Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  Alan writing in his journal, Cockscomb, Belize, 1984

  Conservation was not something known to the Belizean government in the 1980s. They won independence from England only in 1981 and Belizean politicians were still finding their way. The Belizean Audubon Society was formed in 1969, however, as an offshoot of Florida Audubon. The abundant bird life in Belize was well known to birders, and Belize Audubon was interested in preserving important areas in the country. Alan had his first partners in BAS for the preservation of Cockscomb.

  If saving Jaguars in the forest was frustrating, saving them on paper was equally so. Political life is a waiting game, a game of compromise and broken promises, and the learning curve is steep. Alan kept at it despite roadblocks. The folks at Belize Audubon one day warned him that some of the Maya of Cockscomb had applied for land titles. They had been squatters for years in the forest just as their ancestors had been, the concept of ownership being as alien to them as it was to Native Americans to the north. Missionaries told the Maya how to go about getting the land so they could build a new church in their village, a move clearly incompatible with a Jaguar preserve.

  Alan knew these missionaries. He had a run-in with them when he saw their children killing birds with a slingshot. He told them the area might soon be a preserve and asked them to tell their children to stop killing the birds. Their only reply was “We save souls.” Later they came into Alan’s study site and showed the Maya a movie of sinners burning in hell, telling the Indians they had to repent. They also told them they could have a nice new church if they got legal title to the land. Alan ramped up his visits to the capital.

  There are always winners and losers when lands are locked up for private enterprise, commercial development, military uses, or wildlife refuges. Alan sympathized with his Indian friends, but Jaguars were more plentiful in the Cockscomb Basin than anywhere else, and if they were protected, then the entire forest would be protected in perpetuity. It was time to put the animals first.

  His position put him in danger from other competing interests. Hunters expected to continue their illegal killing and threatened Alan with bodily harm. Marijuana growers likewise expected to continue to harvest their crop. He had no police to call on in the jungle, just his unwavering resolve to protect the animals and their land. It worked. It took more than a year and many meetings with forestry and natural resources representatives in the government but finally, with the constant help of the Belize Audubon Society, the Cockscomb Forest Reserve/Jaguar Preserve came into being in December 1984. One of Alan’s closest Mayan friends, little Agapita’s father, Ignacio Pop, became its first warden. Alan left the Belizean forest a short while later. He had managed to protect the Jaguar in this small part of the world where Belize is still 70 percent forested and it is possible to see the cats in the wild. But the idealism he brought to his research as a thirty-year-old biologist was gone. It was not enough to understand the animals, even to love them; it was incumbent on him to protect them, the very promise he had made to the Jaguar in the zoo as a little boy. The future for wildlife was about war, and he knew the fight would be hard.

  3

  Thailand

  The girls had no expression on their beautiful faces as they slid suggestively up and down the poles in the oscillating blue and amber light. They flicked their long black hair round and round and pushed their tiny breasts and buttocks forward and back. Beefy Germans lifted large steins of beer and drunkenly catcalled to them above the canned music. One of the men pointed at a girl, and she teetered in her high heels down the platform’s side steps and joined him at a door in the back of the room.

  Patpong is the famous red-light district of Bangkok where parents in rural villages often send their teenage daughters to bring back money for the family. I was struck by the tender age and indelible beauty of these Thai girls. Few women in the world are as beautiful as Thai women. They are delicate and perfectly proportioned, with copper skin and thick black hair. It was appalling to see them being targeted for sex.

  How in the world would it be possible to protect wild animals if human beings were treated with such degradation?

  This was our discussion as Alan, Ed, and I traveled from the choking traffic of Bangkok to the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, where Alan studied the Clouded Leopard and other cats near the Burmese border. A week earlier Ed and I had visited a Cambodian refugee camp with our friend Cynthia Thomas of the Foreign Service. By coincidence she and Alan were again working in the same country, first in Belize and now in Thailand in 1990.

  The killing fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot were horrific. No one knows how many died in the genocide between 1969 and 1979, but some say as many as three million, out of a total population of seven or eight million. Border camps were set up all along the eastern half of Thailand, presenting a huge challenge to the international humanitarian community. They existed for twenty years, like Cambodian cities. Hundreds of thousands of refugees lived far better inside the camps than they would have outside.

  Evelyn Sak, the wife of General Sak Sutsakhan, the last head of state of the Khmer Republic before it fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, was determined that the generation lost to the killings and camps would somehow not lose its ancient and highly evolved art forms, particularly Cambodian dance. When she learned from Cynthia that Ed and I were theater and film professionals, she arranged for the remaining members of the classical dance company of Phnom Penh to perform for us.

  We sat facing an open-air stage on a warm February morning in 1990. Little children whose legs had been blown off by land mines that riddled the Cambodian countryside sat on the ground in front of us with their crutches and makeshift prostheses. Disfigurement from the mines was commonplace in the camps. It took decades before the land mines were removed from the fields and traveling was safe again.

