Cambodia: Rare Water Birds Repopulating In Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake
News 2008-04-03 16:22
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA: The populations of seven species of rare water
birds have recovered significantly in Cambodia's Tonle Sap lake due to
a program that employs former hunters as park rangers,
conservationists said Thursday (3 Apr).
A re****t by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society found the
populations have increased by as much as 20 times for some of the
species since 2001, when the program started.
The findings mark a "success story" in efforts to protect the bird
colonies from poachers, said Noeu Bonheur, the Cambodian Environment
Ministry's deputy director of the Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve.
"It is definitely exciting news that we should be proud of," he said.
His office and the WCS have worked together for several years on a
conservation project at Prek Toal, a flooded region on the
northwestern edge of the Tonle Sap.
The lake is Southeast Asia's largest freshwater reservoir, which can
expand to 12,000 square kilometers (4,630 square miles) at the peak of
the rainy season and recede to about 3,000 square kilometers (1,160
square miles) in the dry season. It is rich in biodiversity and
provides a breeding ground for many species of birds and fish.
The WCS re****t, released earlier this week, said the Prek Toal bird
colonies hold the largest _ and in some cases the only _ breeding
populations in Southeast Asia of the seven globally threatened large
water bird species.
The species are the spot-billed pelican, milky stork, painted stork,
lesser adjutant, greater adjutant, black-headed ibis and the Oriental
darter. There were over 20,000 birds in 2007, compared to 5,000 in
2001, the re****t said.
All seven species are listed as "threatened or near-threatened" by the
World Conservation Union, Tom Clements, a WCS technical adviser in
Cambodia, said in an e-mail Thursday.
"Prek Toal is the most im****tant large water bird breeding colony in
Southeast Asia. In some cases, Prek Toal sup****ts up to 30 percent of
the global population," Clements said.
When the colonies there were discovered in the late 1990s, they were
threatened with extinction as a result of villagers' rampant
harvesting of eggs and chicks, the re****t said.
But during the past seven years, a colony protection and monitoring
program has resulted in a gradual decline in poaching incidents,
allowing the birds to stage "remarkable comebacks," it said.
The program employs some 30 park rangers, many of whom are former
poachers, who work in ****fts around the clock to monitor the bird
populations.
"The approach was extremely effective," Clements said.
He said some of the hunters who were not employed did try to collect
the birds' eggs and chicks in the early years of the project, "but
since 2004 this threat has effectively ceased." (AP)
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