On May 14, a special presentation in Bangkok will pay tribute to Dr. Boonsong Lekagul (1907–1992).
The Thammasat University Libraries own copies of such classic texts by Dr. Boonsong as A Guide to the Birds of Thailand and Mammals of Thailand. In 2007, his centenary year, a Thai language translation appeared of A Guide to the Birds of Thailand. The May 14 lecture at the Siam Society will be by the veteran conservation consultant and scientist Dr. Jeffrey A. McNeely, who worked with Dr. Boonsong for five years.
Dr. McNeely will explore how a Thai medical doctor, biologist, ornithologist, herpetologist, and conservationist made a strong impact on the Kingdom’s future. In his youth, Dr. Boonsong was an avid hunter but alarmed by widespread and unregulated destruction of Thai forest and animal life in the postwar era, he established the Association for the Conservation of Wildlife in 1952. Starting in the mid-1950s, he advocated founding a bird sanctuary on the banks of the Chao Phraya River. In 1962 he founded the Bangkok Bird Club (today’s Bird Conservation Society of Thailand) He also made a mark for his work with the International Council for Bird Preservation and World Wildlife Fund. Today, Thailand dedicated something under 20 percent of its land to national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. These are avidly visited by millions of Thai people and tourists each year. This important source of national income for the Kingdom would no longer exist were it not for Dr. Boonsong’s indefatigable efforts to educate the public. He lectured about the beauty and importance of nature at schools and promoted conservation laws. Among the many people Dr. Boonsong influenced was Dr. McNeely, who first visited Thailand in 1968 as a Peace Corps volunteer building school water systems. Starting in 1970, he worked with Dr. Boonsong at the Association for Conservation of Wildlife and co-wrote The Mammals of Thailand with him. While collaborating with Dr. Boonsong, he also wrote a report for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations about wildlife in the Lower Mekong Basin, including a systems plan for regional protected areas. After doing research in eastern Nepal, Dr. McNeely designed 35 conservation projects in Indonesia and worked in over 85 countries under the auspices of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This experience formed the basis for his study, Soul of the Tiger: Searching for Nature’s Answers in Exotic Southeast Asia, which is not in the TU Libraries collection, but is available by interlibrary loan.
Dr. Boonsong’s achievement.
Born in the Songkhla Province of southern Thailand, he received his high school diploma from the Wat Benjamabophit Secondary School in Bangkok. Soon after earning his MD from Chulalongkorn University, Dr. Boonsong opened one of Thailand’s first polyclinics in 1935.
After the Second World War, wildlife poaching was very common, and in 1953 Dr. Boonsong and some of his friends founded a nature and wildlife association to observe the ongoing destruction. As secretary of the Niyom Prai Association, Dr. Boonsong urged Field Marshall Sarit Thanarak to pass laws regulating the Kingdom’s natural resources. As a result, the Wildlife Conservation and Protection Act, B.E. 2503 and the National Parks Act, B.E. 2504 came into effect. In 1962, Khao Yai National Park is in the western part of the Sankamphaeng Mountain Range, at the southwestern boundary of the Khorat Plateau was named Thailand’s first national park. Three years later, Salak Phra Forest became its first wildlife reserve. In 1983, Dr. Boonsong cofounded the Wildlife Fund Thailand Under The Royal Patronage of Her Majesty Queen Sirikit.
Remembering a conservation pioneer.
In a 2007 reminiscence, Dr. McNeely stated
how each day at 6AM when he began work on the book about Thai mammals, he would be
anxiously waiting for a cup of coffee to miraculously appear – as it always does — to kick my brain into motion. Dr. Boonsong has no such weakness. His energy seems to come from some sort of internal generator that never slows down. After Dr. Boonsong works on the subtle differences among the Thai warblers for a few hours, a nurse slips into the museum and tears a reluctant Dr. Boonsong away from his birds and into his day job in his adjacent clinic, where he spends the rest of the morning meeting the needs of a seemingly-endless stream of patients he has been serving for decades. We meet again at lunch, where he enquires on the morning’s progress on the cat chapter (not a particularly difficult group, as each of the nine Thai cats is distinctive, though the ecology, behavior, distribution, and population status of many of them are poorly known). Dr. Boonsong then rushes off to a teacher training college, where he tells the students about conservation’s contributions to Thailand’s well-being and showing a wildlife film he had made in India. Back in those days (I worked with Dr. Boonsong from 1970 to 1977), it was still possible to travel easily around Bangkok, so on his way back, Dr. Boonsong stops off in Lad Prao to check proofs at Karusupa, the printer that was working to get the new color plates right for the second edition of the Bird Guide to Thailand, to which my friend Ted Cronin was contributing. Then back in time for dinner and an evening of writing text for “Conservation for Thai Youth”, a magazine Dr. Boonsong produces for students through his Association for the Conservation of Wildlife in Thailand.
