Wildlife return to Ho Chi Minh Trail

The Age
March 6, 2007
Four decades after US warplanes plastered it with bombs, a remote corner of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia is making a comeback as a treasure trove of endangered wildlife.
Tigers prowl imperiously down tracks where weapons-laden North Vietnamese trucks once rolled. Elephants shepherd their young past giant bomb craters to drink at jungle water holes, and rare apes call from treetops that used to hide communist forces from American pilots.
Much of the credit for this swords-into-plowshares story goes to the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which has managed and protected this forest in southern Mondulkiri Province since 2002, in partnership with the Cambodian government. A former free-fire zone is now a strictly policed no-hunting preserve.
"It's quite moving, I guess," says Ed Pollard, the society's technical adviser, standing in the dappled light beneath a canopy deep inside the jungle.
"Only 30 years ago this was a hotbed. There were arms coming along this trail around this area and now it's all overgrown and it seems like this untouched wilderness. In what used to be a cauldron of war, we've now got tigers and elephants and bears trotting backward and forward almost unmolested."
Home to 42 threatened species