In honour of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams, who spent a year tramping to the ends of the Earth with biologist Mark Cawardine in search of near-extinct creatures for the BBC in 1989, we continue our own nod to the magnificent work of nature right here. Teeming with almost as many exotic creatures as the Amazon, Southeast Asia is a hot-spot for fauna and flora that risks becoming a black hole if the destructive urges of humankind aren’t brought to heel. So, without further ado, meet some more must-see species. Book early, to avoid disappointment…
Furry 4×4: serow
So adept at scaling rugged mountains that it inspired the creation of an off-road motorcycle, the mainland serow, Capricornis milneedwardsii, is a shaggy black mountain goat that lives among the lofty limestone hills of mainland Southeast Asia (the Yamaha model, whose nature-loving, litter-collecting fans call themselves ‘serowists’, has now migrated as far as the US). Solitary, elusive creatures, they’re suckers for sunbathing and can spend hours rooted to one spot. Shy and largely nocturnal, they’re among the region’s lesser-known rarities – and are set to become even rarer if the rate at which they’re being snatched to feed the traditional medicine market doesn’t decrease. “They are one of the most heavily hunted and traded mammals in Southeast Asia,” says Chris Shepherd, deputy regional director of Traffic, “but because they are not striped and don’t have ivory, few pay any attention to them.” The serow does, however, have horns. While they may not be particularly impressive to look at (they grow to a mere six inches and are mainly used for headbutting would-be turf-challengers), these horns are much sought-after by poachers: the tip is used to make a deadly spear which can be attached to a rooster’s spur before cock fights. Some serow are destined for the dinner table, others are destined to have their heads boiled for oil. “They’re traded largely for the oil in their facial glands, oil in glands on their feet and for the fat in their stomachs,” says Chris. “This goop is used for a variety of medicinal uses, such as to make one’s joints supple, to make your skin soft and to treat a variety of other ailments. At one point, a dealer in Myanmar dumped some of the stuff on my arm and it did indeed make my skin soft. It also made me smell like a goat…”
Twitchers’ Holy Grail: masked finfoot
Glimpsed from afar, which is usually the closest these shy water birds allow their human admirers to get, the masked finfoot – Heliopais personatus – could almost be mistaken for a common duck. “But although it looks like a duck,” notes Adam Starr of Fauna and Flora International, “it is in fact one of the rarest and least-known birds in the world.” Found only in a few pockets of wetland habitat scattered across Asia, the finfoot, which has a call that sounds like someone blowing bubbles in a glass of pop, is something of a loner. It rarely ventures out in strong daylight, preferring instead to sift through the mud for tiny aquatic creatures under cover of thick vegetation in the early morning, or simply hide out in the bushes on the bank of a creek until any interested third parties have safely passed by. You’ll know a finfoot when you see one: while swimming, they jerk their heads back and forth with comical effect. Masked finfoots rarely fly, and when they do, it’s usually only about a metre above the water’s surface. That’s not to say they can’t get up to quite a speed: unlike ducks, which have fully webbed feet, the finfoot’s striking pea-green toes are lobed, which allows it not only to propel itself through the water like a torpedo, but also to move adeptly on land. Far from clumsy, it can run surprisingly fast and even clamber into trees. Distant relatives of cranes and rails, finfoots have been recorded twice in Cambodia’s Mondulkiri Protected Forest. Because of their secretive nature, population estimates are all but impossible, but conservationists warn their numbers are dwindling fast as Asia’s wetlands and lowland forests continue to deteriorate and, in some cases, disappear. There is, however, an even more urgent human-induced threat to the survival of this ornithologists’ Holy Grail: during a recent scientific study conducted in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh, more than 60% of local fishermen interviewed admitted having dined on – you guessed it – masked finfoot.
Hairy humanoid: Cao vit gibbon
Famous for having the longest arms of any primate relative to body size and able to swing between trees that are more than ten metres apart, the cao vit gibbon (Nomascus nasutus) has a haunting call not unlike that of a rare bird of paradise. In ancient China, according to Fauna and Flora International (FFI) primatologist Yan Lu, poets and painters often immortalised these radiant creatures in their work “because the gibbon’s swift, graceful movement and beautiful song are considered representative of higher intelligence”. Rediscovered by FFI on the China-Vietnam border in 2002, where it exists in just one small patch of forest, the cao vit, also known as the eastern black crested gibbon, is the world’s second-rarest ape. Less than 110 are believed to still survive in the wild – and all are at risk of falling victim to hunting, along with the destruction of their natural forest habitats for fuel wood and to make way for increasingly rampant livestock grazing. To allow such a thing would be tantamount to fratricide: gibbons are considered close relatives to us humans in China, and commonly group themselves in family units of one male and one female (occasionally two) that mirror our own. “This is very similar to human beings and they have all same the kinds of emotions that we have,” says Yan Lu. “Gibbons like to sing at dawn and their song can be heard for as far as two kilometres in the forest. It is an extremely graceful sound, and serves as the wake-up call for all other forest-dwelling creatures.” Females of the species sport a magnificent disc of fur which encircles their face. A dark streak down the gibbon’s back adds to its distinctiveness. “This black fur runs from the top of the head all the way to the back of their shoulder, just like girls with long hair in the breeze.”
Nature’s percolator: civet
The global explosion in coffee culture has perhaps taken no twist more peculiar than that involving kopi luwak. Known in Vietnam as caphe cut chon (‘fox-dung coffee’), its beans have basically gone in one end of a small animal and come out the other. The Indonesian palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, is an expert tree-climber. This lithe little mammal, with its distinctive spotted hide, can be found wrapped around the boughs of palms where it sucks up the sap used traditionally by locals to make sweet liquor known as ‘toddy’. Today, far too many civets are forced to spend their time prowling around coffee plantations and gorging on the ripest, most primo cherries – the sweet pulpy fruit that encases the beans. Too tough to digest, the beans make their way intact through the civet’s digestive system and are promptly scooped up, sifted through and sold. Once upon a time, impoverished Indonesians made their living by collecting the civet’s excretions and brewing the digested beans into coffee. Then some bright spark figured out that, if they played their cards right, they could sell it to white folk for as much as $1,200 a kilo. Only about 500kg are produced in a year, making kopi luwak, according to one online retailer, ‘the ultimate in exclusivity and rarity’. Thanks to the growing market, its source is getting rarer – snatched from the wild in ever greater numbers for their meat or hide or to be hustled onto coffee farms. If you can bring yourself to ignore where kopi luwak comes from, a fact that brings new meaning to the phrase ‘this coffee is shit’, it is said to have a rich, full-bodied, almost syrupy quality. “While this seems to be increasingly popular, I cannot help but wonder why,” says Chris Shepherd, Traffic’s deputy regional director. “Who was the first person to try this? Having said that, who was the first person to eat seal penis, pangolin foetus or owl eyes?” Enjoy your morning brew, people. Want perineal gland with that?