Daily Mud - Fashion Week Hits the Mangroves

"Still, a chap ought to look smart
in front of the men, don't you think?"
Lt Gonville Bromhead, played by
Michael Caine, in Zulu, 1964, just before
being sliced up into pet food by 6,000
angry warriors

It was upsetting when it happened, like a pet dog finally dying, but having made the decision, it was clearly the right thing to do. No doubt to the relief of the talented and quizzical seamstress, K’Nee, who had sutured them back to life and respectability many times, the faithful and crucially nylon, fast drying shorts that I always wore to the mangroves finally endured their last trip & rip, while in the brown stuff at Ban Tale Nok, Phang Nga province. A rose-like climber ensnared the shorts, ripping them from top to tail, and slicing my thigh like a barbed wire cheese cutter.

Pity. So before a more detailed and hopefully useful report on Ban Tale Nok, some thoughts on sartorial elegance in the filth. Consider the presence of sun, salt, silt, sea, sweat and Islam.

Clearly hats are vital and a full brim is better than a baseball cap. The tropics receive twice the amount of radiation from the sun per area compared to the UK so bald bonces need covering. Good sized holes on the side stop from brain cells frying. A Tilley might be the answer – one of Canada’s finer exports. Better still, they are washable as without doubt any hat is going to get muddy and sweaty. Tilly’s also have a thin layer of foam in the top – just enough to make it float, and has saved my head when a tree has leapt out and hit me.

Sweat, like salt (water) is bad news for many materials. Delicate straw creations might be dandy for toffs day at Royal Ascot (horse races), but will not last past a second washing. Local Thai builders wear something that looks like a cross between Mexican in a recession and a lamp shade. Straw and large, they too don’t last long.

The artificial fibres of nylon shorts and also a Gortex-style Berghaus t-shirt resist being eaten by salt much better than cotton. A cotton t-shirt just gets wet and stays wet all afternoon (and no, I wouldn’t win a prize). The cotton socks worn to help deal with the sand trying to grind my feet to powder, last five visits max before the holes start to join up. And all of the above are also likely to get suntan cream tide marks. Thus black is definitely in vogue.

Black is also a sane choice as, in much of the developing world, washing clothes is done in a top-loading ‘impeller’ washing machine. These machines do not heat the water. And however hard Unilever and P&G try, washing powders just don’t work as well in cold water. They can add all the enzymes, UV reflectors and gimmicks imaginable, but stains stay. Thus, once something is worn into the mud (like white boxer shorts), it is never ever going to be clean again. Just ask the soon-to-be Mrs Balaji.
Watches, jewellery, necklaces, bling, blah blah blah. If you can avoid it, don’t bring it. High clay content mud is very slippery, especially if you are in a Monmorillonite area. This can make rings slip off without you knowing. Leather and rubber are corroded by the salt. Steel is good. Unless it’s sapphire crystal, watch faces are abraded by the sand when digging. Necklaces are a hazard. But something I started wearing round my neck while on site as a tree surgeon was a whistle. Wading through the twisting channels of a mangrove on a cloudy day can be disorientating (spot the correspondent, pictured below?). Wind doesn’t penetrate a dense stand. The voice travels perhaps only twice as far as the eye can see. A whistle might save you when lost, stuck on some abandoned fishing gear (of which sadly there is much) or have crumbled your back trying to demonstrate that 40 is still young. Gents- earings. Necessary? Think you’re P’Diddy? When it’s been caught in a Flagellaria climber and ripped through the lobe, post a blog on this site for some sympathy (no picture, no reply).

Shoes. Not enough can be written about shoes. [Agree, G?] Shoes will be the subject of another posting. Enough to say, wear them, and lace ups. So back to the shorts. It’s not that I’m obsessed but those shorts had two other qualities that endeared them, when in semi-liquid surroundings. The first was lots of pockets that either zipped up or buttoned up. Positive fastenings are really useful for keeping the essentials in place (phone in a ziploc bag). And zip-on extensions to turn the shorts into longs for visiting Muslim communities and mangrove areas with lots of mosquitoes.
So, RIP, faithful shorts. Just not while I’m in them.

Daily Mud... heads north

Dear Readers, this is just to let you know that your correspondent is heading north this week to Ban (village) Talay Nok (I assume sea bird). More of the same. Smaller pond to be sorted. The village really suffered in the tsunami, and the likes of Mangrove Action Project and Andaman Discoveries (ecotourism specialists) have shown how positive the response can be, after such a negative event, with intelligent implementation and patience. A fuller report on my return.

