back at Mang Den (still without Doucs)

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On my 2015 trip to Vietnam I had come to Mang Den in an attempt to see grey-shanked doucs. Several reports from birders and mammal-watchers said this was the place to be. Unfortunately, by the time I got here they were gone. Although I was later told by one birder that there was still a troop left in the forest, all the locals I talked to at the time were explicit that there were none left. They had all been shot and eaten.

I had heard of another site called the Kon Ka Kinh National Park which had the largest remaining population of grey-shanked doucs, but I hadn't been able to find out anything about it. After returning home and starting planning for this trip I tried again to find out anything at all, and again came up empty. There are various tourist sites which purport to give information, but they are in fact just general "national park" descriptions. Basically all I had was a douc survey from Kon Ka Kinh and the neighbouring Kon Cha Rang Nature Reserve (also spelled Kon Chu Rang), and Google maps which showed where they were.

My plan therefore was incredibly bald - I'd go back to Mang Den which is the nearest town to the reserves, and then try to find out a way to access them from there.

Coming from Yok Don National Park, the bus from Buon Ma Thuot to Kon Tum took about five hours. Last time I caught a silver mini-van to Mang Den from beside the Kon Tum bus station, next to the little restaurants. So this time I went straight to that spot and was told that the bus would be at 4.15pm (after a motorbike driver told me he had to take me elsewhere to catch the bus, and the guard at the bus station entry told me there were no more buses to Mang Den that day). When the bus came past it was actually a green and yellow mini-bus, not one of the silver mini-vans, but they cost the same (40,000 Dong) and take the same time to get to Mang Den (around one and a half hours). I got the bus on it's inward route - still dropping people off, and then there was a wait at the departure point - so it didn't actually leave until 5pm.

Once again I stayed at the Hotel Hoa Sim. It was the only hotel name I knew so I asked the driver to drop me there. The rooms are 220,000 Dong so not quite as cheap as some other places along the way but still cheap enough. The lady who now runs the hotel speaks some reasonable English and she made some calls for me. The Mang Canh forest, 15km from town, is where I had been looking for doucs last time. I wanted to go back there at least once for birds. I had seen buses running through there, and she arranged for one to pick me up in the morning (a motorbike would be 300,000 for half the day or 500,000 for the whole day, versus 20,000 for the bus). She also, rather unfortunately, found out for me that Kon Ka Kinh and Kon Cha Rang both require permits which need to be arranged at least a month in advance. That pretty much meant the end of seeing grey-shanked doucs before I'd even got started.

While she was making calls, a guide from Cat Tien National Park walked in. He was there with a Vietnamese client looking for grey-shanked doucs also. He said they are still found in the Mang Canh forest but I really don't trust his judgement. Because I hadn't been able to find out anything about Kon Ka Kinh I had been asking park guides about it whenever I could. When I was at Cat Tien I had asked this guy and he immediately said he knew the park - but then started describing what was clearly the Mang Canh forest. When I said I wanted to visit Kon Ka Kinh to look for grey-shanked doucs he had told me that I should go to Son Tra for them. I said they were red-shanked at Son Tra and I was looking for grey-shanked, to which he replied with they were the same at both places. When I rejected this, he said the grey-shanked were only found in the north of Vietnam, to which I suggested he was thinking of Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys. Anyway, he was now in Mang Den acting like he knows all about grey-shanked doucs. Last time I was here everyone said all the doucs had been hunted out, and on this visit I only met one local who said they were still here. On balance I believe they are well-gone.

There now seemed no point in trying for grey-shanked doucs at all. I really doubt there are still any in the Mang Canh forest given its state of ongoing destruction. Kon Ka Kinh and Kon Cha Rang were not an option any more. I contemplated hiring a guy to drive me around further afield looking for them, but the chances of seeing any from the road would be remote and the cost of transport here is too high. Basically I decided to just give up on this one, go try to find a few birds at Mang Canh, and then head off to Danang to try and see the red-shanked doucs at Son Tra. If I'd come here even five years ago I probably would have been able to see them easily at Mang Canh, but I was just a little bit too late.

