World's Largest Tiger Reserve Created

[Nyein Chan(SST)]

World's Largest Tiger Reserve Created

Aug 3, 2010 2:24 PM ET
by OurAmazingPlanet Staff

Hukaung Valley in Myanmar. Credit Steve Winter / National Geographic.

The world's largest area devoted to protecting tigers has been declared by the government of Myanmar.

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The entire Hukaung Valley in the Southeast Asian country will become a tiger sanctuary under the declaration, which officially protects an area the size of Vermont and is a major step forward for saving tigers — one of most endangered species on the planet. The number of tigers in the wild has plummeted from up to 100,000 a century ago to less than 3,000 today.

"Myanmar now offers one of the best hopes for saving tigers in Southeast Asia," said Colin Poole, director for the Wildlife Conservation Society's Asia Programs. "The newly expanded protected area in the Hukaung Valley will be a cornerstone of tiger conservation throughout this iconic big cat's range."

The world's remaining tiger populations exist in small, isolated fragments that are constantly threatened by the illegal hunting of tigers and their prey. The Hukaung Valley reserve joins a number of other areas of existing and potential tiger habitat that exist in many parts of Asia. The Hukaung Valley Tiger Reserve covers approximately 8,452 square miles (22,000 square kilometers) in the northernmost part of the country and has the potential of holding several hundred tigers. Illegal hunting both of tigers and their prey has caused a steep decline in their numbers in the area; some estimates show as few as 50 of the big cats currently in the region.

In 2004, the Myanmar government designated 2,500 square miles (6,500 square km) of the Hukaung Valley as a wildlife sanctuary.

The new designation extends that protected area an additional 4,248 square miles (11,000 square km). The resulting wildlife sanctuary stretches 6,748 square miles (17,477 square km) and makes up the core of the larger Hukaung Valley Tiger Reserve.

The designation was enacted after Myanmar's Prime Minister Thein Sein gathered 17 other Cabinet Ministers to fly to Hukaung Valley earlier this year to assess its conservation needs and convey the importance of the region for tigers, and other species.

The designation protects some of the last expanses of closed forest in the Indo-Pacific region and is one of the most important ecosystems for the long-term conservation of large mammals such as tigers, clouded leopards and Asian elephants.

Approximately 370 bird species, including the critically endangered Rufous-necked Hornbill, have been found in the region. Of the current global estimate of 13,500 plant species, approximately 7,000 are found in the Hukaung Valley and nowhere else on the planet.

"I have dreamt of this day for many years," said Alan Rabinowitz, CEO of the wild cat conservation group Panthera. "The strides we made in 2004 were groundbreaking, but protecting this entire valley to ensure tigers are able to live and roam freely is a game changer. This reserve is one of the most important stretches of tiger habitat in the world, and I am thrilled that the people and government of Myanmar understand the importance of preserving it."

Scientists and conservationists believe that tigers can make a comeback if the most critical threats to their existence — poaching of the cats themselves and their prey — are addressed effectively and immediately.

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/tiger-reserve-0404/

Myanmar creates world's largest tiger reserve, aiding many endangered Southeast Asian species

http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0804-hance_tiger_myanmar.html

[Thomas Latt]

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

By An Asian Tour Operator http://anasiantouroperator.blogspot.com/

Tigers, Big Predators of Myanmar

dMyanmar Tiger on Trap Camera by Wildlife Conversation Society - WCS

Tiger is an animal with full of mystical background stories in Myanmar since for hundreds years ago. Like werewolves in America and Europe, weretigers in Mynmar is one of the most thrilling characters among folklore of Burmese and various ethnic groups. Furthermore it is a part of religious value for animistic beliefs both tribal people and urban communities. Until now, it is remained as one of the major themes in traditionally told bedtime tales.

From the far northern snow-capped mountains to down south Mergui Archipelagos, Myanmar is a shelter for a wide range of biodiversity and wildlife. Various parts of the country itself is a home for mix of species from north Asia, south Asia and southeast Asia. In fact, Myanmar is the largest country by geographical area in mainland Southeast Asia or Indochina Peninsular.

