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Nesting: storks favour settling on well-chosen and fertile land. — VNS Photos Phung Trieu Flying high: storks symbolise hardwork and gentle care in Vietnamese folklore.

by Hong Ha

To the growing list of places in Viet Nam that claims to have discovered eco-tourism, add the name of Dao Co.

It will have to take its chances for the claim along with all the others but certainly they won’t be lessened by its celebrated Island of Storks.

It nestles in Thanh Mien District’s Chi Lang Nam Commune and has been quietly pulling bird-watchers – around 15,000 annually, to an out-of-the way part of Hai Duong Province – since the early 90s.

That’s a modest figure but local tourist officials are hoping to spread its attractions wider without trampling on the very nature that attracts visitors in the first place. Welcome to eco-tourism – welcome to the problem.

Dao Co, one writer enthused "rises like a jewel blessed by nature" in the middle of the 2,832sq.km in Chi Lang Nam. Few ornithologists – those birdwatchers – would disagree.

It’s home mainly to a mere nine varieties of storks, Chinese pond herons, jabirus, buff-backed and grey herons, and the grey, blue and black bitterns, stopping off on their way to China, Myanmar, India and Nepal. But don’t forget the common teal, wild ducks, moor hens, the pelicans or the snipes – all faithfully recorded in the Viet Nam’s nature bible, the Red Book.

But it’s this time of year that most excites visitors and locals as spring heralds the arrival of tens of thousands of storks. Local experts somehow seem to have deduced that each flock of storks numbers 70, arriving in clusters as night falls to take up residence on their island.

With them they bring an almost welcome headache for tourist chief Tran Hung who has to marry the growing demands to watch them with a poor local infrastructure that puts almost man-made barriers against it. The Thanh Mien area is badly served by a poor road making access difficult, he laments.

There’s also a slight problem of educating some locals as to the benefits future expansion could bring to the area and ultimately to them.

That, tourist officials are trying to convince them, would mean an end to the practice of hunting the birdlife, which they see as theirs and their Nature-sent right. Local businesses, too, have still to be convinced of the wisdom of investment.

But Hung says a start has been made with the provincial environmental and biological association already looking into possible expansion while the area’s management board is working on laws curbing the hunting excesses of those ecologically-unsound locals.

The United Nations is lending a hand: in 1996, the Viet Nam office of the UN Development Programme proposed turning Dao Co into an environmental education centre in a two-year, VND549 million project which would see planting of bamboo trees and introducing teaching programmes to raise awareness of environmental protection.

And good news for Hung: the provincial public works service says it is looking hard at upgrading local roads – possibly this year.

Vu Thanh Son, deputy director of the provincial tourism service, also reveals plans to make Dao Co part of an eco-trail starting from Ha Noi, winding through Hien Street to Stork Island and on to Con Son Kiep Bac and Hai Phong, and back to the capital.

All that’s needed for success is a little patience, a lot of acceptance by locals... and, of course, those storks. — VNS

www.ecologyasia.com

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