Qualla: Phou Hin Poun National Biodiversity Conservation Area

Phou Hin Poun National Biodiversity Conservation Area: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1996, the biologist Robert Timmins was walking through a market in Thakhek, the provincial capital of Khammouane, and bought a dead rodent. Villagers called it kha-nyou. It had a long furry tail, short legs and a skull that did not match anything in the literature. When Paulina Jenkins and colleagues formally described it in 2005 as Laonastes aenigmamus, they judged it strange enough to need an entirely new family. A year later, palaeontologists argued they had gone the wrong way: the animal was not new at all, but a surviving member of the Diatomyidae, a family last seen in the fossil record roughly eleven million years ago. It had been living in these limestone hills the whole time.

Phou Hin Poun National Biodiversity Conservation Area: A Landscape Made of Edges

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Phou Hin Poun covers about 1,801 square kilometres of tower karst in the Annamite Range, and the striking thing about it is how little of it is soil. More than half the area is estimated to be bare rock - fluted, pitted, blade-sharp limestone rising in towers and ridges, drained ...

Phou Hin Poun National Biodiversity Conservation Area: Rat Among the Rocks

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The kha-nyou was not the only surprise. Another rodent found here, described in 2005 by Musser, Smith, Robinson and Lunde, was given the genus name Saxatilomys - from the Latin saxatilis, among the rocks, and the Greek mys, mouse. The name is a description of a lifestyle. Saxatil...

Phou Hin Poun National Biodiversity Conservation Area: The Census of the Living

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Surveys have counted 113 species of mammal here, along with 160 birds, 81 reptiles, 47 amphibians and 145 fish. Forty-one bat species have been recorded, and a single cave, Tam Houay Si, is used by twenty-two of them - a nightly exodus of a scale that is hard to picture until you...

Phou Hin Poun National Biodiversity Conservation Area: Five Hundred Dollars

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Phou Hin Poun is one of twenty-one National Biodiversity Conservation Areas in Laos, and the protection this status confers is largely nominal. The annual budget for each is about five hundred dollars. That figure is not a typo and it is not an exaggeration for effect. Spread acr...

Phou Hin Poun National Biodiversity Conservation Area: Twenty-Nine Thousand Neighbours

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nearly thirty thousand people live inside the conservation area - 29,603 at last count. They are not intruders in it; their villages predate the designation, and their livelihoods come from the same forest, fish and stone the surveys are counting. Any honest account of Phou Hin P...