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 (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
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.
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.
The Phana Monkey Project is about to reach a crucial stage. A week from now five researchers, all recent Msc graduates in Animal Behaviour from Exeter University in the UK, will arrive in Phana to begin a project which will provide the basis for the establishment of Don Chao Poo Forest as a research field site as well as educational and informational material for schoolchildren and visitors to the forest.
This team will be carrying out most of the research which the Phana Monkey Project needs at this stage. In addition, they will be conducting some research of their own along lines that they discussed last Friday with Dr Joah Madden of Exeter University.
NO APE MUSEUM
As far as the Phana Monkey Project goes, we have not been idle in the last few months. We have held meetings with the Phana Municipality to clarify our role and theirs. At least one of the original intentions has been abandoned: the money is no longer available for an "Ape Museum" to be built in the forest. Although the promise of this was perhaps the key starting point for the then-named Macaque Project, I think all of us who have carried the idea forward see abandoning that particular part of the project as a good thing. There was every chance that had a building been provided, there would have been no money available to keep it staffed and maintained; on top of that, building inside the forest would have been a major disruption. There are already two small buildings in the forest which have been abandoned and left to the monkeys to play in -- their main playthings being ceiling and roof tiles, which they love to pull off and destroy.
COMMUNITY CENTRE
The Tetsaban have suggested an alternative to an 'Ape Museum' in the forest. The old market building is to be converted into a kind of community centre, and it will provide three main spaces. At one end will be a community IT centre with 22 computer stations. There will be a similar-sized space at the other end of the building which we will be able to use to show videos to visiting schoolchildren. The central space will be for occasional community meetings, and we will provide an exhibition detailing macaque information and photographs in that space.
The tetsaban is providing the materials for the conversion of this building but the community will provide the labour. In the following pictures you see the headman of Moo 7 and his wife working on the new floor, which they have completed since the photos were taken.
CLEANING UP THE FOREST
Last week we worked with the tetsaban / municipality and some students from the school they run, to clear the forest of litter. It is amazing how quickly litter accumulates, and monitoring it will be an important focus of the upcoming research, so that hopefully we can recommend some practical ways to reduce the litter produced and ensure that litter is removed frequently. Our monitoring will be made more useful because we have established a 'zero-litter' environment before the monitoring begins. This way we should be able to get a clearer picture of when, where, and how much litter is dropped over a weekend, for example. Already the tetsaban have put a new cleaning team in place to collect and remove litter and we are sure this will be a great improvement on the previous 'emergency' cleaning sessions before big events.
DON CHAO POO FOREST RESEARCH CENTRE
The Phana Monkey project has also been working to provide a centre for researchers to use while they are in Phana, and the team from Exeter University will be the first to do so. The building is almost ready, and the only thing which may prevent them moving in as soon as they arrive is that water and/or electricity may not be connected in time. Details of this centre will appear here as soon as all is ready.
ROAD TRAFFIC FATALITY
Last week we experienced our first recorded road traffic fatality, an adult male killed on the road outside the forest just before 8 am. As it happened, Pensri and I were on our early morning cycle ride, so Pensri put the still-warm monkey in a plastic bag (there were still plenty lying around at the beginning of the week) and took him home. Our first thought was taxidermy but it quickly became apparent that no-one locally had the skill and experience to do this; we soon realised, too, that there was litle point in creating a life-like specimen when we have more than 400 live ones! With advice from Prof Dr Suchinda at Chulalongkorn University, we decided to preserve and display the skeleton. The person in charge of the museum in the Biology Department at Chula sent us some insects (in a box, via the Railway parcels service) and for more than a week now these insects have been nibbling away at the cooked flesh and revealing more of the skeleton. When the process is completed we will post pictures of the skeleton and more detail regarding the process. For the time being, here are a few of the photos we took of our monkey soon after the accident. The monkey had been hit a glancing blow on the side of the head which had fractured his skull but not smashed it. Nevertheless, bleeding was still evident through his nose and mouth, so no pictures of his injury are included here. The blow struck him on the left side of his head, the side not shown here. He was a fine specimen as can be seen from his teeth. (CLICK on the photos for an enlarged view.)
We have learned a lot from this monkey and hope to learn more when we are able to examine his skeleton so we have named him "Ajarn Ling" in gratitude. He is not the first macaque to give his life to science, but he will be remembered in Phana, for sure.
( This post has also appeared in a slightly different form at www.thaimonkeyforest.wordpress.com . There is much more about the Phana Monkey Project at that site, so I hope you will visit it sometime soon.)
