Life in Phana

Full Moon in Phana

We met the two new volunteers from Project Trust last week, our first week back in Phana after the summer break in England. The two girls are from Scotland so I guess they may still be just 17 years old.  How young they are (and contrastingly, how old I am) was brought home to me in our first conversation.

One of them asked me "Do you have full moons in Phana?" and I was well launched into a response that centred on Buddhist Observance Days, lunar months and so on, having firstly assured her that we do indeed have full moons as well as quarter moons, half moons, new moons and no moons. When she laughed I suddenly realised that she and I were not speaking the same language and this had nothing to do with her being Scots and me being English. It had everything to do with the 50+ years difference in our ages and interests.

Oh well, nothing much I can do about that.

The subject was topical because two nights later it was full moon.

Pensri had said that she was interested to try to follow the customs as they were when she was a girl. This particular month's tradition is to pay respect to ancestors, and Pensri had almost certainly not been in the village at this time of year for more than 50 years.

So before going to bed, Pensri prepared for the ancestors a dish of food which she intended to put outside at dawn the following day. Dawn in this case meant the official time of 3.30 a.m. when we would be awoken by the temple drum. But just in case we were not, I set the alarm, too.

Here is the dish of special delicacies (traditional ones, people know what the ancestors like) that she prepared. You may be able to see two small pieces of toast, one with marmalade and one with marmite, and a chunk of cheese. These were for my mother, Pensri said, because she might be out in the garden too on this special night.

We were woken by the temple drum, and soon afterwards here was Pensri out in the garden with her offering to the ancestors.

 

You may have noticed a certain creature heading for the dish. I am not certain whether Thai snails fancy marmite, but I am very sure that my mother would not have wished to share her little feast with such company. Or is this a manifestation of her karma, I wonder? As we turned to go back indoors, the moon was even more dramatic than it had been earlier.

 

But this was not yet the end of the old-style traditions. Pensri was up again at 6 a.m. ready to take an offering to the monks at Wat Burapha, where the ashes of her parents are interred. 

This offering to the monks is made in the form of a raffle, the name of the monk and the number of the offering matching. The idea is that no monk will be personally singled out even though some offerings may be more elaborate or more delicious than others. 

Pensri had a great time there, and all her various relatives were pleased to see her. The old ways certainly live on in Phana.

Karen Girl's New Look

Some time ago I posted about a little Karen girl who was in hospital in Chiengmai. That was way back in February 2010. The little girl was called Buk Paw and she was in hospital for surgery to remove a huge lump on her nose. She was able to have the procedure thanks to the work of an English woman called Madge Davey who runs a charity called KidzinKampz. Madge contacted me recently with an up-to-date picture of Buk Paw and you can see it below alongside the picture I used in the orignal post.  I’m sure you will appreciate what a fantastic job the surgeon did, as well as applauding the wonderful work that Madge is doing for the kids in the camp up on the Thai-Myanmar border.

 

   

You can find my original post HERE.

 

Madge’s website can be found HERE. I hope you will visit it to find out more about the work that KidzinKampz is doing.

Distressed long-tailed macaque female in Don Chao Poo Forest, Phana

I was witness to a distressing scene in the forest a few days ago. I came across this group of monkeys which I took to be a family group. The adult female grooming a younger monkey had only just arrived, trailing with her a dead infant. The infant seemed wet and at first I assumed it had drowned, but as I saw it more I thought that it was so small and thin that it had perhaps been stillborn only moments before.

     

I assume that the monkey receiving the grooming was a female since it was adult and so unlikely to be allowed in the group if it was male. The low body position in the first shot suggests submission, since it doesn’t look at all comfortable, and the bowed head in the second shot also looks as if this monkey is unhappy – but perhaps I am just applying a human judgment here. This position is repeated in the following sequential shots.

     

Notice how the female (mother) doing the grooming is also retaining ownership of the dead infant by placing her left foot on the body.

The grooming did not continue for more than a couple of minutes before the mother was left on her own with the dead infant.

     

In these few minutes the body had dried and the mother also moved it around as you can see by comparing the last two shots with the previous ones. And after a minute or so more, she set off on a frantic journey backwards and forwards that seemed to indicate that she was deeply distressed. I switched to video and shot three sequences, although she made at least two more changes of location that I was unable to keep up with.

The monkey which sits down with her in the last shot is almost certainly the same one she was grooming earlier and most likely a sibling or even an offspring. The mother trusts her as you can see when she does not react to the infant’s tail being picked up and sniffed.