Dr. McNeely particularly appreciated the way Dr. Boonsong would
make sure that conservation benefits the rural people who live closest to wildlife. As a keen naturalist who spent much of his time in remote wilderness areas, Dr. Boonsong had a deep understanding of how people relate to wildlife. He recognized that the rural people were not to blame for the devastating deforestation Thailand was suffering at the hands of timber concessionaires, all too often with the connivance of Forestry Department officials. When he saw that hill tribes such as the Hmong were clearing forest to plant opium (a big problem back in those days), he understood that strict law enforcement would never be a sufficient solution. So he started one of the first programs to replace opium with other crops, such as coffee. One result was Doi Inthanon National Park, which contains has the country’s highest mountain as well as substantial populations of Karen and Hmong hill tribes. But with Dr. Boonsong’s help, opium is no longer part of the economy, wildlife is no longer part of the subsistence of the hill tribes, and Doi Inthanon has become one of the most popular national parks in the country – even a victim of excess use by tourists. Using Doi Inthanon for conservation has turned out to be far more lucrative for the local people than their subsistence agriculture ever could be.
His approach to conservation showed that it was necessary to
get out in the field. Almost every weekend, Dr. Boonsong took us into the field, to watch birds, to see how Khao Yai National Park was being managed, to crawl into limestone caves searching for elusive bats, to check on the breeding progress of open-billed storks at Wat Phai Lom (where he had been instrumental in having the temple designated as a sanctuary), or to inspect the impacts of road projects on the remaining natural habitats along the Burmese border. He always travelled with his Nikon camera and binoculars, making observations that would go into one of his books. Only such an astute observer of nature would describe the call of a bird as like the sound of a snake swallowing a frog.
Dr. Boonsong energetically got urban dwellers involved in admiring nature, and led tours to Bang Poo, in Samut Prakarn province to see shore birds and Khao Yai for forest birds. He advocated camping trips for young people to gain a connection with nature. Education was a key aspect to his influence, and apart from his major efforts with students, the Royal Family also showed sustained interest in his campaigns to preserve the Kingdom’s irreplaceable natural treasures.
Dr. McNeely concludes:
The entire Kingdom of Thailand, also benefitted from his pioneering work in ornithology, mammals, butterflies, reptiles, amphibians, and protected areas. Ideas that today are mainstream in Thailand originated during the formative years of conservation in the Kingdom, when Dr. Boonsong was often a lone voice in the wilderness, working to save the remaining natural riches of Thailand for the benefit of present and future generations.
His influence is measured by such leading conservationists today as Dr. Theerapat Prayurasiddhi, deputy director-general of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. Asked last year by The Bangkok Post about his favorite book, Dr. Theerapat replied:
Tiew Pah by the late MD Boonsong Lekagul. I discovered this book by chance when I was in school, Sathit Pathumwan Demonstration School. I was 10 years old and was Prathom 4. I was an urban kid and my family had never been outdoorsy, so I was awestruck by the story of the jungle and wild animals in the book. Since then, I became obsessed with nature and those beasts. When I was in Prathom 5, I begged my parents to take me to Khao Yai National Park to see the forest and wild animals. This enthusiasm shaped my career. While at university, I chose to study wild animal conservation at the Faculty of Forestry at Kasetsart University, and was accepted. I consider myself an outsider in my family in terms of career choice. My grandfather is a judge, my father is a doctor and my mother is a teacher. So I guess it is MD Boonsong’s book that led me to nature and profoundly changed my life.
(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)