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Rescue mission: Quyen returns a youngster back to the safety of its nest.

by Thanh Long

Dang Dinh Quyen hurries home every day as an orange-dappled dusk envelopes his home in Bac Giang Province’s Lang Giang District.

But his work is far from over.

This dedicated headmaster at the local primary school has at least an hour’s toil ahead of him.

As he treks home, 55-year-old Quyen watches the sky, anxious that his charges return home safely.

As soon as he can, he rushes into the stork hills at the back of his house and starts his customary tour.

Birds of a feather: Quyen’s Mi Phuc stork hills are covered with white-winged guests as the sun goes down every evening.

He scans the ground at the foot of the trees to see if any young storks have fallen from their nest. If he finds any, he shimmies up the tree to replace them safely.

Quyen’s work is a daily necessity, if the mother storks can’t find their offspring they won’t get fed and will die.

Next, he checks the perimeter fence to check that there are no holes through which strangers could come to disturb the birds.

When the sky has been dark for an hour or more, Quyen heads for home in his green hat – stained white and grey with the droppings of storks.

This is all part of a day’s work on the Mi Phuc stork hill in Dao Mi Commune. Quyen has been making his nightly excursions for about 16 years and has never lost his sense of wonder.

A lifetime’s work

His love of nature is deeply ingrained. As a child, you would never catch him beating a dog or shooting a bird from a tree, as many of his peers did on their days off.

Now he is much older, a respected teacher and head of the local school, but he hasn’t lost his passion.

The storks came into his life one happy day 16 years ago when 200 of them flocked to his family’s bamboo bushes.

At first, Quyen thought their arrival was a portent of good fortune and hoped the six members of his family would love the new guests as much as he did.

But within a few months his wife, Nguyen Thi Minh, started complaining about the trouble the winged guests were causing.

The list was long: they came into the garden and left droppings on the clothesline, they were noisy, and some strangers had come into the garden at night to shoot the birds.

Quyen explained that this was all the more reason to protect the guests. If the poachers had their way, there would be no more storks in their homeland.

His patient and gentle persuasion won over his wife and four sons. The family worked together to protect their guests and soon the population had swelled so much that the bamboo bushes were no longer big enough.

They decided to plant more trees on the 1.4ha hill at the back of their house and develop a sanctuary for the storks.

The more they planted, the more storks arrived. It was as if word was spreading that here was a place they could live in peace.

And the more storks arrived, the more Quyen worried about security. He asked his wife and relatives to keep an eye on the hill during the day.

But more and more people came to hunt the birds. They told him that birds belonged to the sky, fish to the water, so he had no right to protect them.

Quyen was unbowed, he and his sons made it their mission to give the storks a peaceful life. He couldn’t even turn to the local authorities because, at the time, nobody had given any thought to environmental protection.

It was no easy task.

He will never forget the night when a group of people set off firecrackers on the hill to make the birds take flight as easy prey. Quyen and his sons stepped in, but the group drew a knife.

Realising what was going on, Minh started calling for help from her neighbours. Finally, the group fled.

Another time, 10 people armed with airguns, sticks and knives arrived at the hill when Quyen and his family weren’t at home. The dogs Quyen kept to protect the property snarled and barked, but the poachers made off with storks’ nests, baby birds and fruit from his garden.

Fate steps in

By the early 1990s, Quyen had lived through years of opposition from his family over his stork crusade.

Then, Bac Giang’s provincial authorities launched a programme to convince farmers to plant fruit trees, particularly litchi. Minh and her sons decided to take a stand.

They begged Quyen to cut down the eucalyptus and acacia trees on his property and plant litchi trees instead.

Even if they only cut down half the trees on stork hill, Minh reasoned, they could grow about 200 litchi trees. After just three years they would be enjoying earnings of VND15 million per crop.

They had their sons’ education to think about and the storks weren’t bringing in any money, she argued.

As Quyen plotted the best way to dissuade his family from their plan, fate took a hand in the events. A thief stole their most valuable asset: the television.

Fortunately on the way home from work that day Quyen happened upon a strange man carrying a television on the back of his bicycle.

He stopped the stranger and politely asked to see the television’s brand.

He knew immediately that is was his family’s television, recognisable by a special sign, but the thief had disappeared.

Even better, he had left the bicycle.

Quyen took advantage of the lucky find and pedalled home early from work every night to help his wife with her chores. A week of this behaviour was all it took to convince his family the storks should stay.

By the late 1990s, the stork sanctuary was thriving. The authorities had started work on environmental protection and were especially keen to help Quyen protect his winged guests.

In June of this year, Quyen received the Environment Protection Medal from the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment at a special meeting in Thua Thien-Hue.

As he made his way home from the meeting, Quyen felt that all his hard work had been vindicated. He thought of his storks with new enthusiasm and resolved to do even more to help them.

His family cut down about 50 litchi trees on their property and planted more eucalyptus and acacia trees for the birds.

Reaping rewards

Pole position: Quyen works with relatives to install concrete poles for a new fence. He poured the profits from his litchi crop into the protective barrier, which he hopes will give his beloved storks a more peaceful life. — VNS Photos Thanh Long

Nowadays many students come to visit the stork hills and talk to their chief protector.

When the visitors leave, Quyen reminds his wife that if they had a thousand ounces of gold in their house no one would come to visit – but the 5,000 storks on their hill makes the family famous.

He has more friends, not to mention more students, for his endeavours.

But while Quyen smiles as he recounts the ups and downs of his work, you can sense that somewhere behind the warm face there is a niggling worry: perhaps he has not done enough for his beloved storks.

After all, every breeding season half the storks move elsewhere, where their greatest ally cannot protect them. — VNS

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