Week of Dung

We’re back from another few days in the forest. We found another eight dung piles, all of them were at least a few weeks old, and some had rotted away to almost nothing. This was one of the best specimens:

And here I am in a rattan thicket sampling the heap:

We had our best results close to this forest pool, which local people said was regularly used by rhinos and Gaur. It looks good for White-winged Duck too…

Sure enough we found plenty of rhino tracks coming down from the ridge to the pool, although park staff thought that all of them were at least three weeks old. We followed the rhino tracks along the ridge (where there were also many Gaur tracks), and here we found six dung piles. We also found (and removed) a thick metal snare along the trail which Mr. Dung (pronounced yung in the south of Vietnam, it would be more like zung in the north), one of our local guides, said had been set to catch Gaur. Here’s Chevy taking a forced break during the search for rhino dung – searching (or rather the thought of getting his ball after finding some rhino dung) gives him crazy eyes:

And here’s Pepper working for Sarah, searching for rhino dung close to a wallow.

It wasn’t always easy going for either of us. Most of the trails are through bamboo, like this one, featuring Mr Long of the technical staff:

Many of the trails also feature a lot of rattan, one of the evilest plants in the whole wide world. Dense stands of this spiny palm cloak many of the ridges in this part of the national park, often with very few trees rising above it:

It can take hours to hack through the rattan, Sarah and her team often have the misfortune of spending whole days in the rattan, but the rhinos love it, so we can’t ignore those ridges. Here Mr. Hai is sending Mr. Dung on ahead to clear the way for a dog team:

After all that we’re often glad to be back at the camp at the end of the day. Here’s a photo of the camp, it was almost the end of the day when I took it (that’s my excuse anyway).