the landscape here.

Looking Ahead

Mr. Thanh ended our briefing with noting his priorities for the future, which include stronger cooperation with local communities to engage them in forest protection and enforcement of wildlife laws, and regular species-level monitoring of tigers, other carnivores such as leopards and sun bears, hoofed mammals, and primates such as the park’s rare gibbons and langurs.

Our last stop was at a building in the park created as a wildlife rehabilitation center but never used as such. Keshav Varma was very enthusiastic about its potential to be developed as a research and training center. Experience has shown that active research programs help boost the quality of protection and management in protected areas as well as increase knowledge about the flora and fauna. Training and capacity building of protected area staff is important in Vietnam too, as it is in most of the tiger range countries. This will be an opportunity for the Global Tiger Initiative and its partners to explore in the future.

After lunch at the wedding hall, we bade farewell to our hosts and headed back to Pleiku through the Central Highlands’ pastoral landscape of rubber plantations and rice paddies. Although our visit was short, for all of us this was our first experience in a Vietnamese park. While the problems we heard about are daunting, we were heartened by the fact that such a large wilderness survives in this region of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The challenge is to protect it so tigers can once again thrive there. Vietnam’s commitment to the Global Tiger Recovery Program and rapid progress on implementation of its own National Tiger Recovery Priorities is reason for optimism.