ABSTRACT
Deforestation has also significantly reduced animal populations,9 but, as Anthony Cheke (1972: 15-22) has shown in a survey of the birds of the Chiang Mai district, it is wise to be careful when interpreting exactly why a species is in decline. Around Chiang Mai, he found that there were different reasons depending on the species involved. Some, such as the 'Jungle Powl', were being hunted out of existence -a problem with a long history in South East Asia (see the humorous witness of Kingdon Ward 1937: 257-8) - while others were being poisoned, either through scavenging on fish killed with DDT (eg. the Jungle Crow, Corvus macrorhynchos) or through eating meat treated with strychnine put down to kill stray dogs (eg. the White-backed Vulture, Gyps bengalensis, and the King Vulture, Torgos calvus). The disappearance of these two species of vulture has already crept into local folklore, the people of Chiang Mai saying, in somewhat bad taste, that they have all gone to eat corpses in Viet-Nam. But, with the war, wildlife has scarcely fared well in that country, such rare species as Rhinoceros sondaicus and lapirus indicus having been seriously threatened with extinction (Le Viet Du 1969).