  A handful of musicians began playing gong chimes, drums, and bamboo flutes as the female dancers took the stage. They had salvaged some of their silk-brocade bodices, and with black kohl around their eyes and elaborate headdresses of gold they danced as if, like their ancestors, they were performing for the royal family. Bells shook at their ankles as they lifted their knees; their toes and fingers seemed to extend to impossible lengths, curving skyward like half moons. The children were rapt. The horror visited on these innocents juxtaposed against the glory of this human endeavor was a lesson in hope. Human beings are amazingly resilient.

  Evelyn Sak and I kept in touch, and a few years later in 1995 when I was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under President Bill Clinton we met again in Long Beach, California, where many of the refugees settled after release from the camps. The NEA awarded a grant to the Cambodian dancers, and the ancient art form continues today, passed down to a new generation of dancers in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh by these very survivors of the refugee camps.

  The degradation endured by people the world over at the hands of other human beings was very much on our minds as we drove north with Alan to his field site, fittingly called Dancing Woman Mountain. Cambodia was to the east and Burma to the west, countries that had suffered ethnic and political conflict for many years. The Burmese military placed the popular Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest in July 1989, just six months before we journeyed to Thailand, putting the political turmoil there very much in the spotlight.

  Thailand is also a politically unstable country, despite being a constitutional monarchy with a prime minister. It has had twenty charters and constitutions since 1932. Theravada Buddhism deeply marks the character of the country and its people. But while all living things are respected, the ancient culture of killing still decimates wildlife. Thailand, like most Asian countries, has traded in wild-animal body parts for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Now the commercialization of that trade and the continual destruction of the forests threaten most of the great mammals, birds, and reptiles with extinction. On paper Thailand has prohibited trade in animal parts; in reality, Thailand is the second la
rgest portal of that deadly trade after China.

  Alan was asked by Thailand’s Royal Forest Department to do a study of the animals of the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary in hopes of saving this last best place from illegal hunting, tribal people, and the rich and powerful Chinese. By concentrating on the density of wild cats there he could learn the density of prey species as well; by protecting the top “landscape species,” the habitats of other species would be protected by default.

  By the time we arrived, his fieldwork was over and he was writing his assessment for the government. It had been a difficult few years. The initial intrigue of the people and the place, the early enthusiasm with which he had greeted his assignment, had eroded, and we saw a man in some despair. The few cats he captured and collared all died. The first, a Leopard, died from injuries sustained during capture, and he never saw his main study animal, the Clouded Leopard, alive, only dead as victims of illegal hunting. The trade in body parts for the medicinal markets of China, Thailand, and Vietnam in particular was ongoing. The authorities paid lip service to protection, but corruption was ingrained and widespread.

  The Thai are complicated people. They claim respect for all sentient beings and yet they seem insensitive to the pain of animals. Many times Alan witnessed them skinning snakes or frogs alive or roasting live fish on the fire, when it would have been simple to end their suffering with a quick slit to the spine. When he suggested that one woman kill the frogs first before cutting them up, she replied, “It is not right for Buddhists to kill.”

  One Buddhist precept urges giving to others as a way to imbue the giver with a sense of generosity toward all things. This includes “merit making.” One way to earn merit is to release captive creatures. This is laudable when it is shrimp or fish stuck in mud after a drought and one helps them back into the water. But the Thai markets are crammed with caged birds, turtles, and reptiles, caught or raised only to be bought and then released to confer merit on the giver. Often they are recaptured by the vendor and sold again. This kind of convoluted thinking extends to many practices in Thai life, and can be difficult logic for a Westerner to understand.

  As in markets all over Asia, Africa, and South America, anything can be had in the markets in Bangkok: birds, monkeys, lizards, pythons, legal and illegal. The illegal ones are just in the back rooms or under a table and it only takes a little coaxing or a bill in the palm to see what you want to see—or don’t want to see, as the sight is pitiful. The animals are commercial products treated with about as much care as a wooden spoon or a metal pot. If they die in the hot sun, so be it. That’s the luck of the draw.

  I once witnessed an event on a crowded Bangkok street that for me epitomized the paradoxical nature of Thai people. We were stuck in traffic in a tuk-tuk, one of the pedicabs so prevalent as a mode of transportation. At last the traffic surged ahead when suddenly a motorcyclist in front of us was slammed by a taxicab, smashing him and his bike to the pavement. It looked bad. Everything stopped around us as the driver leapt out of the cab and came round to the still rider on the ground. He gently touched him, whereupon the cyclist slowly staggered to his feet and, laughing, grabbed the cabdriver in a tight embrace. They jumped up and down together and danced in the street, exuberant that he had escaped death. The luck of the draw.

  Jubilation is not common to see; Thais hold their emotions close to their chest, as Buddha teaches. The social structure would be disrupted if anyone exhibited extreme emotion, even affection. The repression of that emotion, however, often leads to outbursts of violence and dependence on drugs and alcohol. Alan is a quiet respectful man who always seeks to know the culture in which he finds himself, but when he is consistently let down his anger erupts. The laissez-faire attitude of the Thais clashed with his Western impatience to get things done. On Dancing Woman Mountain a bridge was not repaired after Alan’s repeated requests and his truck fell through, injuring his hand. Alan was openly furious, a display of anger for which the Thai men never forgave him.

