Chainsaws in the forest

The National Park where I'm doing my fieldwork is the smallest in Cambodia, and the closest to Siem Reap. These are two major factors why it is subject to so much degradation, and why you can no longer find leopards, bears or banteng and gaur (wild cattle) here, but these animals are found readily in larger parks less accessible from major towns.

Hunting and logging are illegal in any protected areas here, but enforcement is weak at best either due to lack of funding or lack of will. Last week I was out in the forest until 10:30pm, and as my ranger and I were walking along we saw lights that weren't fireflies, they were other torches. We stopped in alarm and switched our own torches off. The other lights also disappeared. We realised they were torchlights and both us and the other group of people had turned them all off and were waiting silently about 40m away from each other waiting for the other group to make a move. I was a bit indignant at finding people in the park at night, as it could only mean they were hunting animals and clearly they shouldn't be there, but my ranger Viset was clutching his gun and agreed that there were 'people!' and suggesting 'let's go!' urgently enough that I figured we should do so. We continued on and found their campfire and that the people had run away into the forest. I reported this and the head rangers were advised by staff at the wildlife rescue centre to be more vigilant.

Then two days ago I was heading up the mountain at 6:30am with another, more experienced ranger, Mr Lan, when we began hearing the unmistakeable sound of chainsaws at work in the forest. We turned around and headed back down the path until we had mobile reception, and Mr Lan was straight on the phone telling his ranger mates to go and nab these guys. Apparently they did, although I'm always suspicious, knowing how things work in Cambodia - did the rangers go and 'arrest' the illegal loggers out of a genuine concern for the Park, or to extort bribes to line their pockets and then let the loggers go about their business, or keep their timber? Corruption is endemic and it's hard to be high-horsed about it when the rangers receive $30-40 salary per month.

Around the Lingas, the carvings where tourists visit daily, the rangers have painted symbols on lots of the trees warning local people to leave them standing...

'Don't cut' or a wide-legged man with a low-hanging willy? Hard to say...

But venture further into the forest, and in places there are clearings where loggers have camped and made planks out of some of the biggest trees. In some cases they were either disturbed or decided to leave without taking everything with them...

 

At times I have come across an entire felled tree just left lying there, no timber taken at all. Puzzled, I asked my ranger who explained in halting English that the people like the fruit of a certain vine that grows high up in some trees. Instead of climbing to get it or knocking it down, they simply cut the whole tree down, make a lunch of the vine fruit, and be done with it. 

When I first visited here last year I remember finding it odd that although you can tell that the forest is secondary - low canopy height, thick under- and mid-storey making it hard to walk through all the tangle and regenerating trees when not on a path, lack of very big trees - there are hardly any tree stumps around. Then I was shown why: most of the trees that are selected for logging are valuable for their timber, dark woods in particular for making furniture. This little Park (about 14,000 hectares) has so few of these kinds of trees left that the people now dig out the stumps and upper root systems, so you can find a lot of these characteristic holes in the forest...

 

On one day we came across a group of men carrying out a big stump slung beneath a pole they all carried together. My young ranger simply gave them a nod and we carried on. Definitely a case of lack of enforcement around here, but without the resources to fund it, smaller 'protected' areas like this are becoming more and more degraded every year.

Cave Stakeout

"A stakeout is the coordinated hidden surveillance of a location or person for the purpose of gathering evidence, especially in regard to criminal activity." - Wikipedia.

 So with the new Plan to await arrival of new transmitters, and spend the intervening time trying to recover the faulty ones being carried around by five turtles up on the mountain, I set some traps back in the river. Two of the turtles' transmitters hadn't completely failed, and I discovered they had moved 50m away from the river and were hiding out in caves! Pretty interesting as we'd assumed they spent all of their time in the river, nevertheless I couldn't see them in this turtle-sized cave. Mostly too small for me to crawl into, it extends back several metres under a pile of boulders, complete with hundreds of cockroaches and several bats.

Come out come out wherever you are...

I would have thought that perhaps they'd lost their transmitters in there somehow and had gone elsewhere, or that something had eaten them, but even if this was the case I'd superglued the transmitters to their carapaces, and I thought it more likely that the turtles themselves were in there than their carapaces had been carried in there by some predator.

After five days of tracking them every morning to find them still in their cave, I thought perhaps they are moving out at night and going back in there by the time I arrive every morning? Only way to find out: a cave stakeout! So last night I packed up hammocks and tarps and fried rice for dinner, and headed up the hill with two rangers. We set up camp off to the side of the cave so I would be able to pick up their moving out at night with my antenna and receiver.

My hammock, swinging in the forest for the night

We set up before dark at 6:30pm, and then there wasn't much to do but wait. I'd check for their signals every two hours throughout the night. But first for dinner, the rangers were hungry...

Mr Hat chowing down

Swinging in my hammock, they grey sky faded between the gaps in the canopy above, and after a little while the only light was from the fireflies floating through the forest. Little flashing light globes going about their firefly business. I had a fully charged ipod to get me through the evening, but hadn't figured on the rangers playing their own Khmer music out loud, which sounds a bit like someone being strangled. I let them go for an hour or so before having to tell them to hush up, figured it would defeat the purpose of the stakeout if we scared the turtles with the music/strangling sounds. I hadn't quite figured how difficult it would be to fight off sleep every two hours to put boots back on and try to quietly creep towards the cave entrance with my antenna to see if there'd been any movement. Especially since there didn't seem to be any change, except that at 5:30am one of the turtle's transmitters appeared to be on the blink. We packed up, checked traps (again no captures) and headed for home.