In general, tigers habitat in Myanmar is the Indochinese Tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti) and also known as Corbett's Tiger which are even found in China, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Records show a number of Bengal tigers also found in Myanmar. They habitat in the deep jungle especially in mountainous or hilly regions. In fact they are very similar to Bengal tigers but practically darker and smaller in appearance. However it is said to be more intelligent and hazardous in the desperate situations. Now all those tigers in estimated population between 1200 to 1800 are only several hundred left in wild and nature due to various reasons such as decreasing of primary prey species which are medium and large size animals (ie. deer, wild pigs, serows etc.), poaching and inbreeding. Furthermore, traditional hunting as basis need for ornaments or costumes by some tribal ethnic groups might be another strong reasons. The illicit demand from China for traditional medicine would be another major reason for the unrelenting poaching pressure on tigers. The traders and brokers for tigers remains are always roaming in tiger habitat areas.

"Myanmar (Burma): Chinese pharmacy, Mandalay, 11. XII . 1987 ; special offer: tiger (Panthera tigris), Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus), civet cat (Viverra zibetha), Bengal and domestic cat (Felis bengalensis, Felis libycus forma catus), etc."

"The Wildlife Conservation Society and the Panthera Foundation announced plans to establish a 5,000 mile-long "genetic corridor" from Bhutan to Burma that would allow tiger populations to roam freely across landscapes. The corridor, first announced at the United Nations on January 30th, would span eight countries and represent the largest block of tiger habitat left on earth."
Source: Science Citizen / WCS

As an ambitious project, "World Largest Tiger Reserve" has been created in Myanmar. It was in year 2001, the total area of more than triples size of the 2500- square-miles (6500 -square-kilometer) Hukaung Vally Wildlife Sanctuary was established. In fact, Myanmar had been identified since 1995 as a high priority tiger conservation area as WCS Myanmar assume Myanmar has large areas of potential habitat existed for tigers. Followed by this statement, WCS approached with National Tiger Action Plan to Forest Department in 1998 when preliminary surveys and training programs began.

Tours are now possible to arrange for off-the-beaten-trek Htmanti Wildlife Sanctuary in Sagain Division, the Hukaung Vally Wildlife Sanctuary in Kachin State and the Htaung Pru Reserved Forest and Pe Chaung catchment in Taninthary Division consider where global hotspots for Myanmar tigers and biodiversity.


Ref:
- Wikipedia
- WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society)
- Science Citizen
- National Geographic
- Aung Kyaw Tha - Myanma Alin
- Research Institute and Natural History Museum - Senckenberg (Germany)

Photos:
- WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society)
- Research Institute and Natural History Museum - Senckenberg (Germany)
- Ledo Road

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[Thomas Latt]

ဟူးေကာင္းေတာင္ၾကားကုိ ကမၻာ့အႀကီးဆုံး ရွားပါးက်ား ေဘးမဲ့ ေတာ႐ုိင္းေဒသ သတ္မွတ္

By ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန) ဗုဒၶဟူး, 04 ၾသဂုတ္ 2010

ရွားပါးတိရစၦာန္ က်ားေတြကုိ အကာအကြယ္ေပးဖို႔ အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံဟာ ကမၻာေပၚမွာ အက်ယ္ေျပာဆုံး သဘာ၀ ေတာ႐ုိင္းနယ္ေျမကို တုိးခ်ဲ႕လုိက္ၿပီလုိ႔ ေျပာဆုိလိုက္ပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ ေျမာက္ပိုင္း ေ၀းလံေခါင္သီတဲ့ ဟူးေကာင္းေတာင္ၾကားေဒသ တခုလုံးကုိ က်ားတိရစၦာန္ ကာကြယ္ေရး နယ္ေျမအျဖစ္ စစ္အစုိးရက ေၾကညာလုိက္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီေဒသဟာ စတုရန္းမုိင္ေပါင္း ၆,၇၀၀ နီးပါး က်ယ္၀န္းၿပီး က်ားေကာင္ေရ ရာနဲ႔ခ်ီ ေဘးကင္း လုံၿခဳံစြာ ေနႏုိင္တယ္လို႔ သိပၸံပညာရွင္ေတြက ယူဆၾကပါတယ္။

ဟူးေကာင္းေတာင္ၾကားေဒသကို ၂၀၀၄ ခုႏွစ္ကစၿပီး သဘာ၀ ေတာ႐ုိင္းတိရစၦာန္ ေဘးမဲ့ေတာအျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္ခဲ့တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အခု အက်ယ္အ၀န္းကို ၃ ဆတုိး သတ္မွတ္လိုက္တာ ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ အဂၤါေန႔က ထုတ္ျပန္ ေၾကညာလုိက္ပါတယ္။