  But it was the ingrained culture of killing, the almost schizophrenic attitude of Buddhist ethics juxtaposed with a cavalier insensitivity to wildlife, that was hardest to comprehend. Thailand passed the Wild Animal Preservation and Protection Act in 1960, putting nine species off-limits to all hunting and custody, including the Javan and Sumatran Rhinos, and native goral and serow, a kind of goat/antelope. The Rhinos were soon extinct in the wild, and the serow and goral barely hung on—despite the legislation, the hunting never stopped. In 1983, Thailand signed on to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) but continues to launder exotic and endangered species through its borders and into its shops, rivaling China in this lucrative illegal activity. By 2014, Thailand was importing Elephants from Burma to satisfy the tourist industry’s need for entertainment, and slaughtering Tigers and other wild cats to supply the Asian trade in body parts. During his time there, Alan began to comprehend that the poaching of wildlife in the forests was simply the underbelly of a vast network of corruption that went all the way to top government officials.

  Dancing Woman Mountain was on fire, literally, when we arrived late in the afternoon at Alan’s cabin. It was not the roaring kind of fire you see on the news, where California’s mountain homes are being burned to the ground. This was a slow ground-level fire, which licked the trunks of the dipterocarp trees, a species tolerant of flame.

  These fires were historically natural occurrences but are now man-made in many parts of Asia. They are set to promote new plant growth, expand communities, and keep areas clear. We wondered what happened to all the ground species in the fire’s path, and presumed that snakes, frogs, turtles, and other animals with nowhere to go simply perished. It was unsettling to see the fires just thirty feet from the house as we retired for the night, but we were told that there were fire breaks to keep it at bay.

  Ed and I were given Alan’s double mattress on the floor of his room for our stay. I shared my corner of it with an eighteen-inch skink who slept behind a laminated map nailed to the wall just inches from my body. Gravity slid him down to the bottom of the map, his belly in line with mine or my back. It took a little getting used to, but he barely moved all night, and when I did get a glimpse of him one afternoon as he was on insect patrol, I saw he was quite handsome in his mantle of turquoise and green.

  Dancing Woman Mountain was beautiful, filled with tall trees and stands of bamboo. The air was fresh after the fires burned out and a gentle breeze blew through the camp. In the early morning saffron-robed monks came out of the forest and stood in a line on the path near the workers’ huts to have their bowls filled with rice, the act of giving conferring merit on the giver. Then the monks disappeared again to meditate or, if they were lucky, to come face-to-face with a Tiger deep in the forest, which was tantamount to meeting the Buddha himself.

  Accepting the offering of food, Dancing Woman Mountain, Thailand, 1990

  I rose at dawn with the birds one day and walked down the bumpy dirt road to an incline, where the sun was peeking through the trees. I knew I would not see a Tiger, as Alan had found only one resident cat in the entire sanctuary. Leopards were more common, but Alan saw them only in his traps or as skins villagers hoped to sell him. It was the birds I was interested in as I sat on a log and watched the sunlight penetrate the wispy fronds of bamboo. Swifts circled the sky above me and a Sultan Tit, dressed in black with a lemon-yellow crest, hopped among the branches, scolding in its reedy voice, while three kinds of orioles fluted from the canopy.

  A troop of fine-boned Rhesus Monkeys chattered to each other as the smallest ones climbed to the very tips of the bamboo to munch on new buds, the stems arching over the ravine with their weight. They were backlit against the horizon like a Japanese painting. I kept still, and they never knew I was there. This was a bit of paradise.

  Ed and I trekked up the steep mountainside following a young man who promised the sight of a Rufous-necked Hornbill. Here in Thailand they were almost gone, hunt
ed for their feathers and the great bill. We were careful not to slip on the occasional pile of steaming dung, courtesy of a rare herd of Asian Forest Elephants ahead of us, and three hours later we arrived at a raging boulder-strewn river. Our guide pointed and there, sixty feet above in the largest branch of a tall straight tree, was the hornbill on her nest. She lifted her heavy body and extended her wings a full five feet, soaring over us, with her curved black and white bill leading like the prow of a ship. Indelible sight.

  Alan was accompanied by a smart and beautiful geneticist named Salisa, with whom he had been spending time in Bangkok. We ate together in a spacious hut where meals were prepared. Thai food is always delicious whether it is sold on the street or in a fancy restaurant. One evening the new chief of the sanctuary, Seub Nakasakthien, joined us. Seub was a senior wildlife officer in the forestry department. His dedication to wildlife was well known, and if anyone could put an end to the rampant poaching, it was Seub. The level of violence had escalated during Alan’s time; there was now an all-out war between the poachers and the forest guards, resulting in the death of two of the guards. Everyone in camp carried a weapon for their own safety, while animals continued to be killed at an alarming rate. The workers estimated that as many as sixty poachers were in the sanctuary regularly. They were tribal people, mostly Hmong, who killed for food and anything else that could bring in money, but they were also police and soldiers who killed for the trade in body parts. Most of the catch was clearly illegal, and they knew it.