This distressed macaque disappeared into the undergrowth and I did not attempt to follow her. Unfortunately I was not able to pick out any distinguishing features she might have so I don’t know whether or not I have seen her again

Long-tailed macaques in Phana as seen by Elliot Capp – ace photographer

Long-tailed macaques in Phana as seen by Elliot Capp – ace photographer is a post that you can see HERE.

More of the Thai Monkey Forest Fauna

Long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) are the most obvious inhabitants of Don Chao Poo Forest in Phana, but they are not the only ones. Two other species which generally make themselves scarce when people are around, can be seen by someone who is patient and quiet and does not move around too much. You also have to know where they are likely to be seen and at what time of day. One of these species is considered a delicacy by local people and fetches quite a good price in the market, and although the original intention some fifty years ago was that Don Chao Poo  should be an animal sanctuary, they are not considered ‘children of Chao Poo’ and so are likely to be ‘harvested’.

I am pretty sure that there are at least two pairs of Bengal monitor lizard (Varanus bengalensis) in the forest and one appears to be pregnant. This is the first sighting I had of one, a few months ago:

Since then I have seen one or other of them on the ground on several occasions:

and climbing trees. This species has been described as “an adept tree climber and thus a formidable enemy to nesting birds and squirrels” (Mark Graham & Philip Round, Thailand’s Vanishing Flora and Fauna, Finance One Public Company Ltd, 1994):

The specimen shown above and below has the appearance of being pregnant, and I have not seen her now for several days, so I am now on the look out for evidence that she has given birth. I don’t suppose that the offspring will be visible for some time but there may be evidence from changes in the pair’s routine.

Fortunately she seems to have an affectionate and attentive partner:

The other species I have been aware of for much longer but until recently have not been able to get near enough to take reasonable photos. Even now, this is as near as I have been to them:

There seem to be two groups of about the same number in each (8-10) living about 150 m apart. Enlarged photos indicate that they are Indochinese ground-squirrel (Menetes berdmorei):

These squirrels seem to have escaped the predation of the monitor lizards. So far.

This post also appears on www.thaimonkeyforest.wordpress.com

Too busy to blog

This blog has not been updated for some time now. (It has, in fact, just yesterday, which shows how long it has taken me to get this one posted.) I’m not sure whether this is because I have been too busy (I HAVE been busy) or because I have lost some of my former enthusiasm for blogging. I suspect that it is a combination of the two and that the things I have been busy with have supplanted blogging at the forefront of my attention. That, and the fact that this blog is about ‘Life in Phana’ and inevitably my life here has become more routine and less of a novelty to me.

So what have I been busy doing? Well, back in April I had to leave the country to renew my visa. Usually I just go across the border to Laos at Chong Mek, and I’m back home a few hours after I left. But this time I couldn’t do that because there was not enough space in my passport for a Lao visa – it fills a whole page, and then there is the departure stamps from Thailand and Laos, and the new arrival stamp into Thailand. So I decided to go down to Singapore, which I had never visited before. The Air Asia flights to and from Ubon made good connections at Suvannaphumi Airport, so the travelling was all quite straightforward. Except that when we arrived at Singapore there was a fierce storm out of sight below the clouds so we circled round for more than an hour and then ran out of fuel and were diverted to Johor Bahru in Malaysia. There we had to wait while a Singapore Airlines plane on the same errand was refueled ahead of us.

We stayed four nights in Singapore, at the Rider’s Lodge, a friendly and pleasantly calm place to stay away from the city centre. It is set in a nice garden and is part of something called Turf City, which was probably once a race course and is now home to lots of activities like horse-riding, gymnastics and dog-training, all housed in the old stable blocks.

 

One of the oddities of the Rider’s Lodge is that it is Indian-owned and largely Indian staffed, but one of the selling-points in its brochure is that you can “re-live the colonial experience” while staying there. That seems very generous, but hopefully it does not give mem sahibs the right to be beastly to the staff!

We ate in a nearby Indian restaurant on two nights, a French restaurant one night, and once next to the Singapore River at Siem Reap II, which is part of the Indo-Chine restaurant outside the Asian Cultural Centre. One lunch-time we had some excellent tapas. What we didn’t have is Singapore noodles, my standby when eating Chinese food in England.

Singapore has the reputation of being extremely well-ordered, but this photo I took suggests that not all is as it perhaps should be:

 

I take it this is not one of them trying to get away.

