Birdwatching in Cambodia

The Mekong River rises as a glacier-fed rivulet in Tibet and roars through deep gorges in Yunnan, China and along the border between Burma and Laos for 1600 km (1000 miles) before settling down to become navigable in Laos. From there it nourishes rice paddies and fishing communities for another 3600 km (2240 miles) before emptying its massive silt load into Vietnam’s Mekong Delta in the South China Sea. The deposited silt blocks the flow, however, forcing the Mekong to back up into Tonle Sap, “the Great Lake” in Cambodia. In the wet season, the Tonle Sap is one of the largest freshwater lakes in Asia, swelling to an expansive 12,000 km2 and flooding the mangrove forests all around its perimeter. During the dry half of the year the Lake shrinks to as small as 2500 km2, draining into the Tonle Sap River, which meanders southeast, eventually merging with the Mekong River. But there is an odd asynchrony in the lake’s rise and fall. Because it takes so long for the monsoon’s rains in the north to transit six countries and reach the Mekong Delta, the Tonle Sap is still rising when the smaller lakes and rivers throughout Cambodia are shrinking in the dry season. The drying forces great masses of waterbirds to leave the smaller ponds for the expanding habitats in Tonle Sap. This was the season when I arrived for a week of birdwatching.
The serenity of Cambodia today belies its recent nightmare of war: the bombing by US forces in the 1970s, followed by the take-over, ideological purgings, and economic restructuring by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge were defeated in March 1992 and U.N. peacekeepers supervised the revival of Cambodia's constitutional monarchy. Today it is a modern, forward-looking, peaceful country whose people are increasing in prosperity. Except for a hotel in Siem Reap near Angkor Wat, I stayed with local families in their villages. Most of this was arranged through the Sam Veasna Center for Wildlife Conservation, www.samveasna.org (bookings@samveasna.org). The Tonle Sap part was arranged by OSMOSE Conservation, Education, Ecotourism, www.osmosetonlesap.net/.
North of Siem Reap to the Thai border is a nearly featureless plain of rice paddies and coconut palms. Because it was the end of the dry season, the rivers and ponds were drying up, exposing fish for easy capture. Boys, girls, men and women were fishing everywhere with an astonishing variety of nets, traps and techniques. Others were threshing rice by hand, collecting the grains on plastic tarps in front of their houses, built on stilts because the whole region can flood during the monsoon. Every house had a collection of food trees—bananas, coconut palms, and trees with fruits I had never seen. Most also had a large pond stocked with fish and filled with lotus plants, nearly every part of which is edible. Every meal I was served had a different kind of fish in sweet and savoury sauces flavoured with exotic fruits and accompanied with fresh rice and gracious smiles. The feeling of pride in their culture and the self-sufficiency of their circumstances was palpable.
In Ang Trapeang Thmor, women were spinning and dying silk and making gorgeous fabrics for sale in the tourist markets of Siem Reap (the city near Angkor Wat) and the boutiques of Phnom Penh. Everyone I talked to expressed hope and confidence in the future. They spoke of new schools and increasing levels of literacy. This is what peace buys.
A fisherman poled me across a wide, flat lake in a tiny boat to the Ang Trapeng Thmor Sarus Crane Reserve see colonies of storks and other birds. The trip, in early December, was too late to see the cranes, but there were enough other waterbirds and raptors to keep me busy.
Next I stayed at two floating villages in Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve, one of the most important wetlands for biodiversity conservation in Southeast Asia. Villagers live in floating houses that they drag forward and back as the lake rises and falls with the seasons. Their economy was formerly based totally on fishing; now, in cooperation with international and local conservation organizations, they have added ecotourism. In recognition of the economic benefit, the villagers agreed to conserve birds and other wildlife and some of them open their homes for tourists to stay—a good thing, since there aren’t any hotels. My hosts were gracious and friendly and provided savoury meals of fish straight from the lake. The prize bird was the Greater Adjutant, a rare species of stork that is difficult to see; in all I added 55 species to my life list.
Notwithstanding my positive impression of Cambodians and their land, there is a need for further progress in conservation of its natural resources. In Angkor Wat, I noticed a long mist net strung high between two trees just beside the Bayon (temple complex) at Angkor Thom. My guide said that it was for catching bats, and indeed later I saw roasted bats in the market at Siem Reap. Later, reading about rare bears of Cambodia and neighbouring countries and doing research on endangered primates, I realized the extent of illegal hunting, trapping and capture of wildlife. Much of this feeds local tastes, but there is also a huge amount of trade north into China where the market seems insatiable. Understandably, a conservation ethic comes slowly to people who for generations, and many even now, have had to struggle just to survive. But if these rare wild animals are to survive, the international conservation community will have to continue working with local organizations to make greater efforts at conservation.
Further Reading
Montgomery, Sy, 2002. Search for the golden moon bear: science and adventure in Southeast Asia. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore, Simon & Shuster.
Mittermeier, Russell A., Jonah Ratsimbazafy, et al. (2007). "Primates in peril: the world’s 25 most endangered primates, 2006 – 2008." Primate Conservation 22: 1–40.
Photos of the trip are at http://picasaweb.google.com/Lee.Coquitlam.