5
Nepal
The tiny window of the plane could not contain the mountain—not even half of it. I scrunched down in my seat, craning my neck, and there, as close as I’d ever get, were the tops of the world’s highest peaks riding the blue like the white sails of a sky goddess. Terraced rice paddies and fields of winter wheat climbed the slopes to the tree line. A huge valley came into view and we descended toward the dusty city of Kathmandu, gateway to the Himalaya.
We spent two days in Kathmandu acclimating to the altitude. Nepal’s capital was going through a revolution in 1990. The king’s men, khaki-clad soldier boys, were patrolling the streets, and an occasional pop of rifle shot could be heard in the alleyways. The People’s Movement, which by 2006 demanded the complete overthrow of the monarchy, was just beginning but did not seem to disrupt the comings and goings of trekkers, soul searchers, potheads, and biologists. It was a funky city, bustling with hawkers of trinkets and hash pipes, the Hindu temples nestled near Buddhist prayer wheels in the confusion that accompanies overlapping cultures. Poverty was etched on the people’s worn faces, their dress, and the collapsing balconies of the ancient architecture. Men, women, and children pursued us in the streets, desperate to sell Gurkha knives, strings of beads, or cigarettes. A Snow Leopard pelt was selling for a mere fifty dollars in the back room of a little shop.
A Snow Leopard in Nepal, taken by the wildlife photographer Steve Winter Credit 2
The Snow Leopard is the iconic cat of the Himalaya, both revered and hunted. It roams the high mountains from India to China, and from Afghanistan to Burma. No one knows how many of these beautiful animals are left. They are secretive and hard to see in the rocky, snowy terrain. When they cannot find Blue Sheep to eat they come down and raid farmers’ livestock. Meat is laced with poison and the cats die.
Rodney Jackson was in Kathmandu while we were there. This was his tenth year of radio-tracking Snow Leopards in Nepal, and it would be another decade before his Snow Leopard Conservancy, with its mission of harmony between man and cat, was founded. Few scientists ever set out to study the Snow Leopard with his steadfastness. Rodney and his partner, Darla Hillard, worked with hundreds of local farmers to find ways for them to coexist with the Snow Leopard and become its guardian. They instituted a community-controlled insurance policy for livestock, where the farmer pays a small premium up front in return for a sure price for his domestic animal should the Leopard take one. Although the chance of seeing a Snow Leopard is slim, many Westerners are signing up for tourist visas to the area, an additional incentive for the local people to keep the cats alive.
George Schaller continues to return to the vast Himalayan plateau he so loves. He encouraged Buddhist monks in Tibet and elsewhere in the Himalaya to keep the hundreds of monasteries that dot the landscape sacred and off-limits to hunters. He wrote that if the Snow Leopard was not protected, the mountains would become “stones of silence”—the title of his classic book on the great cat.
Alan, Salisa, Ed, and I began our five-day trek of the lower Annapurna range from Pokhara in the western part of Nepal. We set off with Sherpas and a ridiculous number of porters who carried everything we had and all we might need for tenting and meals. At least we were employing a good number of them. They leapt ahead of us with boxes, bags, pots, and pans hanging down their backs from tamp lines taut on their foreheads. Some were barefoot, preferring the security of splayed toes and the soles of their feet to the soles of their shoes. I marveled at their agility on rocky inclines. Alan kept pace with us for a few miles and then, in a burst of macho flair, grabbed a duffel from one of the porters, held it on his head, and raced forward. We didn’t see him again until the end of the day. This was typical of Alan; he is hard to keep up with, literally and figuratively, accomplishing more in a week than most of us do in a month. Salisa is lithe and a runner; she kept pace in the middle of the pack, while Ed and I brought up the rear.