For a big, modern city, Singapore has plenty of open spaces and we spent some time at Bukit Timah where there are walking trails through the forested hillside

 

and on another day we visited the McRitchie Reservoir Park:

At both places there are long-tailed macaques, which of course was why we went there. Both places were recommended by Dr Michael Gumert, an associate professor at Nanyang University and an expert on long-tailed macaques. We were lucky enough to spend a very pleasant evening with him over a meal at Picotin, the French bistro in Turf City. The situation regarding these monkeys is very different from here in Phana. The monkeys, though, are much the same:

Back in Phana, time may stand still, but people are always on the move. So my next post, I think, will be about some of the recent comings and goings.

Long-tailed Macaque Twins in Don Chao Poo Forest

Ten days ago I saw a monkey carrying two young infants. The infants looked to be the same age but I had never seen twins in the forest here before. I know that sometimes a female will foster an orphaned infant, so that is a possibility too. At the time I did not have my camera with me, and my sighting of the mother + two was quite brief.

 

I have been on the lookout for them ever since, and today I finally succeeded. And I had my camera with me.

 

They look like twins to me. What do you think? And have you come across long-tailed macaque twins in the wild before?

Click on an image to enlarge it.

This post also appears on Thai Monkey Forest. Please visit that site if long-tailed macaques interest you.

Technorati Tags: Thai monkeys,Thai monkey forest,Isan monkeys,Phana,Long-tailed macaques

Study Centre is Busy, Busy

After opening on 8th March, the Rin-Homhual Mahanil Study Centre in Phana was busy two days later when the Phana Bicycle Rally came by. Then there were a few quiet days when we wondered where everyone was who had said they would visit. Slowly ‘business’ picked up. The Director of Phana Suksa called in with a good luck gift to the Centre, for example, and several people stopped by to do a little weaving.

But this last week has been very busy and has been everything we had hoped the Study Centre would be: a place for people to study, to hold discussions and meetings, and to drop in to browse through the books and magazines and study the exhibits and ask questions about them.

Three groups of children on school holiday are now attending the Study Centre twice a week for English lessons and practice. The largest group (16 of them at the last count) are of Primary One age or a bit younger. One group of them comes in from a village about 7 kms away in/on this vehicle driven by the mother of one of them. I guess you would call this a little-people carrier.

The oldest group (M1) is currently the smallest, but these three girls are very keen. They are joined by ‘Judy’ in the background, a Phanasuksa student who has just returned from a year as an AFS student in Brazil. She is helping out at the Study Centre and especially helping me with the teaching.

The other group, about to double in numbers next week, is Primary 4 and 5. After their class finished on Thursday they stayed on to play some English-language games on the computer.

On Wednesday we hosted a group of teachers and students from Benjamah Mahavat School in Ubon. They were following up an earlier exploratory visit to assess Phana as a possible focus for their off-site study programme. We started the day early after they had had breakfast across the road at the house of Acharn Kalyani, who is involved in the running of the centre.

After introducing them to the centre and looking at the history and monkey exhibitions in some detail, we took them on a tour of other possible educational sites in the village.

The Traditional Medicine Centre had not been expecting us, but when we arrived they had just done a presentation to a group from Si Sa Ket, so they kindly repeated it for us.

 

At Fai Rong Hin the group was most interested in the cooking, using methane gas produced on site with the help of a lot of pigs… (APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE)

… and in posing for a group photo:

After lunch we visited the weaving co-operative in Moo 9. Again, they had not been expecting us and it turned out that a training session was in progress. But again, we were welcomed, given lots of attention and lots of answers to our questions, and a couple of the teachers were sold some cloth produced by the co-operative.

And finally, to Don Chao Poo, where we took them on the Path of the Buddha:

Then it was back to the Study Centre for a plenary discussion. It looks very likely that a group or groups of students from the school will be making a visit of several days to carry out a varied study programme using all the facilities we visited early in the new school year which starts in mid-May.

And finally, on Friday evening the first of a planned series of meetings took place at the Study Centre, organised this time by Khun Chorkdee Pornsri. The idea was to discuss the ways in which the traditional 12-month festivals were celebrated ‘in the old days’.

Thirty-two people turned up, but they didn’t get past the first month! The next meeting in two weeks time will be to listen to the Chao Kana Amphur (the chief abbot of the District) talking about his recent pilgrimage to the places in India associated with the life of the Buddha.

So, a very busy week at the Study Centre, and a very productive one which promises well for the continued use and interest in the Centre.

