Science / Medicine : Heavenly Bird : Vietnam’s Revered Sarus Crane Is Rising From the Ashes of War

In Vietnamese mythology, the Eastern Sarus crane is the bird sent from heaven to ferry to God those destined for eternal life. It is an apt species for such a heavenly mission: An other-worldly looking being, it is the tallest flighted bird in the world at five feet, with a red head, long slender beak and slate gray body. Huge yet ethereal, migrating between water and sky, it courts its mate while dancing to an inner music, bowing, arching, springing into the air with wings spread in ecstasy. The pair will remain faithful for life, which may exceed 20 years. For its dance and its monogamy, the crane is also thought to be a symbol of ardent courtship and conjugal love.

For centuries, Asians have revered cranes as a symbol of humankind’s most cherished hopes: A good marriage, a long life, eternal bliss in heaven. Today, the cranes are ambassadors for two nations, as the United States and Vietnam work together to restore the cranes’ habitat. The two countries are re-creating a tropical wetland that could well serve as a model for other Asian nations.

Five and a half million acres of forest and half of the country’s arable land were bombed, napalmed, and defoliated during the Vietnam War. Nearly 20 million gallons of herbicides--the infamous Agent Orange and its deadly cousins, Agents Blue and White--were dumped over 4 million acres of South Vietnam. By some estimates, more than one-third of the south was defoliated before spraying stopped in 1971. Where forests and swamps once flourished now grow vast stretches of useless grass.

Few at the time considered the war’s toll on Vietnam’s spectacular wildlife. “That war was a war against the environment,” says George Archibald, director of the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wis., “destroying any place the Viet Cong could hide, destroying their food base. It was a great crime.”

A Vietnamese legend held that to count a thousand cranes foretold good fortune. But for a decade, no Sarus cranes were seen in Vietnam; the land had become a wasteland, and the bird of good fortune deserted the people and was feared extinct. Today, that good fortune may have returned--a recent count of the Sarus cranes numbered them at 1,000.

Vietnam’s wetlands, the cranes’ habitat, were the victims of the war’s most vicious assaults. The upper reaches of the Mekong Delta were important staging areas for the Viet Cong. U.S. troops cut huge drainage canals across the wetlands, to dry up the swamp and reveal the hiding places of the enemy. Meanwhile, there were reports that American helicopters and gunboats used the feeding cranes as targets for rifle practice.

With the delta drained and napalmed, natural flood basins dried out; iron sulfides in the soil rose to the surface; when wetted by monsoon rains each summer, the sulfides formed sulfuric acid. The poison drained into the remaining water, driving out storks, herons, ibises, cormorants, anhingas--and the luck-bringing Eastern Sarus cranes.

There were other victims. The fighting nearly wiped out the Javan rhino, the smallest and rarest of rhino species; Vietnam had been one of its last strongholds. Elephants reportedly were bombed as “transport vehicles.” The kouprey, a forest ox, is nearby Cambodia’s national animal; now the ox is considered one of the rarest land mammals.

The reforestation began in 1975, after the fall of Saigon and the reunification of a devastated nation. “Without environmental recovery, Vietnam cannot have economic recovery,” said the country’s vice president, Gen. Voi Nguyen Giap.

In Dong Thap Province, at the heart of the Mekong River Delta, the chairman of the provincial People’s Committee, Muoi Nhe, knew the people needed their swamps back. Without water, there could be no fish, no rice and no melaleuca--a rot-resistant fresh water mangrove from which most houses are built. Nhe launched a program of dike-building, radiating from the center of the province.

By 1984, more than 20 kilometers of dikes were built. Around the dikes, the wetlands bloomed. And along with the rest of the nation, the province began a massive tree-planting campaign. Thousands of hectares of fast-growing melaleuca were planted; those areas not planted remained open wetland. By 1985, Dong Thap’s wetlands were thriving.