Salisa and Alan Rabinowitz and I picnicking beneath the Annapurna range, Nepal, 1990
I was drawn to the lush flora covering the hillsides and the birds among it. Glossy Ashy Drongos perched on long branches in the morning sun; Indian Rollers undulated by, their turquoise and teal-blue wings unmistakable in flight; while the stunning scarlet of the Long-tailed Minivet brightened the green foliage. The Great Himalayan Barbet called loudly in the oak forest, and various species of vultures, kites, and eagles rode the thermals high above. The beauty was staggering because the mountains, peeking through the clouds so far above us, made everything seem part of some mythical kingdom.
Surprisingly, we met no other trekkers, but we passed through many villages of different Hindu caste peoples, first the Chhetri and later the Gurung. Some women came and sat with us as we ate our lunch on the ancient stone paths. They sat on the ground and stared at Salisa and me. They were lovely with small rings in their noses and ears, and silver necklaces draped around their necks. I wondered what they were thinking. They did not ask for anything, not money or even a smile; they just stared. Their families had lived there for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years, and their red adobe-like homes, rectangular or round with a thatched or slate roof, were beautiful to look at, reflecting the order of centuries. Soon they would be harvesting their crop of winter wheat.
The eastern Himalaya region is known for its diversity of plants, with multitudes of orchids and primulas, and as the hub for genus diversity of rhododendrons in particular. There are hundreds of species. I have never been in these mountains in April and May when the riot of color is at its height, but in March a few species of red flowering rhodies were spotting the slopes and little sunbirds were reaping the nectar while pollinating the plant at the same time.
This trek was not difficult. We stayed below twelve thousand feet and followed well-worn trails. The tenting at night was on fields laid bare by the many who had come before us. Ed and Alan dug individual pit holes for each of us and were hard put to shovel unearthed ground. Children found us each evening as the snowy peaks of Annapurna turned golden in the waning light; they laughed and tested their English.
I saw no wild animals except birds and insects during our time in Nepal, but we were in areas long civilized. With more than thirty million people living in a country the size of Arkansas, Nepal manages its wild habitats, a healthy 29 percent of the country; everything is cultivated or managed except for the highest mountain peaks. There are twenty-three parks and reserves, including those where hunting is allowed. The country is a model in Asia for the administration of its parks, two of which are World Heritage Sites: Chitwan in the south, and Sagarmatha, the premier mountain park of the world, with Everest at its heart, in northeastern Nepal. Sagarmatha is an IBA—an Important Bird Area—with more than one hundred species, high-altitude beauties like the Blood Pheasant. Its mammals include the Musk Deer and the Himalayan Black Bear, as well as the Snow Leopard and the Red Panda.
Chitwan, the oldest park, has had some troubling times. It is one of the last places to see the Indian, or One-horned, Rhinoceros, whose population wavers depending on the success of poachers, who continue to kill these ancient beings for their horns. The going price can be higher than $100,000 for a single horn, used by the Chinese and especially the Vietnamese for spurious medicinal purposes. The Rhino population plummeted from eight hundred animals in the 1950s to three hundred by the end of the century. In 2003 alone, thirty-seven Rhinos were killed in one massacre. The government of Nepal ordered soldiers into the park to handle the situation, and by 2011 no Rhinos were being killed by poachers, a clean record still maintained by Nepal. The soldiers, heavily armed, patrol by jeep and on Elephant where they can move through the thick grass in pursuit of poachers. By 2012, the Rhino population had rebounded to five hundred animals, but the poachers have become more sophisticated in their methods and are backed by international cartels of criminals. Wildlife trafficking is so lucrative that it ranks fifth in international illicit trade, after counterfeiting, drugs, the trafficking
of people, and illicit oil.
It is harder to estimate the number of Bengal Tigers killed by poachers in Chitwan because the entire body of the animal is taken; the skin, the head, and the bones are all valued in illegal trade. The census of 2013 put the number alive in the park at about 125 breeding females, a figure the government wants to double by 2022, the next Year of the Tiger. With an estimate of only one thousand wild breeding females left on earth, Chitwan’s goal is admirable.