သဘာ၀ ေတာ႐ုိင္းတိရစၦာန္ ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး အဖြဲ႕ႀကီးတခုျဖစ္တဲ့ နယူးေယာက္ခ္ အေျခစိုက္ ပန္သီရာ (Panthera and Wildlife Conservation Society) အဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ အမႈေဆာင္ အရာရွိခ်ဳပ္ ေဒါက္တာ အယ္လန္ ရာဘင္ႏုိ၀စ္ဇ္ (Dr. Alan Rabinowitz) က ဗီြအိုေအကို အခုလုိ ေျပာျပပါတယ္။

“ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ က်ားေကာင္ေရ သိပ္မ်ားမ်ားစားစား မက်န္ေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ဒါဟာ စိတ္မေကာင္းစရာပါပဲ။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ က်ားေတြေနႏုိင္တဲ့ သဘာ၀ ေတာ႐ုိင္းေတြ အမ်ားႀကီး ရွိပါေသးတယ္။ ႏုိင္ငံတ၀န္း ေနရာ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားမွာ က်ားေတြ ေသသြားၾကပုံ ရပါတယ္။ တႏုိင္ငံလုံးမွာ က်ားေကာင္ေရ ၁၀၀ ကေန ၁၅၀ ေလာက္အထိ က်န္ေနႏုိင္ပါေသးတယ္။ အတိအက်ေတာ့ ေျပာလို႔မရပါဘူး။ ဟူးေကာင္းေတာင္ၾကားမွာေတာ့ က်ားေကာင္ေရ ၅၀ ကေန ၇၀ ေလာက္ေတာ့ က်န္ေကာင္း က်န္ေနႏုိင္ပါတယ္။”

ကမၻာေပၚမွာ လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္က က်ားေကာင္ေရ ၁၀၀,၀၀၀ နီးပါး ရွိခဲ့ရာက ဒီကေန႔ ၃,၀၀၀ ပဲ က်န္ေတာ့တယ္လို႔ ဆုိပါတယ္။

တရားမ၀င္ ေတာလုိက္သူေတြ၊ အမဲလုိက္သူေတြ၊ မုဆုိးေတြရဲ႕ အႏၲရာယ္ေၾကာင့္ က်ားေကာင္ေရ အနည္းငယ္သာ က်န္ေတာ့တာ ျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ သဘာ၀ ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ ထိန္းသိမ္းေရး အဖြဲ႕ေတြက ေျပာၾကပါတယ္။

[Thomas Latt]

ႏုိင္ငံေရး ရန္ဘက္မ်ားကုိ လက္တြဲေစခဲ့ေသာ က်ားရဲမ်ား

မဇၩိမသတင္းဌာန | ေသာၾကာေန႔၊ ၾသဂုတ္လ ၀၆ ရက္ ၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္ ၁၇ နာရီ ၄၇ မိနစ္

ခ်င္းမိုင္ (မဇၥ်ိမ)။     ။ ႏုိင္ငံတႏုိင္ငံ၏ ျပည္တြင္းႏုိင္ငံေရး အေျခအေနမ်ားကုိ ပဋိပကၡမ်ား မုန္းတီးမွႈမ်ားက ျပ႒ာန္းေလ့ ရွိေသာ္လည္း ရွားပါးက်ားမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရး ၿပိဳင္ဘက္ႏွစ္ဖြဲ႔ က႑တခုတြင္ ေပါင္းစည္းခဲ့ရသည္။

အဂၤါေန႔က ျမန္မာစစ္အစုိးရသည္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ အေနာက္ေျမာက္ဘက္ရွိ ဟူးေကာင္းေတာင္ၾကား ေဒသတြင္ က်ားတိရစ ၦာန္ ေဘးမဲ့နယ္ေျမကုိ ၄၂၄၈ စတုရန္းမုိင္ ထပ္မံတိုးခ်ဲ႕ေၾကာင္း ေၾကညာခဲ့သည္။ ဟူးေကာင္းေတာင္ၾကားေဒသသည္ ကမၻာ့အက်ယ္ဆံုး က်ားတိရစ ၦာန္ ေဘးမဲ့နယ္ေျမလည္း ျဖစ္သည္။

က်ားမ်ား ေဘးအႏၲရာယ္ ကင္းကင္းျဖင့္ ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္စြာ က်က္စားႏုိင္မည့္ ေဘးမဲ့ ဂႏုိင္ေတာအုပ္ ဧရိယာ ခ်ဲ႕ထြင္ေရးသည္ ျမန္မာ စစ္အစိုးရ၊ ကခ်င္ လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရး တပ္မေတာ္ (KIA) ႏွင့္ အေမရိကန္လူမ်ိဳး ေတာ႐ုိင္းတိရစ ၦာန္ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး လွႈပ္ရွားသူ တဦးတို႔ ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ရာမွ အေကာင္အထည္ ေပၚလာခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

