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Indiana Jones Meets His Match in Bu



Subject: Indiana Jones Meets His Match in Burma Rabinowitz 

Indiana Jones Meets His Match in Burma Rabinowitz 
New York Times; New York; Aug 3, 1999; Les Line; 

Sub Title:  [Biography] 
Edition:  Late Edition (East Coast) 
Column Name:  SCIENTIST AT WORK/Alan Rabinowitz 
Start Page:  5 
ISSN:  03624331 
Subject Terms:  Science and Technology
Personal Names:  Alan Rabinowitz
Abstract:
In 16 years with the Wildlife Conservation Society, Dr. [Alan] Rabinowitz
has tracked and captured jaguars in Belize, tigers in Thailand and
leopards in Borneo and Taiwan. He has lived with Mayan Indians in Central
America and jungle tribes in Southeast Asia.

His efforts have drawn the praise of others in the field, including Dr.
Howard Quigley, president of the Hornocker Wildlife Institute in Moscow,
Idaho. ''Alan's passion, expansive thinking and sense of priorities set
him apart in the present conservation environment,'' Dr. Quigley said.
''He's ready to act on a situation and make a difference, while his
colleagues sit around and think about it.''

At the moment, the impending birth of his first child has grounded Dr.
Rabinowitz, the society's 45-year-old director of science for Asia, at his
office at the Bronx Zoo. Still, there has been a flurry of excitement over
his discovery in Myanmar of the world's smallest deer, an animal so tiny
that hunters wrap it in a single, albeit ample, leaf from a tropical
plant.

Full Text: 
Copyright New York Times Company Aug 3, 1999 

If Indiana Jones, the daredevil hero of Steven Spielberg's adventure-film
trilogy, had been invented as a zoologist rather than an archeologist, Dr.
Alan Rabinowitz would have made an ideal model.

In 16 years with the Wildlife Conservation Society, Dr. Rabinowitz has
tracked and captured jaguars in Belize, tigers in Thailand and leopards in
Borneo and Taiwan. He has lived with Mayan Indians in Central America and
jungle tribes in Southeast Asia.

Most recently he trekked for a month to reach one of the world's most
isolated areas, in northern Myanmar (formerly Burma), crossing mountain
torrents on hastily built bamboo bridges that would have given the
unflappable Dr. Jones pause.

Moreover, the treasures that Dr. Rabinowitz has helped save, among them a
1,472-square-mile national park in northernmost Myanmar and Taiwan's
largest nature preserve, are infinitely more valuable in the eyes of many
than possessions like the fictional Lost Ark, which caused so much
celluloid commotion.


His efforts have drawn the praise of others in the field, including Dr.
Howard Quigley, president of the Hornocker Wildlife Institute in Moscow,
Idaho. ''Alan's passion, expansive thinking and sense of priorities set
him apart in the present conservation environment,'' Dr. Quigley said.
''He's ready to act on a situation and make a difference, while his
colleagues sit around and think about it.''

At the moment, the impending birth of his first child has grounded Dr.
Rabinowitz, the society's 45-year-old director of science for Asia, at his
office at the Bronx Zoo. Still, there has been a flurry of excitement over
his discovery in Myanmar of the world's smallest deer, an animal so tiny
that hunters wrap it in a single, albeit ample, leaf from a tropical
plant.

And he is planning a return expedition to the deer's realm, where Chinese
traders crossing the high passes use salt as currency to buy wild animal
parts in order to sell them in Beijing and other cities.

Dr. Rabinowitz has a plan to curtail the killing. He also has a
mini-lecture that he will readily deliver about all the important
zoological discoveries yet to be made.

''People think that we've gone to all the remote places and seen nearly
everything there is to see except for a lot of small insects,'' he said.
''But there are isolated mountain ranges that have been closed to
outsiders for generations for all kinds of reasons, especially politics
and wars.''

The northern extremity of Myanmar's Kachin State, along the China border
-- home of the leaf deer or ''leaf muntjac'' -- is one such place. Burmese
refer to the sparsely populated region as the icy mountains after a rank
of lesser-known Himalayan peaks, the highest of which is the 19,320-foot
Mount Hkabo-Razi, the name of the new national park.

British naturalists collected birds, mammals and plants there in the early
1900's, but when Dr. Rabinowitz arrived, it had been decades since the
last scientific visit. ''I couldn't find anyone who remembered seeing a
white person,'' Dr. Rabinowitz said.

Getting permission to travel to the icy mountains took five years, Dr.
Rabinowitz said, in part because a rebellious Kachin army wanted to break
away from the central Government in the capital Yangon, formerly Rangoon.

''It was two years before they even let me in the country to talk to
officials,'' he said, ''and then I had to prove myself by doing things
like tiger surveys.'' Once the insurgents signed a peace accord, however,
the conservation society and Myanmar Forest Department organized an
expedition in early 1997 to survey the mammals of the Hkabo-Razi area.

''We used photographs and drawings to interview local hunters and examined
their kills in village markets,'' Dr. Rabinowitz said. ''Because of the
thriving cross-border trade in wildlife parts with China, the skins,
antlers and horns of larger mammal species were readily available.''

In an article in the journal Oryx, Dr. Rabinowitz reported good news and
bad news. Three species that inhabited the region -- the Asiatic elephant,
the Sumatran rhinoceros and the gaur, a large ox -- have disappeared.
Tigers are rare or gone and musk deer are in serious decline. But

Himalayan species that are disappearing elsewhere, like the red panda and
the takin, which combines the features of an ox, a goat and an antelope,
are still relatively abundant despite hunting pressure.

