First survey
Though Christmas lies between and might fog my memory somewhat, I think it’s time to report on my first survey. I left on the fourteenth of December after frantic packing. Hannah’s old red rucksack, which I borrowed was stuffed up with plaster of paris and silica gel for taking samples of tracks and dung. I bought a ticket in the morning for the long train south.
I was going to the north of Quang Nam province to find out whether, one way or another, I might find any trace of my study species there. My study species, for those of you who don’t know, is the saola, the beast that caused a stir by being discovered by science in 1992, when the number of known large mammals was supposed to be shrinking not growing and secrets of that size were supposed to all be gone. The saola lives only in the Annamite mountains, the ancient rain-soaked range that divides the ancient kingdoms of Vietnam and Lao, that separates the tides of Chinese and Indian culture and holds in its crags a heritage much older, and older than the ice.
As I was about to leave I got an email from my friend Sam who had just finished a survey. He was searching for another five-letter Asian animal: the Baiji, dolphin of the Yangtze. It seems like the results of the survey were widely reported on the news: As far as anyone can tell, the baiji is extinct.
It is impossible to say what the age of a species is because the meaning of ’species’ gets lost in time and anyway we haven’t the fossils to track their histories. But it is possible to talk about the divergence times of species – that is, how long ago the lineage of that species split off from any others still alive today - how much evolutionary experience that species represents. As far as we can judge the baiji diverged from all other cetaceans 20 million years ago. It was perhaps the most ancient single lineage of all the weird and ancient order of cetaceans, it is now the first cetacean to have been eliminated by humans.
I like to point out that the ‘ancient’ nation of China is only one five-thousandth the age of the baiji lineage. That perhaps the baiji’s extinction might serve as a reminder that past performance is no guarantee of future success. Endangered species, after all, are our canaries in the coalmines; warning signs about our own survival.
Yeah, yeah, so sayeth the blog. Anyway, about my trip:
It was good to feel like I was really doing something and in a weird way I felt on top of things. Although I made shedloads of mistakes (like falling too far into the clutches of the village headman and so being unable to escape hiring his family as guides) I felt they were all basic beginners mistakes. At no point did I get that numbing feeling that has hit me in the past that goes: “this is a useless piece of research, overambitious and ill-conceived and it will net me nothing for a lot of hard work and discomfort but a shifting set of numbers and some stats that don’t connect”.
It was hard work: the country there is sliced by white streams, ever-running over blocks of black rock, carving chutes and falls and pools in black walled gorges where grey ferns and green snakes stand out bright against the stone. Between, the streams leave knife-edge ridges with slopes steep as the rain, thick with tangle and slick with mud. The saola, they say, is seen on the streams. Indeed one man from the next town had said he’d shot a party of three by one of the waterfalls here three years ago. No westerner, and no scientist has ever seen a saola in the wild. Do they really like the leaves along the streams, or is it simply that the hunters themselves tend to wait there. Or do the saola, like the hunters and like us, use the streams as roads? The ridges, certainly, are no joke; me and Hung passed a freezing day in the endless drizzle running transects along the flanks of one. Our guides gave up and went back to camp. In the end we found nothing, which was all I expected but then, coming back along the stream I found a green mess of dung on a rain-soaked rock by the stream, bringing the total for the trip up to two. It’s now in a sealed bag in a sealed box in the freezer, awaiting shipment to America for genetic identification. It’s probably serow dung – a creature like a shaggy chamois that shares the Saola’s home. But at least we’ll know. If I get enough dung samples analysed then maybe we can work out what saola dung looks like and it is just possible that we will find enough of it (if we know how to look) to find out something about where the saola are and how they live: some basis for protection.
There’s too much to say about the situation of wildlife in Vietnam, iron filings in an acid bath about sums it up. All mammals are valid meat and once they’re almost used up, markets can be found for birds, reptiles, even insects. The last large mammals in the accessible forests are easily killed off by opportunistic bug collectors. As more and more roads are built, more and more forests become accessible. As more people become richer, more of them are likely to come up with the idea that it would be cool to have a stuffed saola in their living room. Without a serious protection effort the saola has no hope, none whatsoever. It’s hard to describe how desparate its situation is, and depressing to try.
Sam said ‘the world is that little bit greyer, and what’s more, most people won’t give a damn’
Oh there’s so much more to say on this but I have no time. I’m off to an insight meditation course in Thailand for ten days.
