ENDANGERED CRANE FINDS REFUGE AT KHMER ROUGE DAM
Date: 24-May-99
Country: Cambodia
The Ang Trapeang Thmar irrigation works in Banteay Meanchey province, 300 km (186 miles) northwest of Phnom Penh, is being turned into a reserve for the rare, red-headed, four-foot (1.3 metre) tall birds, agriculture ministry officials said on Monday.
"We want to protect this bird because we have only about 200 of them left," Men Phymean, chief of the ministry's wildlife protection department, told Reuters. "Doing this will not only protect the crane but other rare species living in the area."
The new reserve will cover a wetland area of some 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) to the north of the 21-km (13-mile) earthwork dam built during Khmer Rouge rule, he said.
The colony of Sarus cranes at Ang Trapeang Thmar was made known to authorities only last year. The remote area was for years under the control of Khmer Rouge guerrillas.
"There are less than 1,000 of these birds left in the world," said Colin Poole, a representative in Cambodia of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "There are a few in Burma (Myanmar) and Laos but almost all of them are in Cambodia and Vietnam."
"We thought the whole population spent the dry season at a reserve in the Vietnam (Mekong river) delta. We didn't realise there was a congregation here in the dry season until these were discovered last year," Poole said.
The so-called dancing crane used to be common and is featured in bas reliefs at the famed 10th-12th century Angkor temple complex, but its numbers have declined sharply due to hunting and the destruction of its habitat.
"This bird is part of Cambodia's heritage," said another wildlife department official, Suon Phalla.
The Khmer Rogue forced virtually the entire population into the countryside as slave labour on agriculture projects during their 1975-79 "killing fields" rule.