 

Mapping the forest

When our group from Exeter first arrived in Phana, we decided to familiarise ourselves with the forest and macaques by conducting a time budget analysis of the population. This is a common technique in animal behaviour, and would allow us to learn how individuals, separated by age and sex, differ in daily activity, taking into account the time of day, habitat and location. This investigatory study would then allow us to ask more narrowly defined questions from observation. Two problems arose from this: (a) we wished to randomly sample our population, but had no idea of the macaque distribution or forest layout, and (b) we did not know what habitats occurred on site. To tackle this problem, we would need to create a map of the forest, which would then allow us to overlay a randomisation grid, in addition to showing us local habitat types. This would not only help us with the time budget analysis, but provide the Phana Macaque Project with a map and an initial assessment of the habitats located on site.

 

As is typical in research, it was not so simple, and another problem arose. The only source map we had of the site was a low-pixelated image from google.com map service. However, this at least gave us a rough outline of the site, and luck was at hand in the form of a tape measure and GPS device. Using the GPS device, the distances of the paths and parameter of the site was recorded, with shorter distances recorded using the tape measure, due to the +/- error of 5 to 10metres of the GPS device. These measurements were then pieced together using ImageJ, a rather handy tool from http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/. The result was our first attempt at accurately mapping the forest. It may not be the prettiest of maps, but it did the job of providing us an outline for our random samples, and landmark awareness for locating the grids.

 

The map then needed to be filled in with habitat types. To do this certain elements normally used to conduct British Phase I Habitat Surveys was used, but differed slightly due to the situation on site and local habitat descriptions. Doing a walkover of the site a judgement of habitat coverage was taken, documented in detail, and a habitat map produced. The only thing missing from the documentation is inclusion of a personal risk assessment… seing that you are most likely to get sunburnt on the open bare ground, mobbed by macaques on the hardstanding, thrown off your bike by vines in the woodland, and attacked by various sharp-thorned plants in the dense high scrub!

Now that we have a Phase I type guide to the site, what’s next? The obvious next step would be to conduct a more detailed assessment of the habitats in our grid locations by placing transects and taking samples of flora & fauna, along with tree surveys, but we are limited at the moment due to the lack of knowledge on the local flora. That will hopefully be solved with help from the forestry department, and because we have the map and the grid location from our time budget data, we can then match the time budget and habitat data together. Another more immediate possible study to conduct is to plot the macaque population distribution onto the map, which then might be useful as a guide for knowing how the population disperses throughout the day.

I hope this small informal report sheds some light on what is happening within the Phana Macaque Project, and we hope to report on some more detailed data later on in the process. Thanks for reading.

- Robin

(Guest blogger Robin Southon, MSc Animal Behaviour, Exeter University, UK)

Bicycle Rally calls at the Study Centre

Two days after the official opening of the Rin-Himhual Mahanil Study Centre we were ready and waiting for the bicycle rally to come calling.

CLICK on the images to enlarge them.

We had arranged an exhibition featuring the work of the weaving co-operative in Moo 9. Khun Pitsamai, leading light of the co-op, set up the loom and provided the ingredients for the indigo dying process. Pensri added the explanation of this process in terms of the chemistry, and also set up the microscope and slides showing the indigo being worked on by bacteria.

Also featured was the work of our four researchers, who have been studying Don Chao Poo Forest and the monkey population there.

Our first customers of the day were these people who were staffing the rally checkpoint and information point at the buea baan (lak mueang) on the other side of the road. Also there were the three people who had done most to get the project up and running.

There was quite a long wait before the first of the rally cyclers arrived at the checkpoint opposite us, but when they came they were in several inseparable waves and many of them came into the centre rather than wait in the checkpoint queue, and others cam in once they had checked in and listened to the information from the four staff girls who had been waiting for them in the study centre and practising their English-language speeches with me. They spoke very clearly and precisely though I would not vouch for how much of what they were saying meant anything to them. I guess it must have, because they had also learned the same information in Thai.

They seemed to hold the attention of our four researchers, anyway.

But these competitors didn’t seem greatly interested in the study centre, they were far more concerned with the impression they were making, which was pretty impressive, to be fair.

 

I was quite sorry not to take part in the bicycle rally this year, especially because I was so insistent last year that it should become an annual event. There were not as many people taking part this year and some of the preparations were very last minute, but people who took part seemed to enjoy it. As well as the short course which was similar to last year’s, there was a ‘professional’ event that was ridden over a 47km route. I have some pictures of that which have been kindly offered to me by my friend Khun Surayuth Singhnak. Thanks, Tong!

I’ll start with the charming young woman in the picture above. Here she is, needing both hands on her bike and so i\unable to make any gestures, rude or otherwise:

And here is someone who may have been expecting an easier ride:

 

And finally, here is Tong himself. At all these occasions he takes hundreds of photos (he was a photo-journalist based in Bangkok for many years) but he rarely appears himself.

Tong: