The Thamin and a Place Called Chatthin
by Christen Wemmer
News spreads quickly in the jungle. As the sun was rising on the railway village of Chatthin, the ladies at the morning bazaar were talking about it, and soon the word spread to the village tea shops. The savory meat of thamin, or Eld’s deer, was for sale today in the Magyi-gone marketplace.
U Myint Aung, the newly appointed park warden, also got the news. Within the hour he was heading to Magyi-gone with his staff of armed foresters. It was April, peak of the hot dry season, and a plume of dust floated behind the derelict Chinese tractor as it chugged across the parched landscape on the edge of Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary. Occasional bullock carts pulled aside to make way for the tractor, upon which the rag-tag staff perched like chickens on a crowded roost. It didn’t take long to locate the house with the deer meat, and U Myint Aung did his job. He confiscated the meat, fined the family for possession of illegal game, and promptly filed the case at the park headquarters in the village of Kanbalu.
That evening an old friend paid him a visit. He offered U Myint Aung a pan -betel nut, lime, and condiments wrapped in a pepper leaf. After the usual small talk, he became serious, and asked about the raid in Magyi-gone village.
"How could you make such a mistake, brother?" he asked sternly.
"What do you mean?" said U Myint Aung with surprise, "I was only doing my job!"
His friend paused to spit the red betel juice, and then looked at him solemnly. "You could have had friends in that village. If you had let them keep the meat, they would have shared it with you. They would have given you water and food when you visited. Now they will hate you. Now you will never get their help. Ma kaung bu, my friend, ma kaung bu." Not good, my friend, not good.
Such is the park warden’s dilemma in Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation known as Burma until 1989. As custodians of large and choice pieces of natural real estate, wardens are the people who protect wildlife, enforce the law, supervise the work force, and try to resolve a continuous stream of conflicts between the park and the people who live in and around it. Usually underpaid, some wardens see their post as a license for entrepreneurial activity. Others defend the law, and in doing so alienate the local people. To complicate matters, park staff usually come from local villages. To meet their needs, villagers play a cat and mouse game, with park wardens and staff trying to stop their clandestine use of the park. But harsh law enforcement creates animosity between park staff and villages, foments bitterness, and often leads to violence.
U Myint Aung (pronounced "oo mee ow") is responsible for protecting Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary 104 square miles of second growth indaing located on the northern edge of Myanmar’s central plains, 125 miles northwest of the city of Mandalay. Indaing is deciduous broadleaf forest dominated by the "in" tree (Dipterocarpus tuberculatus), which shares the sandy soils and ancient volcanic ridges of the region with a few other species, such as ingyin (Pentacme suavis), and thitsi, or lacquer tree (Melanorrhoea usitata). A wide swath of this ecosystem once covered the shimmering floodplains of the Irrawaddy River. Wherever 40 to 80 inches of rain fell annually, similar monsoon forest cloaked large areas of Southeast Asia. Meandering creeks and small rivers link the terrestrial landscape to the giant rivers like the Irrawaddy and its westerly tributary, the Chindwin River.
Monsoon forests are thin-canopied and grass-friendly. Dappled light reaches the grasses of the forest floor, and open grassy glades called lwins dot the landscape like emerald oases. Only a few decades ago these grassy forests sustained a substantial community of large charismatic mammals. Herds of wild cattle banteng (Bos javanicus ) and gaur (Bos sauveli ) moved between the lwins. Four species of deer thamin, muntjac (Muntiacus muntjac), hog deer (Cervus porcinus), and sambar (Cervus unicolor) partitioned the habitat according to their needs for cover and food. Sounders of wild pigs (Sus scrofa) rooted in the soft soils along the creeks. These large herbivores fed a guild of predators: tigers (Panthera tigris), leopards (Panthera pardus), wild dogs (Cuon alpinus), and pythons (Python molurus). Several species of scavenging birds picked over the remains of the predators’ kills.
The scene started to change after World War II, when modern firearms became available to the common Burman. Shooting game animals, a popular diversion of the colonial British rulers, became a subsistence activity of poor villagers. When the Burmese socialist regime came into power in the 1960s and controlled the ownership of guns, it was too late. Most of the big game of the indaing had perished and, without food, so had most of the predators. Today, only three species of large mammals remain the thamin, the muntjac, and the Asiatic wild dog. The thamin is highly threatened. Its last refugee is Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary, where a population of about 1,000 deer live in the dry dipterocarp forest. It is U Mying Aung’s job to protect them.
