Conservation plan in Cambodia aims to protect habitat of endangered bird

STOUNG, Cambodia: Conservationists in Cambodia think they might be turning the corner in their fight to save one of the world's rarest birds.

Since 2005, a rush to turn grasslands into large rice farms has gobbled up one-third of the Bengal florican's habitat in Cambodia, threatening the critically endangered bird with extinction.

But a new land-protection plan - devised by the Wildlife Conservation Society, based in New York, along with BirdLife International from Britain and Cambodian authorities - appears to be slowing this controversial real estate grab.

Most of the world's Bengal floricans, believed to number fewer than 1,000, live in scattered pockets on the fringes of Cambodia's Great Lake, also known as the Tonle Sap. The rest are in India, Nepal and Vietnam.

The Cambodian program to protect florican habitat bans development in five zones totaling 135 square miles, or 350 square kilometers, while villages and farms within the zones can remain, preserving traditional ways of life. The plan calls for the police to patrol by motorbike during the dry season and by boat during floods.

Since the program was adopted, three planned developments have been canceled and another put on hold, according to Tom Evans, a Wildlife Conservation Society technical adviser in Cambodia.

"Some prospective developers have been deterred at an earlier stage when they learned that the areas had a special designation," he said.

More such zones, known as integrated farming and biodiversity areas, are planned.

In mid-March, the height of the dry season, the grasslands near Great Lake, in west-central Cambodia, are at their bleakest. They stretch to the horizon, brown and flat under the blazing sun, with barely a tree to break the monotony. Smoke curls into the air where farmers burn off scrub to rejuvenate pasture for their cattle. Ox carts trundle down deeply rutted tracks.

But for the patient and the sharp-eyed, this landscape offers a striking sight: the courtship display of the male Bengal florican.

The bird, a black-and-white bustard - large, long-legged and heavy, looking like a small ostrich - struts into a clearing, stretches its long neck and ruffles up its feathers. It then flits into the air before fluttering back to the ground in an undulating pattern, like a parachutist caught in a crosswind.

As it descends, it emits a deep humming sound that has earned it its Cambodian name, "the whispering bird." The displays are usually carried out within sight of other males, in what amounts to an open dance competition to attract a mate.

"They're really unique," says Lotty Packman, a 24-year-old researcher from the University of East Anglia in England. "They're very striking and very charismatic."

Packman was spending long days in the heat, netting floricans and attaching tracking devices to learn more about them, especially the elusive female, of which little is known.

The species was rediscovered in Cambodia in 1999. Before then, the country's decades-long civil war had made detailed exploration of the countryside too dangerous.

But peace has proved to be a far greater threat. Businessmen have snapped up thousands of acres of land in often murky deals and built more than 100 strip dams, which turn the grassland - the florican's natural habitat - into rice paddies that can produce rice during the dry season.

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