Cuc Phuong National Park, part two

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I had been staying at the HQ for three nights which was longer than I had wanted. The forest in the vicinity is not the best and the birds are just common species. The centre of the park, at the Bong Substation, was where I really needed to be. So on the fourth morning I got a mountain bike from reception and set off. The weather was nice and cool, looking like it might start raining although it didn't until late afternoon, so it was good for biking.

It is 20km between the HQ and Bong. On the way there I thought it was pretty evenly split between uphill and downhill. Undulating would be a good descriptive. I walked the bike up several of the uphill sections. However what I found on the return journey three days later was that it was almost entirely downhill back to the HQ. There were three sections I walked up, but even including those the total amount of pedalling wouldn't have amounted to more than a few hundred metres, and generally that was only because sometimes the road flattened out just enough to stop me coasting from one proper decline to the next. It took half the time to get back to HQ as it did going to Bong, and it probably would have taken about a tenth of the time if I didn't have to have the brakes on for most of the way so I didn't build up too much speed. The road is very winding and only as wide as a bus - it was Sunday when I was going back and there were regular buses and jeeps coming up from HQ.

Nobody at Bong spoke any English, but in contrast to the HQ restaurant everybody here was extremely friendly and helpful. I liked staying here much better. There are rooms right beside the restaurant but the cheap ones are about five minutes walk further along the road. The restaurant and the rooms next to it have generator-electricity for a few hours at night, but the cheap rooms don't unless there are more than a few people staying there. There were a couple of people staying at the rooms by the restaurant each night but none in the cheap accommodation where I was, even when the weekend came around.

I'm not one of those people who stays in the jungle and then complains there are spiders and lizards in the rooms but, yeah, there were some big spiders in the rooms! And the mosquitoes were even more numerous than at the HQ area which is saying something. I haven't had a lot of trouble form mosquitoes on this trip. I tend to forget the bad bits like insects and heat once I move on, but I do remember plagues of mosquitoes at Bukit Fraser back in October. Here they were much worse, a veritable curse. I got so many bites I fully expect to be coming down with haemorrhagic dengue in the next week.

Once you get about four or five kilometres from the HQ the forest gets much nicer and denser. There weren't a lot of birds seen along the way - I was too busy cycling up hills! - but I actually saw some mammals, with two red-bellied squirrels and a maritime striped squirrel in a tree full of thick-billed pigeons. Fork-tailed sunbird was a lifer for me also.

After putting my bag in my room I went back to the restaurant for lunch and met some German girls (the two from the HQ, plus another group of three). They were going off round the loop trail which is here. I chose to walk along the road to look for birds. I saw some pretty birds I'd seen elsewhere, like sutan tit and scarlet minivet, but nothing too interesting. I went back to the restaurant when it started raining. I met the girls later in the afternoon and found they had seen a silver pheasant on the trail! Grrr.

There are 135 species on the park's mammal list but I think you'd have to be incredibly lucky to see anything larger than a squirrel during the day or a civet by night. Everything else has either been poached or has hidden in the deeper recesses of the forest. There are still lots of birds around, but they too are very difficult to see. Most days I was only seeing about ten or fifteen species total, and something like 95%!o(MISSING)f them were ones I had already seen elsewhere on this trip.

Night-time is when you could expect to see something more interesting. There are all sorts of civets here, including Owston's palm civet; ferret-badgers, including the newly-discovered Cuc Phuong ferret-badger (known only from a couple of confiscated animals); two species of slow loris; pangolins; some small cats; and various other critters.

It had stopped raining before dark which was good. I didn't know what the condition of the loop trail was like so for the first night I tried my luck spotlighting along the road. I wasn't sure what to expect, given the amount of wildlife left here, but I saw three mammals. First up was an unidentifiable rat which whirled down the trunk of a small tree in a corkscrew fashion and disappeared into the undergrowth. The next mammal was much more obliging - a hairy-footed flying squirrel in the canopy of a big fig tree, which once the light went on it simply sat there and stared. This was exciting for me because I have only ever seen the giant flying squirrels (of three species) - I can never seem to find the smaller ones - and this particular species is considered very rare in Vietnam. Looking on Google Images the "sitting on a branch and staring at you" technique seems to be normal in this species.

I didn't see anything else along the road, but back at the accommodation area I picked up some eye-shine over by the abandoned swimming pool. The animal was moving round a lot as I hurried over there, but I got a look at a vague shape before it departed. From the size and pale colour I thought it must be a masked palm civet, but I wasn't too confident about it. The next night I saw a pale grey domestic cat in the forest by the restaurant which confused things. On the whole I think it probably was a masked palm civet but there's enough doubt to leave it as an unknown.

Given that the German girls had seen a silver pheasant on the loop trail, I made that my route for the next two days rather than birding along the road. The start of the trail is just by the restaurant but the end is by the cheap rooms where I was sleeping, which meant I could easily do it in either direction. The loop is about 7km in total and takes around three hours. A lot of the day-visitors just go as far as the "thousand year old tree" and then return the same way. The forest here is great, growing all around and over limestone outcrops and boulders. It really lets you see how the country looked before all the farming and towns destroyed it.