A Zoo Saga
In 1969, when there were still occasional reports of a tiger in Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary, the Smithsonian National Zoo received its first thamin from Burma’s Rangoon Zoological Gardens. From the outset, the deer proved difficult to manage. They were high strung, frequently bolted, and injured themselves by dashing against the fences. During the rutting period, the males lost their fear of people and attacked keepers. And the birth period, in the fall and winter, was not timed to optimize the survival of fawns. But the herd grew despite these problems. By the mid-1970s, a small group of thamin was shipped to Front Royal, Virginia, where the Zoo had recently established the Conservation and Research Center. In their new 30-acre enclosure of woods and pasture, the deer became wilder than they had been in the Zoo. The keepers had trouble making daily head counts, fawns were almost impossible to find, and those that survived the winter of their birth were even more wild and wary.
We decided a more intensive form of management was needed, so we started to hand-rear thamin fawns. These tame deer were then kept at the newly completed Rivinus Barn, which was designed specifically for studies of ungulate biology. The deer had access to green pastures, but were harness-trained for routine measurements, semen collection, milking, and weighing on an electronic scale capable of measuring the change in a doe’s body weight before and after nursing her fawn.
Studying the succeeding generations of thamin born at Rivinus Barn revealed many facets of the species’ biology, from their relatively long gestation period of 272 days to patterns of growth and development. Research veterinarian Steven Monfort deciphered the endocrine control of the reproductive cycle, and postdoctoral fellow Sue Crissey studied lactation. After a decade and a half of study, we knew more about many facets of the thamin’s biology than we did about any other species of tropical deer.
But knowledge about the deer’s ecology was a glaring gap in the picture. All of the adaptations we had studied had evolved in a remote and mysterious landscape on the other side of the world. Not knowing more about thamin in the wild hindered interpretation of almost all of our Zoo findings. The timing of the birth season was a case in point. Seasonally breeding ungulates usually give birth when food is abundant and nutritious. In Southeast Asia, the monsoon season from May to September is a period of lush verdure. Yet the thamin gives birth during the cool dry season from November to February, when the grasses are turning brown and the brittle leaves are riddled with insect damage. Why? If we wanted to understand the ecology of thamin, we had to study them in the wild.
Prospecting for a field site offered a reality check. Historically, Cervus eldi ranged from eastern India in the west to China’s Hainan Island in the east. Geographic isolation had created at least three subspecies, or races, but by the mid-1980s all three were on their way out. The largest subspecies, the marsh-loving eldi, is confined to a peculiar floating bog in Logtak Lake within India’s Manipur State. It numbered less than a couple hundred animals. The subspecies siamensis once occupied the vast monsoon forests from Thailand to Hainan. It was extinct in Thailand, thinly scattered in Laos and the killing fields of Cambodia, and was on the brink of extinction in Vietnam. On Hainan Island, a few hundred deer were protected in a large enclosure.
The Burmese subspecies, thamin, however, was estimated by United Nations biologists to be 2,200 strong on the wooded plains. What’s more, two wildlife sanctuaries had been designated as refuges for thamin, and one of them, Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary, harbored a population estimated in four figures. This seemed to offer the best site for an ecological study.
Yet Burma was a troubled land, largely forgotten by the modern Western world. The time warp was apparent in 1988 when we boarded the Burma Airways flight in Bangkok. The plane was a Fokker of classical vintage, and a diverse assemblage of dead insects rested in the spaces between the windows and in the overhead lights of the cabin. I was less interested in the kinds of insects than how they became entombed in the plane’s parts. As it accelerated down the runway and started to shimmy, my question was answered. All the panels and seats squeaked and rattled. The parts were all loose; the plane was porous.
In Rangoon, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) officials whisked us through customs and immigration, and drove us to a private residence in the suburbs. Fragipani flowers scented the balmy night sweetly, but the city looked haggard and was as still as a ghost town. Our visas gave us only a week to make contact with Burmese colleagues and attempt to arrange a study. It soon became apparent that pursuing field studies would be an elusive goal, and for some reason the university was out of bounds. But the director of the Rangoon Zoo was anxious to host a training course in zoo biology and USAID was willing to cover the costs. The zoo had a large collection of thamin, so there were still possibilities for studying the deer in their native land.