Here we are back in Phana, far from the floods that are ravaging much of Thailand. We have been here a week now, but our broadband connection was only restored yesterday, so this is my first post in some time.
Our journey from Bangkok was uneventful although the train to Ubon was diverted via Chachoengsao, and the journey time was two hours longer than usual. Warin Chamrap, where the train arrives, on the south side of the Moon River, was quite flooded, with the two large lakes overflowing and people who had had to evacuate their homes living in makeshift shelters along the main road to Ubon.
Arriving on the outskirts of Phana, the fields were full of rice and it looked as if here, at least, there is a good harvest in prospect.
At home in Phana we found the garden hedge in full bloom and attracting large butterflies:
We had heard that some of the sandy paths in Don Chao Poo Forest had been 'improved' and we were somewhat fearful that this meant more concrete. It wasn't as bad as that, and perhaps is not so bad at all. Certainly if these new paths encourage people to explore the forest a bit more that might be a good thing.
The paths lead to the four Buddha images that have been in the forest for the last 30 or so years.
The monkeys seem to have adopted the paths. Whenever they spend time on the ground, they seem to prefer to spend most of it on the roadways and now on these paths. They eat ants and termites and it may be easier for them to spot these and pick them up from the hard surfaces.
There are still some very pleasant, sandy paths, shaded by the tall canopies of the yang trees. This one leads off one of the concrete roads. I took the picture early on my first morning back in Phana, with the sun just beginning to break through.
VISIT PHANA was the theme of the community-based tourism that was on the agenda of the Amnat Charoen Provincial authorities earlier this year. Nothing much seems to have come of it so far, at least as far as the Provincial initiative goes. That may in part be due to the change in government. Not because a change in government necessarily results in the abandonment of all previous policies, but because budget allocations inevitably have to be looked at again in order to reassess priorities.
But in Phana itself some progress was made towards planning for community-based tourism. Perhaps it has taken a new direction, or at least a somehwat unexpected one, in that Don Chao Poo and the resident monkeys have become the focus; and the focus has been narrowed down further to the educational possibilities that they offer.
Another step towards community-based tourism in Phana has been the production of several leaflets, in English initially, but to be translated into Thai and possibly into Japanese.
Here is the content of the first leaflet.
VISIT PHANA
THE TOWN OF FIELDS IN THE FOREST
Visit Phana and uncover the secrets of this little-known but historic and surprising town in the heart of Isan.
Phana just may be the best place you have never heard of!
Phana is famous for Phra Lao Thepnimit, the beautiful image in a 300-year-old temple: come and pay your respects.
Phana is famous, too, for the large tribe of long-tailed macaque monkeys in Don Chao Poo forest – come and feed them, or just sit and watch them.
But visit Phana and you can discover much more
Visit during one of the festivals – there is one every month, but the most lively is the Wat Phra Lao festival in February. Join the festivities at the temple. Take part in the bicycle rally around the town …
Come for the rocket festival in May. You can see the young women of Phana competing in traditional dancing as well as watch the firing of huge rockets.
Or Boun Pravet in March when the story of Buddha’s penultimate life is paraded on a banner and read in 13 chapters in a temple.
Or celebrate Loy Kratong at the big pond in Don Kwan village in November.
Visit on market days – Wednesday and Saturday mornings – but you must be up early as most of the action is between 6.30 and 8.00 a.m. The market meets again on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from about 4 – 6 p.m.
Come to Phana and eat gai yaang with som tam and sticky rice, or duck noodle soup, Korean BBQ perhaps.
Or a local speciality: Jao Hawn.
Visit the Traditional Medicine Centre for a massage or a sauna – or spoil yourself and have both!
Ask to see how traditional herbal medicines are produced — and then buy some to ensure your health and comfort.
Hire a bicycle to visit the nearby villages. Watch weavers at work at their looms or dying thread; take a tuk-tuk to Ban Soi in Tambon Chan Lan and see the complete process of silk production from mulberry leaf and silkworm raising to the finished cloth.
Take a picnic to Fai Rong Hin (the Model Agricultural Centre) in Tambon Phra Lao. Enjoy the quiet serenity and take a look at the livestock and find out how farmers are advised to adopt a more self-sufficient and sustainable style of farming.
Don’t forget to take a look at those fields in the forest.
Phana Garden Resort is waiting to welcome you.
Get to Phana by bus from Amnat Charoen or Ubon Ratchathani. Or take the a/c coach service from Bangkok to Khong Jiam.
But don't forget your destination:
Phana
Come on!
Surprise yourself
with an unforgettable visit.
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