And in August of that year, a group of Vietnamese scientists mounted an expedition to survey bird species there. They found the area had been transformed into ideal habitat for the Eastern Sarus crane.

“We were looking out over one of the marshes, and there was a very large bird there. Oh! What is this?” ornithologist and University of Hanoi professor Le Dien Duc told a journalist that year. But to Duc, the bird’s red head was unmistakable. “We were very happy and excited” to have found the cranes, he said.

His happy excitement rubbed off on American crane expert Archibald when the two men met at the International Crane Workshop in Qiqihar, China, in 1987. “I was really excited about their finding those birds,” Archibald said. Once common from South China to the Philippines, the crane was feared extinct in Southeast Asia except possibly in Cambodia (Kampuchea).

So in 1988, at the invitation of Duc, Archibald arranged to visit the Vietnamese cranes, securing a visa through Thailand. “And that,” said Archibald, “was the beginning of our whole effort to save them.”

Archibald, accompanied by teams of American and Vietnamese wildlife experts and American layman volunteers, has traveled to Vietnam every year since--with much logistical help from Judy Ladinsky, chairwoman of the U.S. Committee for Scientific Cooperation With Vietnam. The crane foundation is now helping to write the management plan for Tram Chim, which has now been declared a protected reserve.

“We’re trying to help with the next step: To ensure that the reserve survives,” said ICF wetland ecologist Jeb Barzen. “The solutions will be Vietnamese solutions, but we’re guiding them to develop a management plan, to show them the science.”

“It’s not enough just to put the species back,” explains Barzen. “You have to put back the whole functioning ecosystem.” The problem with wetlands, he explains, is that a given wetland doesn’t necessarily stay the same for long; it is an ecosystem that is constantly changing. The trick is to discover, first, what this wetland was like before the devastation of the war; and next, how to recreate the naturally fluctuating hydrological conditions by regulating the dikes. To keep static an ecosystem that would otherwise naturally change would drive the cranes away.

With funds from the National Wildlife Federation, University of Wisconsin graduate student Richard Beilfuss is studying the water quality at Tram Chim, and training Vietnamese scientists to continue and expand his work once he has finished his thesis. Construction of water gates and other support of Vietnamese scientists is given by the West German Brehm Fund for International Bird Conservation.

The work is difficult, requiring wading in swamps waist-deep, and so humid that by noon it feels like a sauna. But, said Barzen, “When you hear cranes in the wild, you feel a tingle go down your spine. And to see these birds fly is spectacular. The local people feel it too. To have the cranes back is wonderful for them. I think they feel that rebirth.”

Currently, the Eastern Sarus cranes winter at Tram Chim, during the dry season from November to March. Pairs then leave to lay their two eggs--only one hatchling usually survives the summer. Archibald hopes that eventually some of the cranes will choose to build their reedy nests at Tram Chim, as they did before the war’s devastation.

With help from the American scientists, Vietnamese scholars are studying the Sarus cranes to determine their habitat needs, especially their preferred foods. Plant life at the swamp is now being carefully catalogued, and special attention is paid to the water levels at which these species are found, and at what time of year. “Very little work has been done on tropical wetlands,” says Barzen. “What we do at Tram Chim could be a good model for other areas in Southeast Asia.”

Local people, along with American volunteers, built a nature center this year, where people can come to learn about the cranes. “This past March was among the most productive time I’ve been associated with in the field overseas,” Archibald says. “This one area is going to get national attention. It will become a jewel of Vietnam.

“I think in Vietnam they’re quite optimistic about the future,” he continues.

For Vietnam, the cranes’ reappearance is indeed a symbol of better times for a ravaged country: Even though Vietnam is one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated, it has pioneered what is probably the first successful replanting of a tropical wetland. Last year, as every year since 1986, the Vietnamese planted 500 million trees throughout the nation. Bomb craters are being converted to fish farming ponds. A campaign has begun to quell the population explosion.

And at Tram Chim in 1988, for the first time since the war, scientists counted more than 1,000 cranes.