Searching for one of the worlds rarest species. World Saola Day - 2021 Bill Robichaud

Hello everyone, I'm Bill Robichaud, the president of the Saola Foundation for Annamite Mountains Conservation, and I'm delighted to be spending Earth Day with you. I'm talking to you from my home in rural Wisconsin, and for this Earth Day we have something quite special in fact, the story of one of the Earth's most beautiful, rarest, and least known mammals, the Saola. This is where our story takes place, in the countries of Laos and Vietnam. I lived in Laos on and off for 15 years or so, doing wildlife conservation work for organizations such as the Bronx Zoo, and that's where I've spent most of my time, so most of our story will be centered there, although it really does cover both Laos and Vietnam. As you can see, Laos is a very beautiful country. It has beautiful natural history, beautiful cultural history. Most of the country is Buddhist, but actually not all. Here I am with a family of a cultural group known as the Hoa that live in the mountains of Laos, and in the mountains there are in fact quite a wide diversity of different ethnic groups and languages. It's just a fascinating cultural richness in Laos. Specifically, where we're going to be visiting today is this area along the border of Laos and Vietnam, a mountain range called the Annamite Mountains, and this really came to world attention in 1992 with the discovery of this animal. In 1992, during a survey in Vietnam, biologists started seeing horns like this in the houses of hunters in the area, and this turned out to be an entirely new species of large mammal, unlike anything known from Southeast Asia before. And the scientists from the study, they went on to publish this paper in the journal Nature, introducing this spectacular new species, Pseudo-Oryx natanensis, to the world, which came to be known as the common name of Sawa. As you can see, these images, these are from a bronze drum cast perhaps 2,000 years ago in Vietnam from the Dong Song culture, and these drums are typically engraved with the images of animals that were important to these cultures. And you can see this long horned animal, which is almost certainly a Sawa. So people have, the local people, have known this animal for a very, very long time. It's just scientists in the outside world that first became aware of it in 1992. So what exactly is a Sawa? Well, this is one form of Sawa. You can see the spinning wheel that local people that live in the Sawa's range use to spin cotton thread. And you'll see those in the front of the spinning wheel, those two long posts, those two long arms that hold up the drum for spinning the thread. Those are about the same size and shape as the Sawa's horns. Now, this spinning wheel in the Lao language is called a La, and those two posts are called a Sawa. So we would call those posts the Sawa in Lao language. And local people say that's why they call the animal Sawa, because their horns remind them of the legs of the spinning wheel. So its common name basically means old spinning posts. So it even has a beautiful name. We don't know much about Sawa. This is a camotrap photograph, the first wildlife, wild photograph that was taken of a Sawa with a camotrap a few years after it was discovered in Vietnam. Here's a couple more photos taken in Laos in 1992. Again, photos of wild Sawa taken with a camotrap. And the most recent wild photograph of the animal was in 2013. This image taken in Vietnam. You can see the Sawa in the yellow circle to the right. We don't know much about the animal. It's very shy. It's solitary. It's not a herd animal, lives alone in the forest. And it's still never been seen in the wild by a biologist. As you can see, it has two horns, as you can see from some of these photos. But it's gotten the nickname Asian unicorn, not because it has one horn, but because like a unicorn, it's a very, very beautiful animal and very rare and hard to see. As far as we know, almost 20 years after its discovery, Sawa is still, 30 years after its discovery, excuse me, Sawa has still not been seen in the wild by a biologist. We also know it from a few captives. I had the good fortune to spend some time with this captive in Laos in 1996. This was caught by local villagers and sent to a small zoo in a district town in Laos. I went down, I was in Laos at the time, I learned about this. This was the first adult Sawa seen by the outside world. And I spent the next few weeks watching her around the clock. I nicknamed her Martha, after a very calm person in our office at the Wildlife Conservation Society, because this animal was very calm. It was very gentle around people. In fact, the Lao people say that they have a nickname for Sawa. They call it the Satsupa, which means the polite animal, because they say it always just walks slowly and quietly to the forest and never gets upset. And if you can see from this photo of Martha, it's an incredibly beautiful animal, with those white spots and slashes on the sides of the face and the beautiful long sweeping horns, and just her gentle personality makes her an all-around beautiful animal. Where this animal lives is also very special, and I'd like to just take a moment and talk about that. This is a view of the Annamite Mountains. After Sawa was discovered in the Annamite Mountains in 1992, then of course biologists started paying more attention to it, and it was soon found to be a global biodiversity hotspot. In this slide, you can see all these beautiful animals, just incredible things, beautiful monkeys and other types of primates. All of these species are only found in this very small mountain range of the Annamite Mountains and nowhere else in the world. And some of them, if you can see the ones that are circled in yellow, have all been discovered just since the Sawa in 1992. So you can see there have been two new species of deer called barking deer that have been discovered. In the upper right corner, a very strange bald songbird. We don't know why it's bald, but there it is, the only bald songbird in Asia. And just some other amazing animals. So this is one of the most remarkable blocks of habitat on the planet, on our planet Earth, for finding new undiscovered wonders. It's still going on that we didn't know was there. And this is really a wonderful thing. That's a saula in the middle, as you can see. As I said, when Sawa was discovered, it was just such a surprise to biologists all over the world. Nobody believed that an animal like this could go undiscovered into the closing years of the 20th century. But then Sawa was quickly followed by many other amazing discoveries in the Annamite Mountains. Unfortunately, all of these animals are under threat. There's considerable issues of conservation challenges in the Annamite Mountains. This is a local ranger, a patrol ranger from these forests, holding a huge stack of wire leghold snares that he's collected from the forest. What's happened is, in the last 20 years, there's been a huge demand developed for animals valued in traditional Chinese medicine. Now, traditional Asian medicine has been known for a very long time, for thousands of years. But due to changes in the economies of China and increasing