Mountain ranger records hoolock gibbons' life track
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E-mail Xinhua, April 30, 2014
"Hush! They can hear us," Li Jiahong presses his hand to his lips, whispering.
Just meters above, two monkeys dangles on their long arms from the branches for a while, and then stop to rest under the cover of the thick canopy.
Li, in his mid-50s, and his team are patrolling the Nankang Station area of Gaoligong Natural Reserve, in southwest China's Yunnan Province. The two monkeys they have been following all day are eastern hoolock gibbons, an endangered primate only found in southwestern Yunnan, northeast India and northern Myanmar.
A ranger for 19 years, Li could still pass as a school teacher once he's taken off he's green hat.
Li became fascinated with tales of the "black monkey", the local name for the hoolock when he began work as a principal at a primary school in a village outside Baoshan City in 1980.
"Local lore had it that the black monkeys were monogamous, pairing for life, and the locals even believed their brains could cure epilepsy," Li recalls.
He went to the Gaoligong Mountains during school vacations to watch the hoolocks. Until in 1995, he quit his school job and went to work at Longyang Station in Gaoligong Natural Reserve.
The reserve, on the southeast edge of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, covers more than 4,000 square kilometers and was listed by UNESCO as a World Biosphere Reserve and World Natural Heritage site in 2003.
Tracking hoolocks is never easy. Li planned the current excursion with a group of visitors a week in advance. Thanks to the fine weather and a bit of luck, he found signs of hoolocks near his current base at Nankang Station. A few hours' walk in the forest was enough to find them.
When he first started as a ranger, Li had no GPS or climbing gear, just cheap rubber shoes and ex-army camouflage fatigues. The station was a rundown shed made from bamboo and sticks.
"Finding a flat and dry place to rest during a patrol was a luxury," he recalls.
More challenging were the mountains. The ever-changing weather and varied terrain made every patrol unpredictable. Rangers could be dripping sweat in hot and damp subtropical forest in a river valley, and frozen two hours later on a snowy mountain ridge.
But to find the hoolocks, he had to get familiar with its habitat with days on the trail. Sometimes he set out at midnight, sleeping under trees where the hoolocks might be. More than once, he heard their howls and watched them from afar.
However he tried, he never got a clear photo, face to face, as the creatures are very vigilant. Any suspicious sound scares them away before a camera can focus.
In 2005, Li was transferred from Longyang to Nankang Station, a better place, he believed, to observe them. Before moving to Nankang, he was trained in wildlife photography and equipped with a high-end digital camera and a 300-mm lens.
One day in May, Li took a sleeping bag and the camera to a possible hoolock habitat. The next morning, he was woken up by howls.
"It just happened. Two hoolocks, a black male and a gray female, dangled from the tree above my head. I can still see their gray faces and white brows." Li held his breath and snapped away.
The noise of the camera shutter betrayed him, but to his surprise, they didn't flee. The hoolocks and Li stared at each other silently for a while, until one of them made a long howl and disappeared into the treetops.
"They must have known me. We were familiar to each other," he recalls with emotion.
Li captured China's first clear photos of the eastern hoolock gibbon. His decade-long study has provided an unparalleled contribution to the knowledge and protection of this species.
He has also taken more than 500 photos of other protected primates in China, such as the Phayre's leaf monkey, the Assam macaque and the slow loris, establishing Nankang Station as a prime site for primate observation.
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