I did the trail each morning starting at about 6.30am with Oreo cookies for first-breakfast and then second-breakfast at the restaurant around 10.30, and then went back around again in the afternoon around 2pm after lunch. Sometimes I'd do it in one direction and sometimes in the other. Birding was very difficult with long stretches of nothing. On the first morning I saw four or five red-headed trogons, and then not a single one at any other time I was on the trail. Some birds were always present, like yellow-browed warblers, striped tit-babblers, white-bellied erpornis, and puff-throated bulbuls. There was an Asian barred owlet near the exit of the trail every day. Other birds were seen only once or twice, even if they should have been common, like Mugimaki flycatchers, orange-flanked bush-robin, black-browed and rufous-throated fulvettas, and grey-throated babblers.

My second night at Bong was pretty worthless in terms of spotlighting. I was going to go around the loop trail, thinking it would be perfect for civets and ferret-badgers, but there were an unbelievable number of fireflies out and about. The previous night there hadn't been any, possibly on account of the rain earlier in the day, but this night their lights were everywhere. This might not sound like an issue - and it is very beautiful - but their lights look like eye-shine. Even the fireflies off to the side where the torch isn't pointing distract you because you are so focused on seeing eyes. I did see some real eyes near the start of the trail, but they turned out to belong to the domestic cat I mentioned earlier. I have never been spotlighting somewhere with so many fireflies, and in the end I just gave up.

On the trail late in the morning of the third day I could hear a loud long whistle from the thickets in a small valley, followed by grunting noises. I couldn't imagine what this was - the whistle sounded like a bird, but the grunting sounded more like macaques or squirrels - and I couldn't see anything from the path. I spent quite some time wandering back and forth trying to figure out where the closest point was. Eventually I chose a spot and crept down through the undergrowth, trying to avoid stepping on anything which would make too much noise, like sticks or land-mines. Something bright white showed up ahead, and I got the binoculars on it in time to see a male silver pheasant stalking through the jungle.

One of the mammals I was hoping to see at Cuc Phuong was the inornate squirrel. It's not a very exciting name, and it's not really a very exciting squirrel - it looks very similar to the grey-bellied squirrel found further west in Asia - but I wasn't going to be seeing it anywhere else except north Vietnam. I'd seen quite a few red-bellied squirrels while here, and diligently checked every one through binoculars to make sure the belly was red and not grey, as well as a maritime striped squirrel and (very briefly) a black giant squirrel. At one of the rest points on the trail, where there are some seats and rubbish, I came across a squirrel clinging to a sapling. It was right at eye-level and only about ten metres away, but I used my binoculars anyway to make sure. Grey belly. It was an inornate squirrel, the only one I saw. I'm not sure if one inornate squirrel versus fifteen or so red-bellied squirrels is a genuine reflection of their relative abundance or just down to random chance. The squirrel clung there looking at me, in a perfect spot for a photo. Of course as soon as I carefully started raising my camera the squirrel "chuck"-ed in alarm and ducked down into the bamboo. I expected it to then reappear up one of the nearby trees but it simply vanished.

I had been going to return to the HQ that afternoon and then the next morning head on to Hanoi, but the silver pheasant and inornate squirrel implied that I might see some more good stuff if I stayed for longer. I had seen a Dremomys ground squirrel the previous morning which was gone too fast to identify to species, but I figured it had to be one of the ones I hadn't seen yet, and another night of spotighting certainly wouldn't go amiss, so I decided to stay a third night.

With that decision made, in the afternoon I was back on the trail instead of on my bike. It was a good decision too, because while I didn't see any further birds I did see another ground squirrel and this one I got to see well enough to tell that it was a Perny's long-nosed squirrel. I have to say, trying to see terrestrial animals in forest in karst country is very difficult! They only need to move a couple of feet and they simply vanish amongst the rocks.

I was determined to make the most of the last night at Bong, so at dusk I was heading into the exit end of the loop trail. What I encountered was swarms of mosquitoes. There had, as mentioned before, been loads of mosquitoes all day every day, but generally there were none at night. This was the first time I had come across them when trying to spotlight here. During the day they are a menace but at least you can see them. At night you're just flailing madly at nothing but the whining noises. I retreated to the road where the mosquitoes were absent.

This wasn't a loss really, because when walking a tiny mouse went hopping across the road, almost under my feet. It was so small I actually thought it was a frog. Fortunately when it hit the leaf litter at the side of the road it stopped and started to forage, completely ignoring the torch-light (I had a red filter over it). It was the tiniest and cutest mouse I'd ever seen. If it hadn't been for the mouse face I would have thought it was a shrew by the size and the way it was searching amongst and under the leaves. I looked it up later and it was a Gairdner's shrew-mouse, a name which manages to get in both "shrew" and "mouse"!

A bit further on, the hairy-footed flying squirrel was perched in the same tree as the other night. There wasn't anything else along the road, and at 9pm I was back at the exit end of the loop trail. The mosquitoes had all gone. I did the entire trail, coming out the other end at half past midnight, without having seen a single vertebrate. There were lots of interesting invertebrates though, including land crabs, millipedes, carnivorous snails, huge moths, little tarantulas, and a giant centipede.

The standard walk around the loop the next morning added a little group of eye-browed wren-babblers to the list (the only other species seen on the trail that morning was a couple of striped tit-babblers). Then I went back to the HQ where I stayed one final night before catching a bus to Hanoi the next morning.

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