Qualla: Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve

Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1923 the French ornithologist Jean Théodore Delacour carried a live pair of extraordinary birds back to Europe: dark blue, crimson-legged, red-faced, with a blue crest. He called it the imperial pheasant, and for the next eighty years it was one of the great enigmas of Southeast Asian ornithology — almost never seen, almost never photographed, a species known chiefly from captives and rumour. Then in 2003 a team led by the ornithologist Hennache put morphology, breeding trials and DNA sequencing together and reached a conclusion nobody wanted. Lophura imperialis was not a species at all. It was a hybrid, the offspring of an Edwards's pheasant and an Annamese silver pheasant. By then a Vietnamese nature reserve had already been created, in part, to protect it.

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Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve: A Reserve Written for Two Names

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kẻ Gỗ occupies roughly 35,000 hectares of hill country in southern Hà Tĩnh, split between a strictly protected core of about 24,800 hectares and some 10,400 hectares of protection forest, spread across the uplands around Cẩm Xuyên and Hương Khê. The Hà Tĩnh People's Committee est...

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Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve: The Bird Behind Both Ghosts

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Strip away the hybrid and the inbred morph and one real bird remains, and its situation is worse than either of its shadows suggested. Edwards's pheasant is endemic to a narrow band of lowland forest in central Vietnam, and the last confirmed sighting of a living wild individual ...

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Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve: Water First

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The reserve wraps around a lake, and the lake came first. French engineers had drawn plans to dam the Rào Cái here, but the Second World War and then the First Indochina War buried the project. Vietnamese engineers took it up in 1976, a year after reunification, and the work beca...

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Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve: What the Surveys Found

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Kẻ Gỗ protects one of the last stands of lowland rainforest left in Vietnam, which is why the species counts matter. A 1999 survey logged 46 mammals, 270 birds, 562 plants and around 100 reptiles and amphibians; the German biologist Thomas Ziegler has documented a herpetofauna of...

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Kẻ Gỗ Nature Reserve: Fifty-Six Rangers

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The management board runs to about seventy people, fifty-six of them rangers, against illegal logging, snaring for the wildlife trade — domestic and international — and pressure from oil exploitation. The Netherlands and the German conservation foundation ORO-VERDE have both fund...

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