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1999 | |
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 November-December 1999 seems to have been a time of meetings
and conferences. First our own NPWD senior staff's workshop at
Bako NP, then regional meetings in Cambodia and Laos. The Lao
meeting was held in Pakse, in the southern part of the
country, and we went in from Thailand. I met a lot of old friends
and saw what has been achieved in protected areas around Pakse since
my last visit in 1996. The occasion was an IUCN World Commission on
Protected Areas (WCPA) meeting for the SE Asia region, and we
presented a joint paper.
We also had a productive discussion in a working
group on training.
Immediately before that, Braken was giving a paper at a turtle
meeting in Phnom Penh, so I went along with him to Cambodia
then on to Pakse. |
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A week-long trip to the Sibuti Wildlife Sanctuary,
near the coast in the north of Sarawak, was a welcome break. We
spent a week paddling up and down the river with the local staff
(who had been on our course in Lambir), helping them to sort out
procedures to monitor the wildlife along the river. We saw plenty of
birds (some 35 different species) as well as crocodiles, squirrels,
and - on a night survey - even a slow loris.
Quite a lot of people in NPWD have GPS receivers
(and we have a couple for the training unit), but they don't usually
make the best use of them. So we set up two three-day training
courses for the most common brands we have: a Garmin course in July
and Magellan in September. These took a lot of preparation, first
learning myself the ins and outs of each model, and then ensuring
that the detailed procedures we planned to go through were correct.
But the materials
produced will be of long-term value. |
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In August, Jack and I
were back in Mulu NP
, helping with the second of three wildlife surveys in
the Camp 1 area of the Park. Then we went straight on to Lambir NP
to run a
training course in line transect survey methods for large birds and
large mammals, aimed at the staff of the three parks and one
wildlife sanctuary in that area. The three-day course was followed
up with a real survey in Lambir NP. At Mulu we spent five days at a
jungle camp in the forest, going out early each morning along one of
the trails to census animals. The survey was similar in Lambir,
except that we had to begin by spending a couple of days clearing
the trails. |
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The Forest School here ran a three-month training course
for senior Forest Guards, qualifying them for promotion to Forest
Ranger. The course included a week on wildlife which we helped
to run in July. The teaching was in Malay, so Jack did the
front-line work. We had a day in the classroom and three days at
Bako NP, and we planned the content around the ecological
interactions between plants and animals and the importance of
animals for the health of the forest. |
 After the Mulu trip I went to the UK on leave. I
went via Bangkok, so I was able to call in on Phaivanh at AIT, where
he was completing his MSc dissertation. In England, I spent most of
the time with the family, but also spent a couple of days in the
library at Wye College catching up on latest publications. | |
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Following up on Jack's plans for wildlife surveys in
Mulu NP, we went there in May to run a training / refresher
course for Mulu staff in line transect survey techniques, then we
went off with them for the first of three planned surveys in the
Camp 1 area, 5km from Park HQ along the trail to the summit. This is
a part of the Park which gets little visitor traffic but where local
people do have hunting privileges, so we want to gather data on the
impact of this legal hunting on the Park's wildlife. |
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Jack Liam has joined us as Training
Officer, since Shazali left us to manage the Lincoln programme. Jack
had been in charge of Mulu NP for a couple of years and one of his
initiatives there was to begin monitoring wildlife, comparing areas
near the tourist trails with controls further away. He can speak
with both experience and enthusiasm about wildlife and surveys and
is a great asset to the unit. |
| A major training initiative affecting the Department is a certificate
course in conservation and tourism management run jointly with
New Zealand's Lincoln University. It is aimed at NPWD staff and
consists of four six-week modules plus a project. We are involved in
teaching the wildlife and some of the ecology for this. The first
session started in late March with classroom work, followed by a
field trip to Bako NP in April. |
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| © 1999-2004 Michael E Meredith | |