MANGROVE REHABILITATION IN A FORMER AQUACULTURE POND: Daily Mud

It's amazing that despite my underwhelming Thai ability it was easy to understand that the elders of BLD thought I was bonkers being 40 (40! the horror, the horror) and not married. The Imam, dressed in Friday-Prayers-White proceeded to question whether 'little brother' worked. Needless to say he is 80, looks 60 has three wives and so many grandchildren he needs an articulated people-carrier to take them all to Tesco.

Thankfully K' Asae, boss of Wetlands International-Thailand and K' Suwit rescued me. We had been trying for a while to find time and the opportunity for a visit. So it was very satisfying to get some of the village and Wetlands International together for a chat, iced coffee and glutinous snacks. We told them of the successful meeting with the pond owner K' Hiran, and skirted around livelihoods, Islam, crab rearing and other issues.

Then the party headed to Bang Don's crab pens. These were interesting due to the fact that the fattening boxes were being semi-floating, like caged fish in a stream, rather than left on the pond bottom as is normal. This opens the possibility of digging a sunk pit in our rehab pond and tethering the line of boxes over the pit. The sunk pit would be deep enough to hold water throughout the tidal cycle, but allow the pond to act as a functioning mangrove area with daily flushing, rather than being impounded, as is the norm. [So often crab rearing and fully-functioning mangroves where the leaf litter is exported, nutrients brought in etc are mutually exclusive.] Interesting.

And then to the site. Sadly the water level was too high to see the channels dug, so with the signposts on each hill sticking out of the water the pond looked like a (golf) driving range. Similar to cats and scuba diving, K' Asae declined my invitation to dig for a while, despite protestations of its therapeutic values. Strangely, K' Asae suddenly became very busy with an urgent conference call from his tailor.

Thus left on my own, in the 0.7ha mudpen the last of the control plots were roped off, looking like muai thai rings for people with very short arms.

And then the call of the shovel - nothing like working in salt water for two days in a row to find out where the first day's cut are. Jim had asked for larger mounds on a previous site visit, so hill 'M' was built up further. Larger mounds are hard work as, the further the digger is from the mound as the corresponding channel extends away from it, the further the mud needs to be thrown. As the mud here is saturated clay, it's heavy, and wants to stick to the shovel blade rather than gracefully flutter onto the hill. Double-handling means putting the mud into a bungie, and carrying it onto the hillock. Needless to say, holding the bungie against the lower chest ensures a very wet, muddy ride home on the bike for me and 'little brother'. No wonder neither of us is married.