Who lives in a house like this?

Those idle enough to be at home during the day-time in the UK in the 1990s will remember the day-time TV classic “Through the Keyhole”. For those who have never seen the show (and for many of those who have), this will be a bit lame. Basically the premise of the show on which this blog post is based is that panelists (who in this version are to be played by you the blog reader) are shown a number of parts of the inside of a d-list celebrity’s house (although in this case the house does not belong to a celebrity), and using clues gleaned from various items in the house they guess who lives in a house like this (i.e. who’s house is it).

So join us as we go through the keyhole (put the emphasis on “through” and “keyhole” for the full effect). 

 

 The front (and only) door opens directly into the front room. The front room appears to be some sort of bedroom/kitchen/study. The bed has a tasteful pink mosquito net. What’s more, all of the furniture appears to be made of plastic, and is of a size suitable for a children’s picnic or a bia hoi.

There is what looks like dung in the oven (and a trapped man holding a camera)!

 And there’s more dung in the freezer! And ratatouille.

Is the pattern on the bed sheet a clue? Perhaps not. Above the text “Intimate Partners” it is decorated with a picture of two dogs, one wearing a flouncy hat and the other sporting bows in its head fur. This raises all sorts of questions about the animals depicted and what they symbolise: are these two cross-dressing male dogs, or two female dogs, or one cross-dressing male dog and one female dog? More importantly, animals should not wear clothes, regardless of their sex or sexuality.

Moving on from the front room, there is an attractive guest bedroom, with country cottage style curtains.

Throughout the property the walls are a relaxing shade of mint-green. The corridor has a number of functional but rustic touches, such as the use of aged bamboo for the equipment rail and clothes rail.

These people have a lot of dog food. Perhaps they have dogs?

The bathroom contains what looks like a home-made sink. A remarkable piece of bathroom furniture, it appears to have been ingeniously constructed by cutting a hole in a table and sinking a bowl into the space. This high-end item looks like the work of a master craftsman.

Consider the clues carefully - who lives in a house like this? Please remember, in rural Vietnam you rarely have a choice of decor!

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).

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.

The beginning

Tomorrow is the beginning: the first proper day of the survey. The training is over and now will will take the dogs into the forest for five days to search for the elusive rhino dung. We'll let you know how we get on when we get back.

Leeches vol. 1

Vietnam's forests are full of leeches. They manage to creep inside clothing that is tucked into clothing sprayed with insect repellant as easily as escapologists escape from locked boxes, only the principle is reversed. The dogs suffer as much as we do and we have to stop and remove leeches from them regularly. 



Over the next six months we’ll be posting a number of posts of leeches doing what they do best. I found this leech after lunch, and after I had had a shower (I don’t know what this says for my personal hygiene standards). That’s proper persistence from the leech – he deserves a blog post!