Tigers, Elephants Returning to War-Torn Cambodia Forest

Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic News

May 27, 2008

For years wildlife poacher Lean Kha had prowled the war-ravaged forests of Mondulkiri Province in eastern Cambodia looking for meat.

A former teenage soldier for the Khmer Rouge political party, he estimates that he killed a thousand animals, including ten tigers, after the fall of the brutal Pol Pot regime in 1979.

Once dubbed the "Serengeti of Asia," almost all of Mondulkiri's wildlife was wiped out by poachers during decades of conflict, which began with the war in neighboring Vietnam. (See a Cambodia map.)

Now, with Cambodia finally at peace, small but growing populations of animals—including Indochinese tigers, Asian elephants, and critically endangered species such as the giant ibis—are returning to one of Southeast Asia's last remaining dry forests

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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