When I think of Thailand, I tend to think of crowded, noisy cities like Bangkok, or the tsunami-prone beaches of western Thailand. But beyond the cities and beaches, Thailand has a number of national parks and wildlife sanctuaries that protect wild forests, canyons, and their inhabitants. Places so dense, so remote, so wild that tigers, leopards, Asian elephants, guar, and 400 species of birds (including 22 species of woodpeckers) find refuge in their forests and fields.
Marc Anderson, of Wild Ambience, knows how to find these wild places. Marc recently visited Thailand, and came back with some remarkable recordings from the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, near the Myanmar border. This sanctuary, and neighboring Thung Yai Naresuan sanctuary, protect a remarkable and ancient area of high mountain peaks, deep river canyons, and adjacent plains. It’s remote and difficult to get to, and its unique forest and river ecosystems contain a huge diversity of Indo-Chinese plants and animals. Marc set up his recording equipment and left it overnight, collecting more than 60 hours of recordings during his visit. And he got lucky, managing to record the haunting roars of a distant tiger (you need good speakers or a set of headphones for this):
All 6 subspecies of tigers are critically endangered, with fewer than 4,000 remaining in the wild. The Indochinese tiger, one of which Marc recorded, is estimated to have a population of about 350 individuals. There are 67,000,000 people in Thailand, but only 350 tigers (actually fewer than that, as some live in Myanmar and China). Tigers once roamed across Asia, from Turkey to the east coast of Russia, but they’ve lost 93% of their habitat. The populations of most subspecies continue to decline, as more forests are demolished and animals are killed to supply the Asian folk medicine markets. It makes me very sad that one of the most charismatic of the charismatic large predators may disappear from the wild in my lifetime.
The wildlife sanctuary is also home to wild elephants. Marc’s recorders picked up the sound of a small group as they foraged near the microphones. Part way through the recording you can hear the elephants sniffing, as they detect the smell of the human-tainted equipment, before moving out of the area:
Some 300 elephants roam through the sanctuary. It takes huge areas to maintain populations of large animals. If these sanctuaries can be maintained, if poaching can be controlled, and if habitat corridors can be created or maintained to connect with other protected areas, then maybe, just maybe, we can preserve this incredibly ancient forest and its inhabitants.
More details on this album can be seen at Wild Ambience.
An interesting read about the establishment of a tiger sanctuary in Myanmar is Alan Rabinowitz’s Life in the Valley of Death: The Fight to Save Tigers in a Land of Guns, Gold, and Greed