But all of our hopes were dashed a few weeks later when we were back home in the states. The democratic movement had clashed with the socialist regime, and university students were shot in the streets. When the National League for Democracy won the elections a year later, the 26-year-old socialist regime, backed by the military, seized power from the new leaders like candy from a baby. Against this human drama, studies of thamin ecology seemed not only beyond our grasp, but trite. We set aside our plans for six long years.
Fast Forward
"Yaaaaay Neway, Yaaaaaay Neway." An army of chanting women vendors circled us and searched our faces for interest in a cup of cool water, or a wayfarer’s snack of green mango with pepper, rice cakes, or fermented beans. It was late 1994 and we were back in Myanmar the country had been renamed in the interim at one of the many whistle stops on the 1,000-mile Rangoon to Myitkyina railway that ran north nearly the full length of the country. We were bound for Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary on the Engineer’s Motor Carriage, a diesel-powered sardine can-on-wheels that could reach a shuddering 40 miles per hour where the track was safe, and poked along at a snail’s pace where it was not. My colleagues were three ornithologists, the National Zoo’s John Rappole, the National Museum of Natural History’s Pam Rasmussen, and the talented young bird artist John Anderton. We were on our way to present a training course on bird survey methods at the last stronghold of the thamin.
The Wildlife and Forestry officials had expressed several of their needs at a workshop held two years earlier in Rangoon. First and foremost, they needed in-service training for the staff of the wildlife division. As one official put it, "Few of the new generation have an education equal to their responsibilities. You see, English-medium studies were abolished during the socialist period. Our young staff has not had the educational privilege we enjoyed." Second, there was a need for basic biological surveys. Myanmar’s biological diversity had never been thoroughly inventoried. And third, there were serious challenges to conserving some of Myanmar’s premier species, including Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), tigers, and thamin. Our original goal to study the ecology of the thamin had to be expanded to include conducting biodiversity surveys and offering professional in-service training.
The bird survey course served as our long-awaited introduction to the people and setting. Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary, we learned, was not a wild and verdant landscape. The British had set the area aside in 1918 as a fuel-wood reserve for the steam engines that plied the railway. The railway attracted settlers, and wayside villages popped up. The timber camps within the park were never disbanded, and three of them grew into villages. During the economic slump of 1986 many of the railway villages uprooted and relocated on the park’s boundary to be closer to firewood and timber. Today, the sanctuary is surrounded by a patchwork of rice paddy that sustains 19 villages and nearly 2,000 households.
In spite of assurances to the contrary, we found that the facilities at the sanctuary needed a few improvements. There were no utilities, no running water, and no paved roads. Deeply rutted cart tracks marred the dusty landscape. An antiquated tractor was the only vehicle available for long-distance transportation within the park. The camp generator was about to die, and the limited supply of florescent lights had to be moved and re-wired wherever needed. (Over the dining table they attracted a swarm of insects. The fallout was overwhelming. You ate fast. If you didn’t, a mole cricket would go down your shirt, or a flying dung beetle would practically knock you off your chair.)
But the basics were there a small bungalow for guests, a dirt-floored cookhouse, two clapboard dormitories for staff and trainees, and an open-sided, dirt-floored classroom. The most modern structure was a large cement-floored mess hall; a year later it was converted to a natural history museum to house the biodiversity collections and to teach local children.
The wildlife staff who attend the course were enthusiastic and devoted, but there was a language problem. We had asked about translation of our lectures into Burmese, but the wildlife officials had assured us that nearly everyone could "understand English more or less." The students took notes in Burmese, but sometimes their eyes seemed to glaze over. And when we asked questions, they strained to understand. "How many of you understood everything U John said?" I finally asked. One hand was raised. "How many of you understood half of what he said?" A few more hands went up. "How many understood a little bit?" After a bit of subdued banter, almost everyone grinned and raised their hands. Later, we learned that the entire class met clandestinely every night for mutual tutoring and drilling.
The two-week-long course was a success. The wildlife staff was hungry for knowledge and willing to work. We also found that conditions in Chattin were amenable to a field study. We knew we could make a difference, so we gamely started the project to study the ecology of thamin and to plan a series of training courses in biodiversity.