အေမရိကန္ အေျခစိုက္ သဘာဝ ေတာ႐ုိင္း တိရစ ၦာန္ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး အဖြဲ႔မွ  ဒါ႐ုိက္တာ အလန္ ရာဘီႏုိဝစ္ဇ္ (Alan Rabinowitz) သည္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ ေတာ႐ုိင္းတိရစ ၦာန္ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအတြက္  ဆယ္ႏွစ္လံုးလံုး ဘဝျမႇဳပ္ႏွံကာ လုပ္ကုိင္ခဲ့သူ ျဖစ္သည္။

မစၥတာ အလန္ ရာဘီႏုိဝစ္ဇ္ အေနျဖင့္ ေတာ႐ုိင္းတိရစ ၦာန္ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး လုပ္ငန္း လုပ္ကုိင္ေနစဥ္ အတြင္း ကခ်င္လြတ္ေျမာက္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္မွ အရာရွိမ်ား၊ စစ္အစုိးရ အရာရွိမ်ားႏွင့္ အၾကိမ္ၾကိမ္ ေတြ႔ဆံု ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့သည္။ ႏွစ္ဘက္လံုးမွ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္မ်ားသည္ အၾကံေပးခ်က္မ်ား စိတ္ကူးစိတ္သန္း အသစ္အဆန္းမ်ားအား တက္တက္ၾကြၾကြ နားေထာင္လိုစိတ္ ရွိၾကကာ ေဘးမဲ့ဇုန္ကုိလည္း တိုးခ်ဲ႕ရန္ စိတ္ဝင္စားၾကသည္ဟု မစၥတာ အလန္ ရာဘီႏုိဝစ္ဇ္ က အသိအမွတ္ျပဳ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့သည္။

အမဲလိုက္သမားမ်ားက က်ားမ်ားကုိ သတ္ျဖတ္ပံုကုိ ဓာတ္ပံုမွတ္တမ္း တင္ႏုိင္ရန္အတြက္ ၂ဝဝ၃ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ မစၥတာ အလန္ ရာဘီႏုိဝစ္ဇ္ သည္ ျမန္မာ့သစ္ေတာဌာန ႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္း၍ အနီေအာက္ ေရာင္ျခည္သံုး ကင္မရာ မ်ားတပ္ဆင္ခဲ့သည္။ ဟူးေကာင္းေတာင္ၾကား ေဒသတြင္ က်ားေကာင္ေရ ၁၅ဝ မွ ၂ဝဝ ခန္႔သာ က်န္ရွိေတာ့ေၾကာင္း ထုိသုေတသနေၾကာင့္ သိခြင့္ရခဲ့ၿပီး တကမ ၻာလံုးတြင္မူ က်ားေကာင္ေရ ၃ဝဝဝ ေအာက္သာ က်န္ရွိေတာ့သည္ဟု ဆုိသည္။

ထုိကဲ့သုိ႔ က်ားမ်ားအတြက္ ေဘးမဲ့ဇုန္ကုိ တိုးခ်ဲ႕သတ္မွတ္လိုက္ေသာ္လည္း တရားမဝင္ အမဲလိုက္မွႈသည္ ရွားပါးက်ားမ်ားအား ထိန္းသိမ္းေစာင့္ေရွာက္ရာတြင္ စိန္ေခၚမွႈတခု အျဖစ္ ဆက္ရွိေနလိမ့္မည္ဟု ခန္႔မွန္းၾကသည္။

လက္ရွိအခ်ိန္တြင္ တရားမဝင္ အမဲလိုက္သူမ်ားအား တိုက္ခုိက္ ႏွိမ္နင္းမည့္ ျမန္မာ့ေတာနင္းတုိက္ခုိက္ေရး တပ္ဖြဲ႕မ်ားသည္ ေလ့က်င့္မွႈအင္အား အလြန္နည္းလ်က္ ရွိသည္။

ထုိ႔ျပင္ က်ားသားကုိ ေရာင္းခ်ရာတြင္ တစ္ကီလိုလွ်င္ အေမရိကန္ ေဒၚလာ ႏွစ္ရာခန္႔ ရရွိသျဖင့္ အေသးစား က်ားတေကာင္ကုိ ေရာင္းခ်ႏုိင္လွ်င္ပင္ ထုိေဒသရွိ လူအမ်ားစု၏ ဆယ္ႏွစ္စာ ဝင္ေငြႏွင့္ ညီမွ်ေၾကာင္း မစၥတာ ရာဘီႏုိဝစ္ဇ္က ေထာက္ျပခဲ့သည္။

