Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The first Western biologist to reach postwar Vietnam in the mid-1980s was John MacKinnon,
Southeast Asia's most acclaimed field man. The Oxford-educated MacKinnon was England's
answer to Indiana Jones, a superb biologist but at heart a devoted rarity hunter. His impress-
ive body of work includes a guide to the birds of China; topics on the birds of Sumatra,
Borneo, Java, and Bali; and his most comprehensive opus, a review of protected areas in the
Indo-Malayan faunal realm, a vast region stretching from Pakistan to the eastern edge of In-
donesia. Many of the park systems of Southeast Asia have John's fingerprints on their design.
His guiding principle: it is crucial to protect examples of all the habitat types in a country
so as to conserve the widest array of species. To help develop Vietnam's new protected-area
plan, John had received permission to search every habitat of this long, narrow nation lying
between the Annamites and the South China Sea. At a time when most Westerners were pro-
hibited from exploring zones most directly affected by the fighting, MacKinnon's freedom
was envied by the global community of biologists.
The next arrival, in May 1990, was a younger conservator of rarities. Twenty-six-year-old
David Hulse was responsible for fashioning the training program for future staff of the new
park system being designed by John and his Vietnamese counterparts. David's party included
Bernard Masters, an Australian education specialist with the World Bank, and me. I was new
to fieldwork in Indochina, as was just about everyone but MacKinnon, but I had spent a few
years in the region as the World Wildlife Fund's Asian conservation scientist. Our field visits
would be limited to reserves near Hanoi, far from the places bio-explorers such as MacKin-
non planned to go. Still, on this trip we would at least be able to interview Vietnamese biolo-
gists searching for the wild orphans of war.
During our flight, David had been going through an Englishlanguage version of a Viet-
namese newspaper he had found at the Bangkok airport. As our plane approached Hanoi,
an unusual story caught his eye. He examined the grainy photograph of Asian elephants im-
mersed in a jungle wallow and handed it to me. It was striking not because of the behavior
captured in the image—large tropical mammals frequently slip into wallows to prevent heat
stress. Rather, it was the symbolic nature of the makeshift wading pool: it was a crater left
from a B-52 bombing raid thirty-five years earlier.
Before the trip, I had visited the Smithsonian Libraries to gather what information I could
about rare Vietnamese species. The darkened stacks held one obscure topic,
ThreeKingdoms
ofIndo-China
. Published in 1933, it described a natural history expedition led in 1927 by the
late Harold J. Coolidge Jr., a Harvard mammalogist, and Theodore Roosevelt. Their journey
along the Mekong River and its tributaries cataloged the biology of a region covered in a bro-
cade of tropical forests, remote mountains, and secluded valleys that supported unusual an-
imals found nowhere else in the world. The expedition collected many small vertebrates, but
the biologists were most interested in the four large mammal species—the elephant, a wild
