Qualla: Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park

Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You do not count these animals by looking for them. Crested gibbons live high in the canopy of dense lowland evergreen forest, move fast, and are almost impossible to spot from the ground - but they announce themselves. A mated pair sings together, a rising, whooping duet that carries far enough through the trees that a listener can fix the group's position without ever laying eyes on it. So between January and April 2019, surveyors spread across Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park in northeastern Cambodia sat at listening posts and wrote down what they heard. The number they came back with was 389 groups, with a statistical range running from 284 to 542. It made this forest one of the most important places on Earth for a species that had not existed, as far as science was concerned, ten years earlier.

Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park: A Species Described in 2010

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The northern buffed-cheeked gibbon, Nomascus annamensis, was formally described in 2010 by Thinh and colleagues in the Vietnamese Journal of Primatology, on the basis of animals from the central Annamite range. Males are jet black with a pronounced crest and a splash of golden-or...

Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park: Counting a Forest by Ear

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2019 work used a technique called acoustic spatial capture-recapture, which treats each identified singing group the way a field biologist would treat a tagged animal - located, logged, and re-encountered. The resulting density came out at 0.437 calling groups per square kilo...

Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park: Fivefold, on Paper

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park was created on 9 May 2016 by Sub-decree No. 77, covering 57,469 hectares - about 575 square kilometres - straddling Ratanakiri and Stung Treng provinces. In July 2023, Sub-decree No. 183 expanded it to 280,359 hectares, close to 2,804 square kilometres, as part of a wide...

Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park: Chainsaws, Wardens and the Cost of Looking

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Illegal selective logging is widespread here. The same 2019 fieldwork that counted gibbons also recorded high-value trees being felled and chainsaw noise at multiple sites. Interviews in surrounding villages have documented hunting pressure on primates - for traditional medicine,...

Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park: What the Forest Might Pay For

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The wager now being placed on Veun Sai-Siem Pang is that the gibbons are worth more singing than the timber is worth felled. A community-based ecotourism project run by Conservation International Cambodia with the TUI Care Foundation and the IUCN aims to strengthen ranger patrols...