Leeches Vol.2

On our last field trip Chevy got himself a monster of a leech. It found him when he was wandering through a rhino wallow. I noticed it hanging from his crotchal region when he got out of the water and pulled it off. Here it is in my hand, this is before it got a chance to take his blood: what a monster!!!

First trip

As our Twitter followers will know, we have returned from our first five day trip to the forest. In five days of searching we found two dung piles, both rather old. Sarah’s team found both of them.

Our team of two national park technical staff (Mr Hai and Mr Long), two rangers (Mr Thai and Mr Huong), two local guides (Mr Nga and Mr Banh) and us and the dogs camped by a beautiful forest stream for four nights. One night we heard some Guar crashing through the bamboo towards our camp, until they heard us and bid a hasty retreat!

Each day we went out with the dogs to search for rhino dung. Most days our searches led us to wallows, in this photo you can see that by rolling around in the wallow (wallowing of course) the rhino has rubbed mud onto some over-hanging leaves. 

At the wallows, rhino footprints were often clearly visible. Ageing the footprints is fraught with difficulty, but the lack of fallen leaves in these prints indicate that they were made very recently.

Those footprints led out of a wallow where a rhino had been moving around. The mud was deep, you can see where the rhino’s belly has flattened the mud in between the footprints here. Again, there is no debris in the areas flattened by the rhino, this and the cloudiness of the water where the rhino has been moving around indicated to us that the rhino had been here recently, perhaps as recently as the night before.

The same rhino then moved up into the forest, brushing against leaves as it went. Here is some mud from its side stuck to a palm frond. Although it is not really visible here, where the mud on the palm was thicker, it was still damp: we must have missed the rhino by only a few hours!

 We then try to follow the rhino trails up into the forest to search for dung, here the rhino has brushed against some dead bamboo leaving mud behind:

And here it has just crashed right through (the bamboo stems are about the width of a big human man’s arm):

Often, trails made by the rhino are not easy to follow – try crawling through this! And all to find a pile of poop…we're back out there tomorrow for another week.

Monitor Lizard confiscation

While staying at park HQ, the park received a confiscation of about 260 water monitors. These large lizards are popular restaurant food in towns, and are put in large jars of rice wine for drinking on special occasions. At least 220 of the lizards were still alive so the park decided to release them. Here are a few pictures of them in the sacks they arrived in, just prior to release.

It's great that the Forest Protection Department seized these lizards, and that there is a large area of well protected habitat in the park in which to release them. However, it’s hard to know what is the ideal thing to do with such a large number of large lizards. There is always the risk of transmitting disease, but a lengthy quarantine is not really an option with so many animals. It’s not possible to put them all back where they came from, since they will have been collected over a large area and then delivered to the trader from whom the seizure was made. However, releasing them all in one place to an area where the current population and carrying capacity are unknown is also risky. Sometimes there are no easy answers, but the national park just have to do the best thing that they can do.