The People - Head ranger

Lean Kha

A hunter turned conservationist

Lean Kha stops suddenly and points. "Gaur," he pronounces softly. Everyone following behind halts in their tracks and looks in the direction he is pointing. They see nothing over the tall shoulder-high grass. Nevertheless, the rest of the rangers follow as Kha makes his way to some distant point on the horizon. Sixty metres ahead he finds a large impression in the grass where the gaur he sighted had bedded down for the night.

Kha knows these woodlands intimately. For years he stalked this forest hunting the tigers, banteng and elephants that now as head ranger of the Srepok Wilderness project he protects. It was here in the late 1970s as a Khmer Rouge soldier he fought the Vietnamese when they crossed the nearby border in response to repeated and unprovoked attacks by Pol Pot's notorious army. And it was into the forest that he eventually fled and hid after deserting the ranks of the Khmer Rouge.

A messenger of death and a hunter

Kha speaks little of that time, perhaps the most infamous period in Cambodian history when Pol Pot provoked terror in this once peaceful kingdom. Kha was only 14 when the Khmer Rouge came to his village, separating families, driving people west and pressing all the young men into the service of their cruel, socialist experiment. Only a teenager, he rode on horseback from camp to camp delivering lists of those selected for execution, returning later along the same route to ensure the orders had been carried out. He doesn't speak about that time too much except to mention, perhaps as a way of explaining, the morning and evening indoctrination sessions everyone was forced to attend.

It was also during this time that he learned to use a gun and to hunt for game to feed the insurgents or to trade for rice. Back then, there was an abundance of wildlife. He often saw large herds of wild cattle and even kouprey, Cambodia's national animal, now thought to be extinct. Tigers too were plentiful, and he claims to have killed six. Today, he estimates, there is only half the wildlife there used to be.

Getting converted to the cause of conservation

As a consequence, hunting became much more difficult. Sometimes he wouldn't see anything for days. The police were also making it hard on him as a hunter, and he was afraid one day he would get caught. It was time, he figured, to get a legal job, and in 2002 he joined a community wildlife project to conserve tigers. It was from this project that he was seconded to work with WWF's Srepok Wilderness Area Project.

A respected ranger today

It is obvious that his skills are also recognized by his fellow rangers, who sit around the campfire after a day of patrolling listening with rapt attention to the tales Kha tells. There is lots of laughter too, but the respect and admiration is obvious. All of them testify to learning a lot from him about tracking wildlife. His intimate knowledge of the forest also benefits the rangers in other ways. In a small pool of murky water, Kha digs deep with his hands, pulling out a half dozen frogs which are promptly skewered and roasted over the fire, supplementing their meagre meal of dried noodles.

The power of persuasion

No desk job for him. He would find sitting in an office all day boring. His work as a ranger is certainly not that and at times can be down right dangerous. Many hunters today, he says, are armed with guns and too ready to defend their illegal cargos. As a ranger, he has no power to disarm or apprehend them. He thinks that the rangers would be more effective if equipped with weapons. Instead, he must use his persuasive powers, which according to Martin von Kaschke, the project's technical advisor, are quite impressive. Angry to find snares at a camp of resin collectors, von Kaschke describes how Kha calmly shared a cigarette with them, then explained that hunting is forbidden, and elicited a pledge they won't hunt here again.

Kha's conversion to conservation is not entirely altruistic. He likes the regular salary and being on the right side of the law. Nor did he want his son to follow him into the forest to become a hunter. But at the same time, Kha is genuinely concerned about the depletion of the wildlife, for which he is partly responsible, he admits.