In the morning I set off for the Mang Canh forest at around 7am. The bus was a silver mini-van - I never saw any of the local buses here which I saw last time - and it didn't go all the way to the forest, instead turning off on another road just after the km9 marker-stone, so I walked from there. There is actually forest along a lot of the road from Mang Den but it is in patches left over from where farms have been carved out of it. It doesn't start properly as a continuous stretch until just before the km15 marker, but even then it only goes for about three kilometres before ending in a newly-built village. And all along the road there are trails going off which, if you follow them, usually end quickly at big empty spaces where trees used to be. There is more destruction here than last time. Won't be more than a few more years before it is all gone.

It wasn't a great day for birding, and the fact that it was continuously drizzling didn't help much. Early in the day I saw some ratchet-tailed treepies, a red-headed trogon, and flock of mountain imperial pigeons, then not much else. I followed a couple of logging trails which looked promising but had no birds on them. I did run into some bird-trappers on one of them though, with their day's catch of laughing thrushes. I couldn't do much about that because the forest isn't protected at all, it's not a reserve or national park or anything like that, despite signs proclaiming "protection of the forest eco-system" it is just a free-for-all, and I don't know if trapping birds is even illegal here. I can't really start something if I'm the one who is in the wrong.

It wasn't until 2pm that I finally came across a bird-wave, and even then I couldn't see much in it except mountain fulvettas and a Mrs Gould's sunbird - until a couple of black-hooded laughing thrushes suddenly popped out! This is one of the endemic laughing thrushes which I hadn't seen at Mt. Lang Biang. Just after that I caught a passing silver mini-van coming from Kon Tum to get back to Mang Den. It turns out that their route from Kon Tum and back now runs straight through the Mang Canh forest along road 676, so it is simplicity itself for budget birders to get to the forest and back (although as I found out the next day, there don't appear to be any coming back to Mang Den after about 2 or 3pm).

The lady at the hotel reception had arranged the bus again for the second morning but it never showed up. She rang them a couple of times, told me "ten minutes" at 7am, but at 8am I gave up and decided to just walk it. If I saw a bus on the way great, if not I'd just get to the forest late. Mang Den is no bigger than a tiny village so the 676 road to the forest goes right through the middle of town, and there in the centre I found several of the silver Kon Tum mini-vans. They leave every hour so I didn't get started until 9am, but because I could get dropped at the km15 marker instead of having to walk the last six kilometres I only got there half an hour later than the previous day.

It was another drizzly day, and so misty at first that when I arrived at the forest I could barely see more than twenty feet. I got my first bird-wave after just a few minutes. Although it was tricky actually seeing the birds through the mist, it included yellow-billed nuthatches, mountain fulvettas, golden babblers, grey-headed canary-flycatchers, and a white-browed piculet. A couple of pale-capped pigeons passed by overhead. I spent most of the day inside the forest on various logging and bird-trapping trails. Maroon orioles were seen throughout day, and random other birds were grey-crowned tits, red-headed trogon, and a sultan tit calling from the top of a tree. There was another good bird-wave about 1.30pm with a single grey-headed parrotbill, ratchet-tailed treepies, lesser racquet-tailed drongo, both Mrs Gould's and black-throated sunbirds, and some laughing thrushes which I didn't get to identify. Actually I saw or heard flocks of laughing thrushes four or five times today but I was never able to see which species they were.

Over the two days I saw most of the birds I'd seen on my previous visit, plus a few additional ones like the black-hooded laughing thrushes and sultan tit, although most of them were ones I'd seen recently at other places like Dalat.

At 4.30pm I realised that I hadn't seen any mini-vans for at least two hours. It gets dark at 6.30pm and the 15km back to town would take at least two and a half hours. I generally walk at a rate of ten minutes per kilometre if I'm not birding, but the uphill parts are slower and obviously the further you walk the slower you get. I jogged the downhill parts to make up time lost on the uphill bits, but after five kilometres a car came past which I flagged down and got a ride the rest of the way.

On the first day something had been biting me while I was at the forest. I have no idea what. I'd feel an itch, look down, and there'd be a little ball of blood on my hand or arm. Mosquitoes and blackflies just leave bumps or red marks. So it was something small enough to go unnoticed until it had left, but with a big enough wound-making-apparatus to leave an actual hole. I'm suspecting invisible flying scorpions. In the night the bites all swelled up. All of them. And I don't mean a little swelling either. My left hand had three bites and most of the hand is swollen up. If I make a fist the skin is stretched tight enough to be painful. It makes me think of Comfortably Numb with the line "my hands felt just like two balloons". If there's nothing posted later it's either because my hands have exploded or I'm dead.

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