When the rainy season starts in earnest, there is instant relief from the oppressive dry-season heat. The clouds of dust along the access roads to Khao Nor Chuchi are damped down and exchanged for mud-puddles. In the forest itself, there is a sudden burst of life, the streams fill up; frogs and toads appear miraculously to go about their business. Footpaths and tracks are overnight decorated by the bright little parasols of innumerable mushrooms. And, in the sunny spells between the showers, birds you haven't heard or caught sight of for weeks suddenly reappear, spurred into renewed bouts of song or other activity.

Renewed activity in birds also presages renewed activity among birdwatchers, and one such fresh, cool, early morning in May found Yothin, Danish field assistant Kim Andersen, Lung Mui and I exploring an outlying patch of forest close to the boundary of our site. We split up into pairs: Kim went with Yothin, and Lung Mui went with me. This forest, lying inside the Bang Khram Reserve Forest, is rich and dense, bordered on one side by a permanent stream and containing a deep moist gully furnished abundantly with rattans, Licuala and Livistona palms. It is ideal terrain for Gurney's Pitta, and, notwith standing its small size—about half a square kilometer—usually supports one or two pairs of this highly endangered species.

This year, though, the usually slow business of picking one's way through the undergrowth was greatly expedited by a profusion of straight, parallel cuts, transecting the forest at intervals of 50 m or so. Where the far end of each cut emerged on to the trail, numbered, concrete saw phaw kaw (office of Land Reform) markers were embedded into the ground. Now the presence of such markers only registers the existence of a local land claim: it doesn't necessarily mean that these claims will be accepted, or ownership granted. But it is extremely alarming that Land Reform staff are even bothering to note claims in forested land at all, and it certainly belies official claims that only areas already under cultivation are being allocated under the land reform programme.

I make a note of all the numbers on all the markers I see, meaning to follow this up later with local forest officers. Enquiries among villagers reveal that this small piece of forest is part of a larger, 2000 rai (ca.3 sq km) plot of land which has actually been bought by a certain Nai Uan (“ Mr. Fatty”) from Hat Yai. Of course, all such land purchases in the national reserve forest are illegal, but Mr. Fatty will be certain to have spread enough money around the community: to the villagers employed to tat naew (cut around the boundary of) his land; to village heads or assistant village heads who helped expedite the purchase, and so on. The parcels of land registered with land reform, for which we saw the markers, will probably appear in the name of these compliant underlings, just so that everything appears in order.

We go on to complete our census before the next bout of rain, but don't find any Gurney's Pittas this time. Perhaps if the sun had shone for longer, and dried out the foliage more, the pittas would have been inspired to call.

But we do find a wealth of other birds, Ferruginous Babblers and Black-throated Babblers among them. The scarcest birds are a pair of little Green Pigeons—only the second I've ever seen in spite of all the years I've spent in the south. The male is resplendent with his maroon back, green wings and belly, grey head and bright orange breast patch. This pigeon is still common in Malaysia, where there is much more lowland forest and secondary growth remaining, but it has almost entirely vanished from Thailand, due to a habitat destruction. Like many other birds, Gurney's Pittas among them, it is more or less absent from the hill-slope habitats which comprise all of southern Thailand's parks and sanctuaries.

It strikes me that hunting must have played a role in the great scarcity of the Little Green Pigeon as well. Even before we saw the bird, we recognized its loud, high-pitched, wailing whistles. Lung Mui, a grizzled old-timer and former hunter (now employed to help us study birds) easily imitated these and the male bird flew in and perched right above our heads. Even though it could see us clearly, it couldn't resist Lung Mui's imitation and kept coming back for another look. Such daft behaviour seems guaranteed to cause its demise.

With the cooperation of a conservation-minded village headman we may be able to save this small piece of forest from the depredations of Mr. Fatty. But can we also protect the Little Green Pigeon from the muzzle-loading rifles of local hunters as well?

Philip D. Round
July 1995