connections between various countries and better road networks and various other changes, the demand for these animals and the market trade in these animals has just increased tremendously, also with some of the prices. For example, there's a small turtle that's found only in the Annamite Mountains, a three-striped fox turtle. If a Lao villager up in the mountains finds one of these turtles, he can sell it to a professional wildlife trader for $30,000 US, $30,000 for one one-pound turtle, because the turtle is believed to cure cancer in China. So these high prices for these animals and the demand has just brought tremendous poaching pressure and hunting pressure, all of it illegal, to the Annamite Mountains. Hunters aren't specifically targeting the saola. Because saola didn't occur in China, the Chinese never knew about it, and so it doesn't have any place in traditional Chinese and Asian medicine. There's no demand for saola. No one's going out and trying to kill this beautiful animal on purpose. But they're doing so much hunting and setting so many of these snares that saola is just getting caught up in the general mayhem. This next picture, this is one of the new rare species of deer. As you can see, it was caught by its leg in one of these wire snares and just stayed there and died of thirst and starvation. The poachers only come back to check these snare lines after they set them every couple of weeks. So this is a huge tragedy. This is a adult saola that was caught in one of these snares by villagers in 2010. They didn't kill it due to the saola conservation awareness efforts that members of our group and other groups have been involved in. They didn't kill it. They brought it back to their village in captivity, but it had already been in the snares for about three days when they found it. It was already very weak and it was too late to save it, and the animal sadly died shortly after. The same thing happened to Martha. The saola got to know in a small zoo. She survived for about three weeks. She wasn't under any kind of professional care. She may not have been fed the right things, and she died after about three weeks. Unfortunately, we learned after she died that she was also pregnant with a male fetus. So this is a second tragedy. Saola is now probably the most endangered large mammal in the world, certainly in the top two or three, and we've formed the Saola Foundation for Anemite Mountains Conservation to do our best to try to save this animal. This is the team we put together, and we're very proud of this team. We're very excited to be working on saola conservation, and what we're going to do is mount a huge effort to find the last saolas in the world and bring some of them into a captive breeding program so they can be saved while we do our best to conserve the forest areas so saola has a safe home to be released back into one day from the captive breeding center. We need a lot of support to do this. We're a fairly new organization, and I just want to acknowledge these wonderful, wonderful donors that have helped us develop this program to save saola. Without them, we couldn't do it. We don't know if we're still in time to save saola. What we know, I knew from Martha, you could tell that she was an older female saola. Even though that baby saola died with her, we're quite sure she had given birth to other other saolas, so her descendants are still out in that forest, and we're just determined to save them. The challenge we have ahead of us is very, very great. There is no guarantee of success. All we can say is that we're going to do the best we can, and I like to think that, you know, this effort, there is no effort that can be wasted. We're going to do our best to save saola and clean up all these snares out of the forest, reduce the hunting, get really good protection going in the anemite mountains, and even if we're not in time to save saola, all of these efforts will benefit all the many other animals that you saw in those photographs in the anemite mountains. So, it really is kind of a whole earth effort today, which I've been very happy to tell you about here on Earth Day. So, this is our organization's logo. There's one of our collaborators, one of the villagers in the saola's range in Laos. The villagers are, in fact, very happy to work with us in saola conservation. This is one of the benefits that we have. The problem isn't local people, you know, killing saola for dinner, for food. The problem is these illegal, organized gangs of poachers doing the hunting. The villagers can actually be an asset for us. Saola doesn't eat their crops. They don't really need to hunt it for food. They have no use for it themselves. So, getting their cooperation is actually, we found, quite easy to do and also very important. Nearly everything we know about saola has come from talking to local people, because it's so hard for us to see it. We just go in the forest on a survey. But the villagers have their villages in these forests. They're there every day. They're the ones who see the saola. They know about it, and they know its habits. So, their information is very, very important to us, and their partnership is very important to us. And what I've seen is they start developing a pride in having saola in their local forests. Before saola was discovered by the outside world to the villagers, like this little boy's family, for example, or his father, they simply saw saola as another animal common running around the forest, like, say, wild pigs, and some of the other species that are actually found all over the world. Wild pigs are found in Europe, for example. Some are even introduced to America. What they didn't know until we had had a chance to work with them is that saola is only found in their forests. In fact, the chief of one of these villages asked me once, he said, oh, William, they're from America. There must be lots of saolas in America. And I said, no, uncle, there are no saolas in America. He said, oh, well, William, I've heard about this place called Africa, where there's just animals running all over the place. There must be lots of saolas in Africa. I said, no, uncle, there aren't any saolas in Africa. There aren't even any saolas next door in Thailand, or, you know, next door in Cambodia, or even in other provinces of Laos. The only place in the world there are any saola are in those forests right behind your house here, and we need your help to save it. You can hear, you know, just the change in him and the pride that he got now to help saola. If you're interested in learning more and helping us as well, you know, we need everybody if we're going to have a chance to save this beautiful, beautiful animal and keep it on this earth a little while longer. So here's our website address. Please feel free to go there and learn more about saola. You'll find a way to contact us if you have any questions and would like anything, like to know anything more about this beautiful, beautiful animal. And I hope you continue to enjoy watching spring unfold. Life feels better, I think, for a lot of us this year than last year, and I've been so happy to spend Earth Day with you, and I wish you all a very, very happy Earth Day. Thank you very much.