Fostering in the forest

Fostering in the forest

Encouraged by their ability to successfully reforest their village's surrounding areas, the Baan Pang Chum Pee community are taking up a new challenge

SOCIAL & LIFESTYLE

Many decades ago, the village of Baan Pang Chum Pee, in the Mae On district of Chiang Mai, resembled an ecological Armageddon. All of its trees had been cut down, leaving the mountains looking like rocky sand dunes. After decades of extensive logging, the trees had disappeared from the forest and the villagers learned some harsh lessons, as the rivers dried up and farmers and fishermen struggled to make a living.

It takes months for domesticated gibbons to become accustomed to living in the wild. Each gibbon needs around 100 rai of forest to live.

Soil became barren and rain only made thing worse because, without trees to absorb the water, the rainwater rolled down the mountain and flooded the community.

But things have turned around. Sujit Jaima, a 65-year-old head villager, said that the severe environmental problem prompted the whole community to change their way of life and led to reforesting and learning to live in harmony with nature. Within a little over a decade, the forest returned and the community of former lumbermen and hunters became a showcase of nature conservation where university students, researchers and conservationists came to study about land sharing and sustainable farming. The community has also embraced eco-tourism and in 2006 received the Thailand Research Fund (TRF) prize for its villagers’ collaborative research and local business model for river water management.

Last year Baan Pang Chum Pee was also chosen by The Wild Animals Rescue Foundation of Thailand (Warf) as an area for the gibbon rehabilitation project.

“We chose here because we are confident that the community is capable of protecting the forest and taking care of gibbons,” said Pornpen Payakkaporn, co-founder of Warf.

Baan Pang Chum Pee is set among over 12,000 rai of national reserve forest. The community allocates 7,000 rai as a sustainable utilisation zone and 5,091 rai as a no-hunting conservation zone. The latter area is where four gibbons have so far been released, with two more to be released in the coming year.

The Thai-based wild animal rescue group is well known for its ongoing campaign to rescue abused gibbons from poachers and those that work in the tourism industry. The Foundation’s Gibbon Rehabilitation Program (GRP) in Phuket has became a famous site for animal-lovers, especially western tourists.

“Gibbons only exist in Asia and many westerners look at them as they do pandas, as exotic animals that are being threatened and in need of help,” Pornpen said, by way of explanation as to the centre’s popularity.

The Foundation has so far returned 22 gibbons to the Khao Pra Thaew Non-Hunting area in Phuket, but has been forced to seek new areas for wildlife sanctuary, as Phuket wildlife sanctuaries have reached capacity. Releasing gibbons is time-consuming work. It takes several years or more to rehabilitate them, as most of those rescued have suffered from severe mental abuse and physical injuries. The gibbons must be given a good bill of health and have regular medical checks to ensure they can survive in the wild.

Returning gibbons to the forest is easier said than done. As gibbons tend to live as a family, the Foundation needs to find mates for the gibbons and wait until the couple has a baby, in order to release them together, as a family. Even when released, gibbons are placed in large enclosed areas and are under constant monitoring for the initial few weeks.

Gibbons can play a vital role in protecting the forest. Known as “forest planters”, gibbons carry seeds from fruits they eat and defecate kilometres away. Each gibbon roams, by swinging from one tree branch to another, around, on average, 100 rai of land.

The seeds that gibbons excrete later grow into plants and trees. Professor Wanpen Soralam, an expert on wildlife conservation at Mahidol University, is quoted in a recent report in Sarakadee magazine, saying that gibbons defecate around 300 seeds per day or 109,500 seeds in a single year, so the potential for fostering forest growth is huge.

Pornpen said that she wished there was some way the Baan Pang Chum Pee villagers could solve the problem of poaching at its very root. Warf only saves poached gibbons, but has so for been unable to stop poaching. She believes that if more villages followed the footsteps of Baan Pang Chum Pee, however, people would care more about gibbons and help end poaching.

Gibbons that people see on the streets are invariably poached from the wild. “Gibbons stay together as a family,” said Pornpen. “So a poacher needs to kill the mother in order to take away its baby.”

A baby gibbon can be purchased for around 10,000 baht, which is a relatively small figure compared to how much money they can generate as props for photo opportunities. Fines also do little as deterrents, with gibbon owners only required to pay a very low fine if caught.

For Sujit and the community of Baan Pang Chum Pee, they hope that one day wild animals will be seen in the forest again. Wild animals will encourage even more visitors to study the community’s forest conservation and eco-tourism. But more than that, he hoped that the village’s subsequent generations could experience the good old days when villagers could walk in the jungle and see wild animals.

“We successfully replanted trees. We now have lot of trees and a lot of water in our rivers. But we cannot wholeheartedly call it a forest because there are no wild animals within. So, we hope these gibbons will complete our forest.”

Community leader Sujit Jaima, left, and two GRP volunteers place gibbons in a cage before releasing them back into the forest.

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