The wildlife director selected U Myint Aung, an ever-smiling member of the wildlife staff, to become the project’s principle investigator. In his late thirties, he had leadership, field experience, and a reputation for getting results. Within a year he was promoted to park warden. Our goal, as mentors, was to see that he orchestrated research worthy of earning a master’s degree and suitable for publication in scientific journals. He selected the thamin project team of six young men and women, and CRC ecologist Bill McShea and veterinarian Steve Monfort trained them to capture, anesthetize, and radio-collar deer. During the next five years, Aung coordinated the day-to-day activities of the team, made all local arrangements for the ten training courses delivered by Smithsonian Institute personnel, and handled a range of local problems with diplomacy and skill.
The team captured and radio-collared 11 male and eight female thamin, spent thousands of hours in the field, and sighted wild deer nearly 1,000 times. We learned that the thamin’s life cycle was finely tuned to the seasonal rhythm of its environment. With an average group size of 2.5 deer, mother with young seems to be the basic social unit. Males form bachelor groups when their antlers are in velvet. When new grass sprouts in the ashes of February and March fires, large numbers of deer converge to graze on tender shoots. Bachelor groups and large prime males then move through the herds seeking receptive females. In spite of the seasonal changes in group size, each male and female uses a distinctive home range of about 3.5 and 2.7 square miles, which is surprisingly large compared to other species of tropical Asian deer. Home ranges overlap and expand in the hot dry season, when forage is low in food value. Some animals migrate into farmland for a few months before returning to the park. By day, they hide themselves in small patches of degraded forest; at night, they make forays into the croplands.
In the hot dry months of March and April, males reach the height of rut. With their newly hardened antlers, males enter a period of anorexia and sexual obsession. They spend their time seeking and competing for receptive females. Does give birth in the cool dry months of November and December, as in the Zoo. Though the vegetation has passed its nutritional peak, we learned that this isn’t an unfavorable time for birth. The does are fat from feeding during the monsoon, the ground is dry, and there is still plenty of cover for fawns to hide. By the time fawns are foraging and able to flee predators, the fires have ushered in green pastures of tender grasses. It seems that the steamy, wet conditions of the monsoon pose greater risks to fawn survival than could be offset by the advantages of abundant nutritious food. Drowning would be a danger because monsoon rains literally transform the landscape small creeks overflow their banks, and more than half of the park becomes waterlogged. Escaping from predators is more difficult in the wet conditions. The air hums with biting insects, and the damp earth is ideal for fostering infections.
We rarely detected predation but of eight thamin that disappeared, four fell prey to wild dogs. The small red dogs eluded our attempts to study them, and even a professional trapper was unable to catch any. All signs of the animals’ presence scats and tell-tale carcasses of prey disappeared after about a year. We now believe that this predator must range over a vast area to find thinly distributed thamin and other prey such as muntjacs.
Ironically, even in the absence of major predators, Chatthin’s thamin population isn’t increasing. We found no evidence that an annual surplus of yearling males seeds adjacent areas, as happens with other deer populations. Which raises the question, is the thamin’s future secure elsewhere in the indaing? In 1997, U Myint Aung deployed a survey team to 24 townships throughout the country’s central plains to find out. The survey revealed that thamin and suitable patches of habitat remained in 23 townships. But there was an alarming 60 percent decline in the deer’s range from 1978 when the first survey was conducted.
There was no correlation between number of thamin and amount of forest, size of human population, or size of livestock population. Peter Leimgruber, of World Resources Institute, analyzed satellite images of the 47,500 square miles of remaining indaing in Myanmar, an area roughly the size of Pennsylvania. He found that the size of the forest fragment was the only landscape feature that predicted the presence of thamin. Thamin disappear when a patch of indaing is smaller than about ten square miles. The landscape analysis tells us that only 14 out of 411 stands of forest were large enough to support thamin. Chattin is the largest, and one of only protected areas harboring the species.
The Missing Piece
After four years of daily field work, various parts of the ecological puzzle had fallen into place. More than two dozen Smithsonian Institution scientists had visited Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary. The emerging picture of the ecosystem was the composite view of these diverse specialists, and we were growing confident that we understood the seasonal ebb and flow of the system. But the puzzle wasn’t complete. We weren’t privy to the human dimension. Like a kind parent, U Myint Aung sheltered us from distractions to our work. Unless you probed, he minimized problems. The Burmese have a word for it ah-na-day. It means sparing your friend discomfort or embarrassment, not being blunt and discourteous.
