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Chu Mom Ray Nature Reserve to save rare ox herds

HA NOI — The Kon Tum People’s Committee has announced plans to earmark 5,560ha for the Chu Mom Ray Nature Reserve, taking the park’s total area to 56,620ha, its management board revealed.

This comes in the wake of Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Cong Tan’s acceptance in principle to elevate its status to that of a national park during his recent visit to the Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands) province of Kon Tum.

Bordering Vinachay National Park in Cambodia and Donganphan Nature Reserve in Laos, Chu Mom Ray is seen as an archetypal Southeast Asian ecological system.

When for the first time, last December, biologists classified Chu Mom Ray’s resources, it got 33 marks out of a maximum 40 – more than Cuc Phuong and Ba Be National Parks – for biodiversity value.

This was confirmed by a pith zone expert, Arnoud Steeman who rated Chu Mom Ray’s biodiversity highly; it accounts for 1.8 per cent of the world’s known biodiversity resources while Viet Nam as a whole accounts for 6.2 per cent.

The park contains many rare fauna and flora, with new ones still being discovered by scientists. Phan Ke Loc, an expert, recently found a beautiful new orchid with an extraordinary fragrance in Ia Boc Valley.

It also contains 15 rare species of Indochinese animals, among them, as Steeman points out, a number of globally-threatened ones.

Besides, in the buffer zone outside the Chu Mom Ray Nature Reserve in Sa Thay, in the Tay Nguyen province of Kon Tum, many herds of Gayal have been sighted, each with 10-20 members.

But the discovery that must be classified as the most exciting has been that of footprints of strange wild animals, believed to be the Asian wild ox, or kouprey, in Ro Koi Commune of Sa Thay District.

Always appearing in the mornings, in the buffer zone, they are thought by both Vietnamese and foreign experts to belong to a herd of the wild oxen.

At least two of them seem very large, weighing in at one tonne.

Footprints of strange wild animals believed to be the Asian wild ox, or kouprey, have been found recently in the Ro Koi Commune, Sa Thay District.

The kouprey faces extinction in many areas of the world, while in Viet Nam it was feared already extinct with many attempts by scientists to seek it out proving futile.

It is in this setting that the footprints have been discovered and as Professor Dang Huy Huynh points out, crossbreeding with it can save half the world’s oxen breeds.

It was Huynh and his colleagues who, in 1985, discovered a kouprey horn, now with Ha Noi National University.

Hunting for the elusive animal should be on a continuous basis, he said.

The park authorities are planning to buy a camera to continue their observation.

The park, located strategically in Indochina, now has an opportunity to be part of the Lower Me Kong project, a project by the National Environment Agency to set up a biodiversity area.

The project aims to create a new environment besides expanding reserved areas for animals, the park’s deputy director Lai Duc Hieu told Viet Nam News. — VNS