Last Glimpses of a Cambodian Paradise?
Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 3:07 pm
An Asian black bear on the move in Virachey National Park. Photo courtesy of Greg McCann.
Last Glimpses of a Cambodian Paradise? Documenting an area on the eve of its likely destruction
By Gregory McCann on 22 June 2018
The sheer scale of the logging operations makes it a wonder that there’s anything left of the forest, especially as the timber just keeps flowing out of northeast Cambodia and into Vietnam unabated.
This year, one of our camera traps captured an extremely rare recording of a Northern buffed-cheeked gibbon (Nomascus Annamensis) walking on the forest floor. Clouded leopards, golden cats, marbled cats, and leopard cats — the “standard four” evergreen forest feline species, as they are sometimes referred to — appear regularly on our camera traps.
Hope, if there is any, might come from the animist beliefs of the Brao and Kavet highlanders who live in the Park’s buffer zone along the now-dammed Sesan River, which snakes around the park’s perimeter. The largest mountains that form the natural (and until now almost entirely undemarcated) international border between northeastern Cambodia (where Virachey lies) and the Lao People’s Democratic Republic’s forested Nam Ghong Provincial Protection Area are considered “spirit mountains” by the Brao and Kavet tribal people. The peaks, which carry names like Haling-Halang, T’buen, Yak Yeuk, and Ching-Yum, send shivers down these animists’ spines.
I’ve thought about throwing in the towel many times, but I keep coming back to Ratanakiri province and Virachey National Park year after year after year after year.
Full article https://news.mongabay.com/2018/06/last- ... ommentary/