The scientists added three species to the list of Myanmar's known mammals:
the black muntjac, a deer previously believed to be endemic to China; the
blue sheep, which lives above the timberline in the foothills of Mount
Hkabo-Razi, and the stone marten, a member of the weasel family that
inhabits open rocky areas whereas other martens tend to be deep-forest
creatures.

The 250-mile hike into the icy mountains from the nearest airport, which
is in Putao, was both arduous and perilous, Dr. Rabinowitz said. ''In the
past I've worked in places where there was always a safety net of sorts.
The people were primitive but they were enough in touch with the outside
world that you could get out in time in an emergency.''

''Up there,'' he added, ''time has stood still. We had a doctor, actually
a Burmese dentist, who had already been to Hkabo-Razi with a Japanese
mountain climber who was the first person to reach the summit. He brought
along a bag of injectable drugs and I asked him why there were no pills or
creams. He said, 'Up there you either stay healthy or get very, very sick.
If you need medicine, you need it fast and strong.'

''Sure enough, he was right,'' Dr. Rabinowitz continued. ''You're walking
every day, you're in cool air and you're eating pretty good. Bugs are not
a problem. Malaria's not a problem. But if you get worn down, pneumonia is
a problem. By the end of the two-month trip, five of our team had deep,
hacking coughs and were being injected with antibiotics. My knees were so
swollen that I walked with a staff and was injecting steroids. I'm not
sure I could do that again.''

On that expedition, Dr. Rabinowitz acquired several heads of a small,
unfamiliar deer that he found displayed on hunters' trophy boards. ''I
thought the features were unusual but I had never seen the animal's
body,'' he said, ''and I imagined it was just a local race of one of the
other muntjac species that inhabit the area. I put it aside since we were
literally buying dozens of animals from each village.''

The eureka moment occurred when a hunter stepped out of a dense evergreen
forest carrying a freshly killed specimen of what he called a leaf deer.
''I said, 'Hey, this is something totally different,' '' Dr. Rabinowitz
remembers.

Skull measurements plus DNA analysis by Dr. George Amato of the Wildlife
Conservation Society confirmed that the animal was indeed a distinct,
previously unknown species. And, for now at least, northern Myanmar's leaf
deer, standing 20 inches at the shoulder and weighing about 25 pounds, is
the smallest of nearly 50 known species in the worldwide deer family.

A qualification is necessary because this deer (Muntiacus putaoensis) is
the third new species of muntjac to be discovered this decade in Southeast
Asia, and a fourth species, known from only a single specimen collected in
Laos in the 1930's, has been rediscovered. Conceivably, an even smaller
deer is in some isolated rain forest.


The muntjacs represent a primitive and poorly studied Asian group that now
numbers nine species. The name is a corruption of a 19th century Javan
word, mindjangan, for the little deer, also known as barking deer for
their habit of yelping incessantly if they sense a predator.

Described by one observer as ''dainty little creatures that are always on
the alert and lift their feet high when walking,'' muntjacs feed on
grasses, low-growing leaves, tender shoots and fallen fruit. Aside from
their size, male leaf deer are distinguished from other species by having
the shortest antlers, a little over an inch long, of any deer in the
world. The single-tine antlers protrude from bony, hair-covered pedicels
that form sharp ridges along the animal's face. Unlike other muntjacs,
both males and females have upper canine teeth that are elongated into
tusks curving outward from the lip, suggesting that both sexes fight for
territory. Among other deer species, males are the aggressors.

Dr. Rabinowitz's return in 1998 to obtain more examples of the leaf deer
and map its distribution was less strenuous, merely a 150-mile hike along
river valleys to 13 villages where hunters were questioned about local
wildlife and deer in particular. ''I needed two and sometimes three
translators,'' he said, ''because the dialect would vary from one village
to the next.'' Firearms are virtually nonexistent among the local people,
he said, but the hunters' snares are extremely effective. ''They build
bamboo walls in the forest with openings every 15 or 20 feet. Animals look
for a way to get past the wall and step on a snare hidden by leaves.''

Although the people do eat the meat, the hunting, he said, is done mainly
for animal parts and skins to trade for salt. The villagers grow their own
food, but a lack of salt in the diet, he explained, causes goiter, which
can be fatal, and also manifests itself in iodine deficiency disease,
which contributes to a low I.Q. or retardation. While the leaf deer's
negligible antlers are not highly valued by traders, Dr. Rabinowitz said,
the animal is one of the most exploited species in the area. ''The deer
are still relatively abundant but persistent hunting over the past decade
has reduced their numbers,'' he said.

The leaf deer's range was not included in the largely unpopulated national
park because of the many villages in the area. To curb the China trade,
the conservation society will distribute salt to the villages, start a
community development program, pay for wardens and carry out a management
plan.

The organization also financed a new enclosure at the Yangon zoo for a
young male leaf deer captured and brought to Dr. Rabinowitz. ''We walked
over a hundred miles carrying the deer in a bamboo cage,'' he said, ''and
then the cage had to sit in the aisle of the plane on the three-hour
flight to Yangon where it blocked the door to the bathroom.''

The only captive example of the world's smallest deer is doing well, Dr.
Rabinowitz added. But now, he said, it needs a mate.