Myanmar snub-nosed monkey facing extinction
The recently discovered Myanmar snub-nosed monkey has been bearing the brunt of China’s appetite for timber but a video clip and a new law banning the export of raw logs could give the critically endangered species a shot at survival, writes Vincent MacIsaac
It is just 42 seconds long, but the first-ever video footage of a species of monkey recently discovered in northeastern Myanmar is raising a glimmer of hope that the animal can be brought back from the brink of extinction. This will, however, require Chinese logging companies to respect the ban on the export of raw logs from Myanmar that begins on Tuesday, conservationists say.
“Finally, after three years of searching, we have proof that large groups continue to survive despite the ravages of illegal Chinese commercial logging,” says a visibly excited Frank Momberg, Asia director of Fauna and Flora International (FFI).
The video above shows a troop of monkeys leaping through the leafy canopy in the eastern Himalayan Mountains and was taken in February, by hunter-turned-ranger Kaung Haung, 24, from the local Law Waw tribe, who was trekking to check camera traps.
Momberg was a member of the team that discovered the species by chance in 2010, while conducting a survey of Myanmar’s gibbon population in northeastern Kachin state, in an area opposite the Nu River Valley, in China’s Yunnan province. Hunters in Kachin’s N’mai River Valley had reported the existence of a large monkey that sneezed during the rainy season, due to its upturned nose. Momberg was intrigued.
“I suspected immediately that it could be a monkey belonging to the snub-nosed genus,” he recalls, explaining that he had worked on a conservation project for a species of the genus in Vietnam. The nearest known snub-nosed species, however, was in Yunnan, its range separated from Kachin by two barriers: the Mekong and Salween (which the Nu becomes in Myanmar) rivers.
“We could not rule out the existence of a new species,” he says.