Trekkers celebrate their ascent of Mt Natmataung in Chin State.

BELOW us a mountain range zigzags down to distant plains; behind us rise the cool oak pine forest and peaks of Natmataung National Park.

But in front of us is a less inspiring sight – a low table, the top of which is barely visible under its load of animal skulls, snares, traps and pots of sticky glue.

Natmataung National Park, located in the Chin Hills near Myanmar’s border with India, is one of the country’s more accessible parks.

Considered part of the eastern Himalayan ecosystem, it is on the trailing edge of the mountains created as the Indian sub-continent squeezes up against Asia. The forests of oak, rhododendron and pine are habitat to a bird that is found nowhere else on earth –the white-browed nuthatch – as well as other threatened birds, mammals and flora including Blyth’s tragopan, Hume’s pheasant, hoolock gibbons and gaur.

At the table, forest guard Hung Mang picks up the snares and explains how each is designed to catch its prey – trapping a wild pig by its leg, for instance, or snagging a barking deer by the throat.

Some are specifically for birds, such as the glue held in a dried gourd pot. The glue, made from the sap of a banyan tree, is smeared on the stems of grasses and twigs that surround forest springs – precisely those spots where little birds come to perch.

“With this glue, hundreds of birds can be taken at a time,” says Hung Mang. He explains that here among the ethnic Chin, gifts of birds are a traditional kinship offering made to affirm clan relations. The hunting tradition runs deep in these communities, as great hunters earn respect, their homes proudly displaying rows of bear skulls and deer antlers as evidence of their skill.

But in recent years the men of this village have started turning in their snares and sap-pots, and instead are taking up notebooks and flashlights, and donning wide-brimmed ranger hats when they go into the forest.

These former hunters have become a local conservation team responsible for patrolling “their” area of forest several times a month, looking for people – sometimes neighbours or friends – who are violating park regulations by collecting orchids, setting snares or clearing trees to plant pumpkins.

Snares and traps are confiscated and the violations are reported to the park staff. Sometimes forest guards patrol with the team to back them up and to build relations. In 2007, the 16 village patrol teams referred a total of 46 infractions to the park staff – an impressive first for Myanmar, as this system exists nowhere else in the country.

It all seems too good to be true. Why would these men – avowed deer hunters, bird trappers and orchid collectors – give up their traditional but illegal activities to become enforcers of park regulations?

These men are subsistence farmers who plant corn and millet in shifting cultivation systems and rely on forest products for part of their livelihoods. Yet they have agreed to collaborate with park staff and a local non-government organisation, the Biodiversity and Nature Conservation Association (BANCA), to form local groups for forest conservation.

“Why?” I have to ask them, just as I have been asking in all the villages we have visited in the past few days where similar conservation groups exist. The answers are consistent, convincing – and disturbing.

As hunters, many of the patrol team members have observed alarming changes in the forest in the past few decades. As human populations have increased, the forest has been cleared by the Chin and has retreated up the hillsides.

In the past they could find goral, serow, sambar deer and wild boar, but now all that is left are barking deer – and even those are becoming difficult to find.
“In the past, all around the village you could hear barking deer and the sounds of many.

animals. But now there is just silence. We want to protect the forest for the animals,” said one former hunter.

“In the past we didn’t know about conservation. But now we know that if we don’t conserve, it will be too late for the animals.”

Some team members remember long cultural traditions of resource protection, saying that the Chin have always protected their water sources and forests. And some don’t like the fact that strangers are intruding on their forest, in search of game or other forest products – so patrolling gives them a sense of security, an empowerment from the park staff to keep out outsiders.

But most of all, there is the sense that the time for conservation has come.

“There is no way around it; we must conserve now,” says the village head.
BANCA, an affiliate of UK-based BirdLife International, has collaborated with the park and other agencies to help form these so-called local conservation groups – made of local stakeholders – in 16 of the 30 villages inside the boundaries of the national park.

BANCA initiated the work in 2005 with five villages that signed agreements to engage in conservation behaviour, including active patrolling, in exchange for development assistance that BANCA provided.

Since then, development agencies such as CARE and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) have started to support livelihood development activities in the townships were the park is located. BANCA now cooperates with these agencies to meet village needs – the association supports the conservation work, while the development agencies support environmentally sustainable livelihood development.

As we arrive in another village, a line of women in traditional green-striped shirts, bearing marigolds, greets us at the entrance to the schoolyard.

We run the gauntlet of women, shaking hands and receiving bouquets. The old women smile from tattooed faces, the geometric indigo designs on face and throat indicating their area of origin. The younger women are made-up Myanmar -style, with yellow thanaka paste creating cool circles on the cheeks and streaks on their noses.

From the school veranda the men sound gongs and drums, while one dances wildly in circles, his longyi tucked up to free his hopping legs. Like teenagers might play air-guitar, this man plays air-attack, twisting a pointed knife as if into the belly of an enemy.

They are pleased to receive foreign visitors at the school, which was recently built with funds donated by a foreign embassy, thanks to BANCA’s facilitation.
Through discussions with villagers, I come to understand that these households are living not only on the knife-edge of the mountain range, squeezed between the park and neighbouring villages, but some households are also living on the constant edge of hunger.

For some, the conservation activities have had a negative impact on their livelihoods. Many households can only yield from three to six months worth of household grain consumption from their farm plots and rely on collecting orchids for the Chinese market, or game hunting, to make up food deficits in the lean season.

In the past, a good hunter could get three to four wild pigs a year, each worth about K40,000 in meat. The smaller and more common barking deer might be worth.

K5000 to K10,000, equal to a week or two of rice for one family.
This is why the development activities, such as the self-reliance groups supported by UNDP, are so important.

Gathered inside the school, the women tell us about their savings and loan group. Each week, each group member contributes K100 to the fund, and each member may apply for a loan with the guarantee of two other group members. So far, this group’s fund totals K820,000, two-thirds of which was provided by UNDP as a supplement to the women’s own savings.

Loans are a maximum of K50,000 and interest has been set by the group at 4 percent a month. Women use these loans to buy fresh tubers, which they slice and dry to sell at a profit, or to cover school and book fees at the beginning of the school year, or for healthcare emergencies.

Seeing the success of the initial 18-member group, a second group of 14 women formed just a few weeks before our visit and are now saving to start their loan fund. The hardest part is the accounting, since most of the women are not literate or numerate. But they are enthusiastic and confident in their ability to take advantage of this opportunity and to pay back their loans.

Villagers in Natmataung are interested in growing coffee, avocados and fruit trees, a project that is being supported by CARE, UNDP and BANCA with community nurseries, tools, seeds and seedlings and other inputs, as well as technical training.

They are also learning to plant wa-u and pyan-u, tubers originally gathered from the forest that can be cultivated and now fetch a fair price. But agro-forestry and other agricultural improvements are long-term solutions and may not provide food for the family for several years after planting. Part 2 will appear in next week’s Myanmar Times.