So I know that for last night at least, they didn't move, and perhaps they haven't moved for the past week? Perhaps they were so stressed out by the transmitter attachment process that they are hiding out for a while? Perhaps I have been disturbing them poking around in their cave last week trying to get them out, and now they're determined not to budge? Perhaps it's just normal for them to be inactive for such a long time? Perhaps perhaps perhaps. So now I am going back to relying on a big trapping effort in the river, and hope with luck to recapture a turtle with a transmitter on it. Seems like a lot of effort to go to because someone else gave me inadequate transmitters, but on the plus side at least I am getting fitter!

Nothing worth doing is ever easy...

Well I've been back in Cambodia for three weeks now, and it seems so much has happened already I'm not sure where to start? There was the elation upon arrival and the feeling that it's entirely natural for me to be here, that it fits better than life in suburban Melbourne. Catching up with old friends and revisiting old haunts in Phnom Penh, I started to think I should definitely be on the lookout for a job here and resettle into the expat lifestyle, a more exciting, exotic and 'aware' way of living.

But first things first, I am here this time around for my own research project, three months of fieldwork in Phnom Kulen National Park, where I will attach radio transmitters to 21 stream terrapins (Cyclemys oldhamii), a small semi-aquatic turtle found across Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. This species was only identified as separate from others in its genus in 2008, and research on Cyclemys turtles is so far limited to taxonomic work. The population I'm studying in northwest Cambodia was only discovered in 2009, and I led a pilot study in 2010 to get a preliminary idea of population status and suitability for further study. Following this, I proposed returning to Cambodia after my 12 month contract with a conservation NGO here came to an end, and am now here for the fieldwork which will be the basis of my thesis for a postgraduate course in zoology from a Melbourne university.

Juvenile Cyclemys oldhamii

So, full of enthusiasm, I leapt straight into the fieldwork a day after arriving here at the wildlife rescue centre north of Siem Reap. I enlisted the help of two visiting German PhD students, and two rangers, to help me lug 20 turtle traps up the (small) mountain to be set along the river. I'd forgotten how tough the climb is, and consoled my aching legs with thoughts of the uber-fit Louise that I'm sure will replace this sloppy-lazy-Louise several months from now. The first few days of trapping went fairly well, and I captured several turtles, mostly hatchlings too small for transmitter attachment, but one that was suitably large enough and which I spent over an hour kitting out with a carefully-glued transmitter. Over the following few days I tracked the turtle up and down the river and was happily gathering data on its movements, when we ran into a few challenges with the authorities...

Setting turtle traps in the river

First transmitter attachment! A very fiddly job...

There are some ancient Angkorian carvings in the river where my turtles live, and every day tourists visit the site, which is 'managed' by the Apsara authority, who oversee all the temple sites around here such as Angkor Wat.

The 'Lingas', Angkorian-era carvings in the riverbed

Although I have permits from the Ministry of Environment for my research, it seemed the Apsara authority took affront that I did not think to ask them for permits to use their path up the mountain every day, and refused me access. They even had tourist police waiting to potentially arrest me if I should be found on the path! Typical Cambodian politics, just because someone has perceived an insult and 'lost face', you can end up with big problems. So I spent the next three days with two rangers and several machetes, trying to hack a new path through the dense forest up the other side of the valley to the plateau above. Fighting the forest is exhausting, and I quickly gained a very high appreciation of paths and roads of any kind. I was defeated by a huge cliff in my way, and although we found a few ways that it could be scaled, these involved using vines as ropes to haul yourself up, and/or crawling through caves so small you had to remove your backpack. Not something I fancied doing everyday, and I decided to just settle for taking a path several kilometres longer, but much easier, for my daily commute to the plateau.

From the research centre where I'm staying, you have to go along the road towards Siem Reap until reaching the Ranger Station, then begin the climb up. I bought a bicycle in the local village for $25 that I now ride to the Ranger Station and back everyday, with local people either giggling or staring open-mouthed at the sight of the srey barang (white girl) pedalling along to work, fresh-faced and eager in the mornings, exhausted, stung and scratched at the end of the day.

I caught four more turtles large enough for transmitter attachment, and with the beginning of the rains was caught out far from home in some colossal downpours, one so mental I had to abort attaching a transmitter to a turtle, stick it in my backpack and head for home, and release the turtle safely into the swollen river the next day.

Transmitter attachment to adult female brought home in a storm

Go free turtle, go freeeeee!

Then, the bigger problem struck: the transmitters I'd attached to turtles started failing. I fretted over all the possible reasons, and immersed some at the research station in a bucket for waterproofing tests. After four days of trying unsuccessfully to locate my turtles in the river, these transmitters in the bucket also failed. It came to light that the transmitters worth several thousand dollars that I'd brought from Australia are not waterproof, despite my being assured by the supplier that they would be! *cue dramatic devastating music*. For a day there I seriously did think the sky was falling and my whole project was disappearing down the toilet. There were suggestions that it would be best if I returned next year to try again, and I was despairing at the thought of having to put everything on hold for eleven months because of this stupid problem. My supervisors (one in Australia, one here on site) were very good in their management advice, however, and I have after all dealt with worse situations than this. So now the plan is to get a refund for the faulty transmitters, have a new batch made urgently by another supplier in Canada, have them sent to Melbourne, and for my supervisor to bring them over in about 3-4 weeks' time. Meanwhile I will attempt to recover the five transmitters on turtles up in the river, and simply start my project again once I have the new equipment. Sigh! I knew there would be unanticipated problems, but didn't expect them to be quite so fundamental and halt my project altogether. Luckily my university have been very understanding and have said I can have an extension of my course deadline as long as is needed to get new equipment. So it looks like my trip will be extended until about November.

Lots of information in this post, I'm sure the following ones will be more of the observing-life-in-Cambodia variety, the Land of Smiling Faces.