Arakan Forest Turtle

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They wanted to know more about the forest’s animals, so they gave us cameras and asked us to take pictures of the animals we would see each day. In time, we brought them pictures of the cats, snakes, deer, birds and boar that we had hunted. They asked about the Great hornbills, the elephant and the leopard. Yes, we said, these animals were rare now.

Tell us about the Forest turtle, they said. These are quiet animals. They like water and the young live in streams, but once they have grown they wade out onto the banks and hide under leaf litter. At night, or when it rains, they go about eating plants, mushrooms and fallen fruit. Sometimes, they will happen upon fish, insects and worms and they eat these too. They are squat creatures, less than 30 cm long and not too heavy. Their feet are more flipper-like than foot, however, so they are slow upon land, and their shells jut out over their bellies. We rarely see them but, when we do, they are easy to pick up and good to eat.

We showed the people the shells, light brown with black stains and a serrated crest running down the middle. The turtles are endangered, they said, they must be protected. We agreed, but explained that our families always need to eat. Help us, they said. Help us protect the Forest turtle and we will bring you chickens and goats to eat instead. We will help you make money by selling your jewellery to people around the world. We will help you build schools for your children.

When we arrived, the Mro greeted us with songs and instruments of their own design. We introduced ourselves as scientists, members of the Bangladesh Python Project, with many questions about their home.

The Mro people are the oldest society in the Chittagong Hill Tracts – a deeply forested area in southern Bangladesh, where travel is restricted for outsiders. An isolated region, it is dominated by thick forest which provides the Mro with both a home and a livelihood. While they are proud hunters (who rely on a range of bushmeat, from the Common wild boar to the threatened Great hornbill), respect for the forest and its animals is deeply ingrained within Mro culture.

We had come to the hills in pursuit of one particular animal; the Arakan forest turtle. Named for the Arakan (now Rakhine) region of Myanmar, the turtle was declared extinct in 1908 following the death of the single specimen that had been discovered by a British Army Officer. Eighty-six years later, however, two specimens surfaced at a Chinese Food Market in 1994. Then, in 2000, Stephen G. Platt of the Wildlife Conservation Society Cambodia Program was part of an expedition hoping to find the turtle in the wild. They began searching in the turtle’s original home, the Arakan Yoma mountains in Rakhine. This southern branch of the Himalayas, which borders Bangladesh and the Chittagong Hills, is one of the most sparsely populated areas in mainland South-east Asia. There, on the western slope of the mountains (an incredibly wet area which shields the centre of the country from the south-western monsoons), a hunter’s dog discovered a single live forest turtle in a bamboo forest beside a stream. The carapace of the turtle was deformed, appearing to have been crushed and then healed abnormally. The cause was never found, and the turtle was given to the Yangon Zoo in Myanmar. In 2003, another 9 specimens were identified as part of a private collection in the Czech Republic. All of them had been captured in the wild. Finally, in 2009, a team from the New-York based Wildlife Conservation Society, finally discovered a viable population of turtles in the wild – safely contained within an elephant sanctuary in Myanmar.

For the Mro, the turtle had never been extinct. Or endangered, or even threatened; it was just one of the many forest creatures that they would occasionally cross paths with. While they encountered it less often than other animals, they still saw no harm in picking these turtles up and carrying them home for dinner or, perhaps, selling them to an interested party from outside of the hills.

While they were not aware of the Arakan forest turtle’s global plight, their intimate knowledge of the forest means the Mro are very much aware of the creeping imbalance in the region. As the Chittagong Hills’ human population swells, its animal population wavers. Creatures that were once common, like the Arakan forest turtle , the Asian black bear or Asian elephant, are now rarely seen, and leopards and wild dogs seem to have disappeared completely. When we asked the Mro to photograph the creatures they encountered, they documented at least 50 species of animals, reptiles and birds, all of which they hunted for food. Thirty percent of these are currently considered threatened species.

The Bangladesh Python Project hopes to help the Mro restore the balance with the forest that they once knew. And, in doing so, it hopes to preserve the Chittagong Hills’ population of Arakan forest turtles that the Mro have revealed to us. Some Mro have now taken on the mantle of “Tortoise Guardian” – ambassadors for conservation who work on behalf of the Python Project. In return, the project provides them with alternate sources of protein (such as chicken and goats), in order to reduce their reliance on bushmeat while providing them with supplemental income.

It is the outside world which remains the greatest threat to the Arakan forest turtle. In both Bangladesh and Myanmar, logging operations, road construction and deforestation for agriculture continue to erode the turtle’s wet, woodland habitat. Proposals have been made to protect large areas of forest which border the turtle’s habitat in Arakan.

As of 2016, a breeding program at Zoo Atlanta in the U.S. state of Georgia has managed to produce 5 specimens, and there is hope that captive populations will continue to grow. Yet poachers for the exotic pet trade and medicine and food markets across Asia are gradually stealing away the wild population. Fortunately, low demand and the difficulty of finding the reclusive turtles in their remote, dense habitat make things difficult for poachers.

The Bangladesh Python Project believes in the future of the Arakan forest turtle. But the responsibility for preserving them falls upon all humans – from the government officials who can choose whether to have its habitat turned into a national park or a logging site, to the passing Mro who spies a turtle in the undergrowth and does not pick it up.

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