Nepal’s managed parks and reserves are really mega-zoos, a popular solution to saving large mammals globally. Dr. William Conway was prescient in predicting this in the 1980s when he claimed that with a rising human population of ten billion by the mid-twenty-first century there would be no way to safeguard wild animals except in isolated parks or “mega-zoos.” By the 1990s Dr. Conway insisted that zoos and all field biologists needed to be dedicated to conservation, not just research. It was in 1993, under his direction, that the esteemed ninety-eight-year-old New York Zoological Society changed its name (and with it, its mission) to the Wildlife Conservation Society.
Nepal’s leaders have halted poaching by bringing in the army, while juggling the needs of thirty million people who speak a multitude of languages and whose cultures often clash. The government recognizes the value of the country’s wildlife, especially as it relates to the lucrative tourist industry. They are taking a hard line against criminals in wildlife trafficking and have committed manpower to get the job done. But with the devastating earthquake of 2015, resources will be needed for decades to come for Nepal’s displaced people first and foremost. The needs of wildlife may have to be sacrificed.
6
Myanmar
The 1990s were about politics—for Alan, for me, and, it seemed, for all the nongovernmental organizations involved with conservation and nature. The Internet was nascent in 1995, but within ten years it would demonstrate how online communities could put pressure on elected officials to enact legislation. It still had a long way to go when I was in D.C. As President Bill Clinton said years later, “When I took office, only high-energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the World Wide Web…Now even my cat has its own page.”
I sat in my office at the NEA, writing some remarks on my electric typewriter, when the three techno-devotees on my staff of three hundred came in and urged me to get “wired.” Vice President Al Gore had requested as part of his “reinventing government” dictum that all federal agencies begin communicating internally and externally on the World Wide Web through computers. I went to visit him at his White House office to talk about the NEA’s budget and problems I was having with Congress, and he ushered me excitedly to his desk to see a special website pop up on the screen. He saw the future of the Internet long before anyone else I knew. He also assured me that the White House was behind me in my struggles.
The techies wired me first with a fine huge Macintosh; they taught me how to negotiate the complex systems of the machine and how to surf the Web. The world opened up in ways I never dreamed of as a child. I could access museum exhibits, photographic archives, and the early digital works of online artists. The Web compiled the latest migratory bird patterns and gave me all the works of Shakespeare at the click of a button, which truly thrilled me. Although government bureaucracy and ineptitude kept the NEA from being fully wired internally, the Web bunch created a great site for us, plugging in audios of blues singers and string ensembles to whom we had awarded grants and listing all essential information about the agency. We did it in record time, and Al was proud. The Internet is a miracle, and nothing will ever be the same. Fully 40 percent of people on the planet today, more than three billion of us, are online.
While I was dipping into the future of communications, Alan was going back into the past—way back. Between 1993 and 1999 Alan journeyed to many remote areas of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. As director of Asia programs for the Wildlife Conservation Society he dreamed of going where few had ever gone and to a country that had been closed to foreigners for three decades. He stared at the huge expanse of wilderness on the maps conjuring Indochinese Tigers, Asian Elephants, and Sumatran Rhinos. When permission to travel finally came, it was from the military government, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC, one of the world’s most flagrant violators of human rights, routinely perpetrating mass murder, rape, torture, recruitment of child soldiers, and forced labor. Aung San Suu Kyi should have been the head of government after elections but was instead under house arrest, where she remained until 2010. The military had taken over all departments, including forestry, in the name of “national security,” and were exploiting natural resources to the point of unsustainability. Only 1 percent of the land was protected in parks, and nothing was truly protected as there was no onsite staff to manage poaching. This was the situation when Alan arrived in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) in 1993.
Many cautioned Alan about working with a despotic government, and some felt that it was morally wrong to do so. But animals don’t engage in politics—except those of the human persuasion—and most have been on earth for millions of years, not the mere two hundred thousand we humans have. I encouraged Alan to do what he could with whomever he encountered. My brief time in Washington had shown me that politics does indeed breed strange bedfellows. Who would have guessed that one of my staunchest allies, a lover of the arts, would be conservative Republican Orrin Hatch from Utah?
