Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
In contrast, Asia is still a leech outpost, with plenty of large mammals on the menu, including
humans.
Judging by our experience, however, leeches in Cuc Phuong must have had a hard
time finding those mammals. Excessive hunting had turned this area into a virtual “empty
forest”—a forest without its vertebrates—an increasingly common sight in the tropics by the
1990s. One cause was certainly the pressures exerted by specialized poachers on the persist-
ence of rarities—from jaguar trappers to rhino horn thieves to smugglers of tiger bone and
elephant ivory—and feather hunters, as we have seen in New Guinea, Peru, Nepal, Brazil,
and Hawaii.
But another group is an even more disastrous contributor to the empty forest syndrome:
bushmeat hunters. The term “bushmeat” refers to any wild game caught by locals. Sometimes
the meat is for the family pot, but more often and more damaging, commercial hunters cap-
ture or kill wild game for restaurants or wealthy urban customers. Commercial bushmeat
hunting is particularly pervasive in the tropics. There is practically a subdiscipline in the field
of conservation biology devoted to describing its staggering footprint and how to contain
it. We began to suspect that the communes around Cuc Phuong were home to among the
most effective bushmeat hunters anywhere, as the forest surrounding us remained eerily si-
lent. What we were witnessing was in microcosm a major challenge facing many former war
zones: the soldiers return home with their weapons and the skills to use them.
Two days later, we were back in Hanoi with John MacKinnon to attend an all-day sym-
posium on forests and conservation. We were the only Westerners present. At lunch, we were
ushered to a seat next to a distinguished-looking elderly man in uniform, who turned out to
be General Vo Nguyen Giap, a famous Vietnamese soldier-turned-conservationist. I knew of
his reputation as Vietnam's Eisenhower and as a superb tactician, but I wondered what made
the general a conservationist. In his fluent French, he explained, “The forest is our friend. It
hid us and provided shelter, food, and water. Now it is our turn to save it.” The forested areas
at the borders with Laos and Cambodia had allowed North Vietnamese soldiers to infiltrate
the south and conceal their divisions along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The dense Vietnamese
forest hid more than soldiers and material, though. It had also become the last sanctuary for
the region's forest-dwelling rarities.
In 1992, two years after that initial trip, David Hulse was among the first conservationists to
return under license from a US government program seeking to build relationships with Viet-
nam. Along with him, a small army of Western naturalists were eager to explore the Annam-
ites and beyond. MacKinnon would have to hurry if he wanted to beat the pack in sighting
the kouprey and other lost species.
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