Muong Nhe Nature Reserve

Very few forests in Vietnam still record elephants, tigers and gaur living side by side. These are three of the biggest, most endangered and hardest to see animals in Southeast Asia. The Mường Nhé Nature Reserve is one of the last places where they are all recorded together.

The reserve lies in the Mường Nhé area of Điện Biên Province, the farthest and hardest corner of the province to reach. It is more than 200 kilometers of mountain road from the city of Điện Biên Phủ. This is a border junction, where Vietnam meets both China and Laos.

In this borderland stands one of the last primary tropical forests of the northwest that is still fairly well protected.

The reserve spreads across five border communes. Three of them are Sín Thầu, Leng Su Sìn and Chung Chải. The other two are Mường Nhé and Nậm Kè. All of it is forest. Of that, 96 percent is natural broadleaf evergreen forest, a kind of tropical forest that has not been heavily logged. The remaining 4 percent is mixed forest of timber trees and bamboo.

Surveys of this forest have recorded 458 animal species. Nearly a hundred of them appear in the Red Book, the list of species at risk of extinction in the world and in Vietnam. The count includes 97 mammals and 260 birds, along with reptiles and amphibians.

Among the animals recorded are elephants, gaur, gấu chó, tigers, leopards, sói đỏ and pangolins. There are also cầy hương, wildcats and the rùa đá turtle.

A fair question is whether elephants and tigers are really still here. The honest answer is that they have been recorded in this area. That does not mean a visitor will see them. Elephants and tigers do not stand waiting for tourists. Still, their presence in the forest rests on evidence, and that matters more than whether anyone sees them.

In 2022, scientists found species never before recorded here, in a forest that had been studied for decades. They were the cầy gấm and 13 new bird species. The forest still holds things people do not yet know, and life in hiding that science has not reached.

Beside the 458 animal species grow 740 plant species, in 500 genera and 156 families. Of these, 29 are in the Red Book.

The Mường Nhé forest does not stand alone. Across the border, in Yunnan in China and in Phongsali Province in Laos, the forest carries on without a break. Elephants, tigers and gaur know nothing of national borders. Where the forest runs unbroken, such animals can move along corridors through all three countries. This is why protecting this forest matters not only to Vietnam, but to the whole of Southeast Asia.

Protection here is not simple. Ethnic minority communities in the buffer zone depend on the forest for their living. Burning fields for farming, hunting wild animals and cutting timber are real challenges. In 2022, the conservation authorities dealt with four cases of wildlife transport. They issued fines of 21 million dong and released the animals back into the forest. It is a struggle for conservation with no end in sight.

What a visitor can carry home is not a selfie with a tiger. It is the story of one of the last primary forests of the northwest, still standing, with so many things inside it that nobody has yet put a name to.