ထုိ႔ျပင္ က်ားသားေရ၊ က်ားအ႐ုိးႏွင့္ က်ားကုိယ္တြင္းအဂၤါမ်ားသည္ အာရွ႐ိုးရာ ေဆးဝါးမ်ား ေဖာ္စပ္ရာတြင္ အသံုးဝင္ကာ တ႐ုတ္ႏုိင္ငံမွ အဓိက ဝယ္ယူလ်က္ ရွိသျဖင့္ က်ားမ်ားကုိ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ရန္ ခက္ခဲေနသည္။

ယခုကဲ့သို႔ ေဘးမဲ့ဇုန္အား တိုးခ်ဲ႕သတ္မွတ္လိုက္ျခင္းသည္ ရွားပါးက်ားသစ္မ်ား၊ အာရွဆင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ရွားပါး ငွက္မ်ိဳးစိတ္ေပါင္း ၃၇ဝ ခန္႔ကုိလည္း ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ႏုိင္လိမ့္မည္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ထုိ႔ျပင္ ကမၻာေပၚတြင္ ရွားပါး သစ္ပင္ပန္းပင္မ်ိဳးစိတ္ေပါင္း ၁၃,၅ဝဝ ခန္႔ သတ္မွတ္ထားသည့္ အနက္ မ်ိဳးစိတ္ေပါင္း ၇,ဝဝဝ ခန္႔မွာ ျမန္မာ့ ဟူးေကာင္းေတာင္ၾကား ေဒသတြင္သာ ေပါက္ေရာက္သည္။

“ပုိၿပီး ေက်နပ္စရာ ေကာင္းတာကေတာ့ အခုလို ေဘးမဲ့နယ္ေျမ ထပ္တိုးခ်ဲ႕လိုက္တဲ့ ဧရိယာဟာ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ ေျမာက္ဖက္ တိဘက္နယ္စပ္နားနဲ႔ အိႏၵိယ ႏုိင္ငံေတြမွာ ရွိတဲ့ တျခား ေတာ႐ုိင္း တိရိ စၧာန္ကာကြယ္ ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးနယ္ေျမသံုးခုနဲ႔ ဆက္စပ္ေနတာပါပဲ” ဟု မစၥတာ ရာဘီႏုိဝစ္ဇ္ က National Geographic မဂၢဇင္းသုိ႔ ေျပာခဲ့သည္။

ေဘးမဲ့ဇုန္၏ အက်ယ္အဝန္းသည္ က်ားမ်ားအား ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရး ၾကိဳးပမ္းရာတြင္ အဓိက အေရးၾကီးသည့္ အခ်က္ျဖစ္သည္ဟု မစၥတာ ရာဘီႏုိဝစ္ဇ္ က ဆိုသည္။ က်ားမ်ားသည္ လြတ္လြတ္လပ္လပ္ လွႈပ္ရွားသြားလာႏုိင္သည့္ က်ယ္ျပန္႔ေသာ ေတာမ်ိဳးတြင္ ပုိမိုရွင္သန္ႏုိင္ေလ့ ရွိသည္။

မစၥတာ ရာဘီႏုိဝစ္ဇ္ သည္ “မရဏ ေတာင္ၾကားမွ အသက္မ်ား (ေသနတ္မ်ား၊ ေရႊတြင္းမ်ားႏွင့္ ေလာဘသားေကာင္ မ်ားၾကားမွ ရွားပါးက်ားမ်ားကုိ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ျခင္း)” ဟု အမည္ရသည့္ ၂ဝဝ၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ထုတ္ေဝခဲ့ေသာ စာအုပ္ကုိ ေရးသားခဲ့သူျဖစ္သည္။

မစၥတာ ရာဘီႏုိဝစ္ဇ္ အေနျဖင့္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ေသာ အေတြ႔အၾကံဳမ်ားကုိ အေျခခံ၍ ေရးသားခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္ၿပီး ျမန္မာအာဏာပုိင္မ်ားႏွင့္ အက်ိဳးအျမတ္ထြက္ေအာင္ ပူးေပါင္း လုပ္ေဆာင္ႏုိင္ခဲ့၍ ေဝဖန္မွုမ်ားလည္းရွိခဲ့သည္။