Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
There was a silver lining to such earlier unsuccessful kouprey surveys and related searches
in the secluded Annamite range. Field scientists had uncovered a seam of rare species that
startled the world, reporting new finds across a wide range of taxa: a bovid, a rabbit, two
deer, several birds, and hundreds of fish. It was as if, eons ago, the Asian plate had tilted east,
and all the rarities had rolled toward the South China Sea before dropping into hidden valleys
of the Annamites.
Meanwhile, MacKinnon continued his quest for the kouprey. “It's a bit like looking for
the Yeti or Bigfoot, this animal,” he told a reporter who had come to cover his story. “First,
it was just extremely rare and then it was shrouded in mystery through 30 years of warfare.
It's become sort of a symbol of conservation in Indochina.” After extensive surveys in the
company of Professor Giao and other Vietnamese field men, MacKinnon's team struck gold
that year, though not in the form of his original quest species. During an expedition to the
Vu Quang Nature Reserve in Ha Tinh Province, they were invited into some hunters' houses.
The hunters placed three skulls on the table of something entirely new to the Westerners.
The sharp, saber-like horns resembled the weapons of Africa's scimitar-horned oryx. And so
Pseudoryx
, or, as it became known, the saola, entered the annals of the mammal kingdom.
News of the saola spread fast. Further surveys of the Vu Quang region turned up more
than twenty specimens, and at last a wild saola was caught in 1994. An account in the journal
Nature
raised its profile. David Hulse made his own trip to the area, and his stunning pho-
tographs of this peculiar ungulate gave a face to the name. All of this attention raised an
obvious question. How could a large herbivore weighing more than 90 kilograms and with
formidable horns stay hidden from scientists, Vietnamese or Western, for so long? The an-
swer was that the saola, as the Javan rhino once did in its own range, lived deep in the forests
of Vietnam and Laos along the Annamite chain. The area was wet and malarial, had poor
soils, and had a very low human population in an otherwise densely populated country. And
saolas seemed to survive best in the higher steep valleys, where few locals lived or hunted.
By heading straight for this dense, wet region of forest that Coolidge and Roosevelt had cir-
cumvented in their 1927 expedition, MacKinnon had seen his hunch pay off. The best place
to find rare species during postwar recovery was in the biggest, wettest block of unsurveyed
intact forest. The saola's success at adapting shows another coping mechanism. Selection for
being a habitat generalist when a species first evolved, long before the human era, allows it
to persist in remote habitats on poor soils, on ground too nutrient poor and too steep to grow
crops. In Vietnam and elsewhere, this becomes the definition of a modern refuge.
