Day Seventeen: Bach Ma
Today was my third day at Bach Ma. As I said earlier, I had been going to stay just two nights at the summit and then one at the bottom, but I hadn't found anything at night yet and I was still hopeful for doucs during the day, so I decided to stay up top for the remaining day and night. Sometimes a change in plan brings nothing to the party, but other times it works a treat. This time it worked - but I had to wait for night to find that out.
There was no rain today, just a bit of thunder and a smattering of drizzle around 4pm, but the day itself was rubbish in terms of finding animals. The morning was spent walking up and down the upper stretches of the road looking unsuccessfully for monkeys. I saw a few birds - nothing I hadn't already seen lots of in the previous two days - and a Black Giant Squirrel and a Pallas' Squirrel, but no doucs.
The rest of the day was dead, with almost no birds. It was quite a bit hotter than the other days though, so that may have had something to do with it. Really the only birds worth mentioning were a Blue Whistling Thrush (the only one I saw in Vietnam) and a male Orange-bellied Leafbird. I had seen lots of female leafbirds yesterday and today, but no males, and I was starting to doubt my identification of them. How could I not be seeing any males at all?! Interestingly, the female of the local race doesn't have an orange belly like the nominate race does, just a bit of yellow which wasn't obvious except at certain angles, and the male's underside is bright yellow and not orange at all.
When I was leaving my room at dusk, one of the staff wondered where I was going carrying binoculars and a torch. He was flabbergasted that I was going out into the forest alone at night. I must be very brave, he thought. I get this all the time in Asia. People generally think I'm either extremely brave or plain crazy (or maybe both) to risk such an outing. Often people even think going into the forest alone during the day time is the height of bravery! Really I like being out alone in the forest at night. It's relaxing. Sure, sometimes your imagination starts playing up and then you can't shake the creepy feeling that a zombie pirate is following you, but most of the time that proves to not be the case.
To keep my spirits up on this night I made up a little song. "Gonna find me a ferret-badger, hope I don't get killed by a bear." They weren't the most developed of lyrics, but I feel it's best not to dwell on being killed by a bear. There were actually several heavily dug-over sections along the Nature Exploration Trail which must have been from either wild pigs or a bear. Perhaps tonight I'd find out.
It was a great night for spotlighting. No wind, no fog, no rain, under the canopy so no moonlight. There were lots of owls calling, and maybe some frogmouths, but none were close enough to be able to see them. About halfway along the trail I suddenly heard the sound of leaf litter crunching. Something was coming. It sounded big. What was it? Where was it? Was it a bear? Oh man, I was going to fail at the second line of my song before I even got a chance to fail at the first line! Then from around the bend up ahead, a ferret-badger came bolting along the path towards me like a rocket, with another ferret-badger hot on its heels! They took a sharp right, off the path and down the slope, and vanished.
There are two species of ferret-badger in central Vietnam, rather unhelpfully called the Large-toothed Ferret-badger and the Small-toothed Ferret-badger. They are also known respectively, and even more unhelpfully, as the Burmese Ferret-badger and the Chinese Ferret-badger. (There is a third species in north Vietnam as well, described from the Cuc Phuong National Park in 2011, but that one looks very different to the other two species). The Burmese and Chinese Ferret-badgers look very very similar to one another. The main differences - unless you can persuade one to open its mouth for you - are that the Burmese one has a white dorsal stripe running right along its spine whereas in the Chinese one the stripe doesn't usually go past the shoulders, and the Burmese one has a lot of white on the tail whereas the Chinese one's tail is just tipped in white. Basically what that means is that if you get a ten second look at two ferret-badgers running towards you at top speed in the dark you really don't have much chance of telling which species they are. Very cool to see them, but they could only go down as "ferret-badger sp."
I carried on up the trail. A rat darted across the path a bit further on - "rat sp." - but there was nothing else seen. Last night I had walked back up along the road after completing the trail, but tonight I just went back the way I had come, hoping the ferret-badgers might be back out somewhere and I would be able to get a proper look at them (but they were not).
Back at the top of the road by the ranger post I picked up some eyeshine which turned out to be a discarded cigarette packet. A minute later I got some more eyeshine, and this time it was real. It looked like another ferret-badger sitting on the road, but it was so small! Then it turned its head so there wasn't the glare reflecting back from its tapetum, and I could see that it was a ferret-badger, although obviously just a young one as it seemed to be only about half adult-size. As it turned to the side and pottered off the road into the grass I was trying to see the dorsal stripe but I couldn't see anything but grey! There were a couple of flashes of eyeshine from amongst the grass and then nothing. Had it gone? I snuck carefully up to the spot - and then spent the next twenty minutes watching the ferret-badger foraging amongst the grass tangles under the torch-light from just a few feet away! At one point it walked right up to my feet, looked up at the light, and then scampered away again. Just the cutest little animal, I could literally have bent down and patted it on the head.
The reason I hadn't been able to see a dorsal stripe before coming closer was because the stripe was so reduced as to be little more than a spot on the nape, and the tail had only the briefest white tip; so I was confident in calling it a Chinese Ferret-badger. I would like to think the other two I saw earlier were Burmese Ferret-badgers because it would have been cool to see two species in one night, but I won't stoop to that. I don't usually take my camera out when spotlighting (I don't like using flash on nocturnal animals) but if I had... well, actually if I had I probably still wouldn't have got any good photos because I would have had the zoom lens on it and the ferret-badger would probably have been too close to focus properly!
Best wildlife encounter of the Vietnam trip, hands-down!
Birds seen today:
Barred Cuckoo-dove Macropygia unchall
Striated Yuhina Yuhina castaniceps
Grey-cheeked Warbler Seicercus poliogenys
Silver-eared Mesia Leiothrix argentauris
Golden-throated Barbet Megalaima franklinii
Black-throated Laughing Thrush Garrulax chinensis
Orange-bellied Leafbird Chloropsis hardwickii
116) Puff-throated Bulbul Alophoixus pallidus
117) Blue Whistling Thrush Myophonus caeruleus
Mammals seen today:
Black Giant Squirrel Ratufa bicolor
Pallas' (Red-bellied) Squirrel Callosciurus erythraeus
Red-cheeked Ground Squirrel Dremomys rufigenis
18) Chinese (Small-toothed) Ferret-badger Melogale moschata