Alan was in luck. SLORC cabinet member General Chit Swe took great interest in the wildlife of his country and in preserving the forests. He endorsed Alan and WCS as advisers to the government, and Alan was cleared to travel with forestry staff in secure regions of the country.
Alan was interested in knowing the status of the Sumatran Rhinoceros. With George Schaller, his mentor and the director of the WCS Science Program, he traveled the Chindwin River north to the largest protected area, the Tamanthi Wildlife Sanctuary. No Westerners had been there for decades, and they expected that these old hunting grounds for British sportsmen would reveal numerous large mammals including Indochinese Tigers, Asian Elephants, and the endangered Sumatran Rhino, which was barely holding on in Sumatra and was extinct elsewhere.
The small Sumatran Rhino probably looks today as it did twenty million years ago when it shared eastern Asia with three-toed horses, early apes, and thriving whale species in the kelp oceans. It survived millions of years of the planet warming and cooling, and the Himalaya shifting higher and higher as tectonic plates pushed against each other. The ignominious demise of the Sumatran Rhino came about because men coveted the two horns protruding from its snout. Through the ages the keratin horn has been consumed as a cure-all for poison, cancer, impotence, headache, fever, and just about anything else you could name. You might as well grind up your fingernails or hair and eat them for all the validity of the claims of traditional Asian medicine. But the superstition has persisted for thousands of years and targets every Rhino living today with a death sentence, because the horns are worth their weight in gold.
Alan and George had some hope that in this remote part of the world the Sumatran Rhino had managed to elude hunters and survive. What they found was a beautiful high-canopied forest devoid not only of human life but also of large animals. It didn’t take long to understand why. They were camped by the water one evening, the soldiers accompanying them in civilian dress, when three hunters calmly walked in, thinking they were locals. Their packs were filled with poaching snares and the body parts of otters. They were confused and surprised at being arrested; they had hunted this area for many years and no one had ever told them it was wrong. They sold Tiger and otter parts, bear gallbladders and Rhino horns across the border in China, but they said that all the Rhinos were gone now. They were still getting a Tiger a year, and showed Alan how they set up the snares with bamboo spikes to pierce the Tiger’s flesh and weaken him.
The forestry department responded to Alan’s assessment of the sanctuary by building a ranger station and educating
the local people about poaching. The Wild Bird and Animals Protection Act had been in place since 1912, but Alan doubted that the trade in body parts could be stemmed. The culture of killing was growing and spreading like a cancer all across Asia. At least in Myanmar he didn’t seem to be dealing with government corruption as he had in Thailand. It’s anomalous that dictatorships often make the environment safest for animals. In Myanmar, Burmese soldiers had a long history of discipline under British rule; corruption was as unacceptable to them as it was at Buckingham Palace.
Alan did an assessment for General Chit Swe of a pristine island called Lampi, where the local people had decimated coastal species such as sea turtles, urchins, and cucumbers for the Thai market. Most of the large trees had been cut down by timber poachers and fish were being blasted out of the water with dynamite. Still, Alan saw promise in species recovery if part of the island was made a protected area and therefore off-limits. The general wasted no time in seeing it designated Myanmar’s first marine park.
Alan kept staring at the map. Farther north, near the borders of India, western China, and Tibet, was a transition zone, where the flora and fauna of lowland tropical species overlapped with upland Himalayan species. This would be where the Pangolin, the Jackal, and the Palm Civet met the Asiatic Black Bear, the Red Panda, and the Goral. After the interminable and obligatory rounds of government officials Alan finally set out with a hundred porters, an orchid specialist, an ornithologist, a medical officer, and the Burmese biologist Saw Tun Khaing, whom he had hired to coordinate WCS’s activities. This was the biggest trip Alan had ever taken and he was to be gone for two months, a long separation from Salisa back in New York. He needed to know what was hidden in the depths of the vast north.
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 5