But it turns out there were problems in this bucolic setting. The park is full of resources people needed. Villagers coveted the park’s timber to build homes. They needed firewood for cooking. They used forest products such as medicinal plants for their everyday subsistence, and, of course, they wanted thamin meat to eat. In protecting the park, staff denied the villagers these essentials. So the villagers took what they could get away with. Sometimes they were caught.
U Myint Aung enforced the law, but there was a price to pay. One day, I noticed that his wife wasn’t her normal cheerful self. That night I asked him if she was ill. He explained.
"She is not sick, only unhappy. She has lost friends. They no longer talk to her because I do my job."
"Why did her friends stop talking to her?" I prodded.
"Oh, there are many problems in Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary!" he laughed, and then he told me the story.
The recent construction of a distillery in Kanbalu had created a market for a lucrative cash crop sugarcane. The villagers’ problem was finding land to grow the new crop. Most available land was planted in rice, and converting rice paddy to sugarcane fields was not an option in this subsistence economy. So the villagers took a chance. They entered the sanctuary, cut 1,000 acres of mature indaing, and planted sugarcane. A settlement of 52 huts had already sprung up when the park staff discovered the encroachment.
U Myint Aung consulted with headquarters and then posted official notice in the villages around the park: The villagers would be allowed to harvest the illegally planted crop, but the Wildlife Division would take immediate action to evict the settlers. An eviction date for the settlement was announced, and villagers were alerted to remove all valuables from the encroachment before that date. On the fateful day there was a stand-off. Village men were at the ready with their dahs, or long knives, and women were sobbing. The crowd retreated only after 16 guards fired rounds into the air. Then the huts were torched.
"Now some villagers want to kill me," he continued. "My wife is very worried. About two months ago, I gave my staff strict orders: Do not to speak to my wife about problems in Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary."
It finally dawned on us. The biggest piece missing from the puzzle was human ecology. So in 1999 we started a new chapter in the thamin project. Teri Allendorf, a University of Minnesota conservation biologist, Chris Duncan, a Smithsonian Institution anthropologist, and National Zoo associate director David Jenkins conducted the first community relations workshop. Following the workshop, two survey teams started to visit the park’s 22 neighboring villages. Their goal was to become familiar with farming and land-use practices, and to assess attitudes toward the sanctuary. A third team surveyed vendors in Chatthin’s market to determine how many forest products are being used in this subsistence economy. Finally, Jenkins worked with the park staff to convert the education center in Chatthin village into a gathering place for local teachers, children, and sanctuary educators.
The process in itself was constructive. It gave the surrounding communities a chance to air their views. We learned that villages differ in their perceptions of the problems and benefits of the sanctuary, depending on where the villages were located relative to the park. All want access to forest products, with fuel wood and house poles the most coveted items. Villages embedded in the sanctuary have the most positive perceptions of the park. While outlying villages make do with sticks and bamboo to build their fences, these villagers use park logs that qualify as top-grade house poles. Satellite maps clearly show the spreading impact of such use: a large, yellow, amoeba-shaped zone in the sanctuary’s green heart. Surprisingly, the thamin and the "good climate" created by forest are regarded nearly everywhere as benefits of the sanctuary. However, thamin are a major nuisance in southern villages, where they eat crops, and in the northwest region the reclaimed piece of the sanctuary is still a bone of contention.
The survival of the thamin and the welfare of local people depend on the very same landscape Chatthin Wildlife Sanctuary. The human dimension is now beginning to play into this conservation story. It won’t be easy to solve the problems, but studying them was the first step. New policies and land-use practices will be needed next. Integrating community development and wildlife conservation is an experiment with an uncertain outcome, and resolving conflicts between people and parks is difficult anywhere in the world. But it simply must be done.
No one imagined this turn of events 30 years ago when the first thamin arrived at the National Zoo. The thamin work has been an odyssey of discovery. Our Burmese colleagues have learned the importance of science, and we learned about conservation in a remote corner of the world. It has also been an opportunity for the National Zoo to share a commitment and affect the future of wildlife. We believe that zoos must be windows on the natural world. Our obligation to the public is to do the right thing to ensure that the view from the window holds promise for a future with wildlife.
Christen Wemmer is the National Zoo’s associate director for conservation and head of the Zoo’s Conservation and Research Center.
ZooGoer 29(5) 2000. Copyright 2000 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