Daily Mud - Dancing shoes not required

Chums who know me well will attest to the fact that I’ve never been a clubber. Dancing is not my thing. Not so much rhythmic movement as early-onset dementia. Think Prescott playing football. But I had a good case of ‘disco leg’ onsite yesterday. After a week of high tides in the afternoon – learning #46: digging underwater doesn’t work, and you can’t see where your feet are – and conducting my own research on Thursday, your correspondent finally got back into the mud yesterday. Arguably for a three hour digging session the pacing was wrong. So by the time 6pm arrived, and I’m willing the Imam’s evening call to prayer to crank up which doubles as my end-of-school bell, the spirit was willing but the body was wilting and wobbling. A bit like peat cutting in Ireland, this solid sticky clay (under a few inches of liquid mud) lends itself to being carved up into blocks and thrown onto hillocks. Rationally, of course, it should be easy to cut smaller blocks to time the arrival of exhaustion at dusk. So late in the day heaving the clay blocks out of the channel that's being created, the legs started to shake, from a lack of stamina and sugar. The hillock of mud I wanted to add to was 20 feet away. And every so often the 15kg block of clay decided not to leave the blade of the shovel but cling on like an AIG director to his bonus, so the digger is sudden yanked like a little old lady walking a husky. Trying. But progress nonetheless, and it was very satisfying to leave the site and be able to see change.

The session was interrupted by the arrival of Bang Don’s children. They are sweet, and are getting the idea that very simple Thai, all ahead slow, is sometimes understood by the bizarre, digging falang, but normal childspeak doesn’t stand a chance. They wanted to play with my camera, which is child/beer/mud/shock & awe proof, so I lent it to them. Actually, getting someone else to take pictures is always interesting, for their differing perspective. And this time was no different. Having taken 30 pictures of their nostrils, they then posed for each other dancing inside my carefully roped off control plots, and standing on the hillock I was busting my barnacles to make bigger. More communication needed: zero dancing is just fine.

READ ME FIRST - HOW TO USE THIS BLOG

READ ME FIRST

Thank you for coming to this blog. You are likely to be here for one of two reasons. Either you’re a friend and curious to know how a fully fledged man can spend much of his adult life playing in mud. Or you are interested in rehabilitating a degraded area of mangrove near you. ‘Daily Mud’ posts are written with friends in mind and though relevant to this project, are not technical by nature. Other articles will cover more in-depth but very practical aspects of the work, and might be more useful to NGO staffers who need inspiration and help with their own project.

Unfortunately this blog has been started after the project commenced. There are a number of reasons for this, but primarily securing land owner agreement has been slower than anticipated. Though publicising this work has always been the intention, a blog was not envisaged at proposal-writing stage. Please forgive the poor timing. So over the course of the next few weeks blogs will be posted that go through the stages we have been through, explain why, and discuss some of the science behind it. Ellison points out that there is a disconnect between the huge amount (of science) known about mangrove rehab, and what happens on the ground. This is supported by the fact that so many mangrove planting projects fail. Hopefully this blog will go a little way to bridge this gap.

If you are looking for answers on a specific topic try the ‘POSTING BY TOPIC’ categories on the right side. Note also that the blogs will have embedded links within, to the most relevant articles and papers to explain points in more detail.

Though they will be covered in more detail in their own postings, two issues with our site (a former aquaculture pond of 0.7ha) are worth highlighting now. The first is our objectives. Ecological Mangrove Rehabilitation is a technique that we believe in, but it needs a good demonstration site to show it working in Thailand. By definition, the objective of EMR is to re-establish a functioning mangrove ecosystem: thus not mangrove for timber, charcoal, coastal defence, erosion control etc. The local community use Nypa fruticans and Ceriops sp, (p41 of this link) so there will be a bias towards these species. But the hope is that soon there will be a stable, biodiverse system in this pond, providing most of the environmental and ecological services that mangrove provides. We also wanted to test actually implementing the theory with practical action on the ground.

The second problem that needs to be mentioned early on is that the whole pond floor is too low relative to sea level. As our distinguished visitor Dr Ong said, in Watson’s classification of mangrove area, we have effectively a mudflat that gets wet everyday. Therefore much of the work on our site tries to rectify this issue.

I hope you enjoy this blog and find it useful. Please feel free to comment or get in contact to provide ideas, correct mistakes or ask for help. We are not experts, so if we can’t answer your problem we might be able to point you in the right direction.

Wetlands International, Mangrove Action Project and APFED

You will notice three logos on the top right of this blog. Time for an explanation.

Though this is a personal blog, and the views expressed (and all mistakes) are my own, these three organisations are crucial to the success of this rehabilitation project. Wetlands International (Thai office) has employed me, on and off over the last two years and is joint manager of this project with Mangrove Action Project. WI's Thailand Office director, K' Asae Sayaka is featured in an earlier blog and leads the project management.

Mangrove Action Project is based in the US and also has regional offices including Trang, southern Thailand. MAP's Jim and Ning Enright have been hugely supportive of this project, working with WI to develop the proposal to APFED, meeting the community and advising on site work.

APFED (Asia-Pacific Forum for Environment and Development) is providing the bulk of the funding, without which nothing can happen.

Thank you, one and all.

Balaji's visit

Balaji is an amazing man. He's motorbiked around India to promote awareness and protection of the coastal ecosystem. He's kayaked the length of Palk Bay (the bite of coastline shown here, hairily close to the frightening end of Sri Lanka) over three months stopping off at various villages to preach the gospel of coastal zone conservation. Within a viva of receiving his PhD in seagrass monitoring he's also set up OMCAR, his own NGO that is based in, and works closely with, two or three communities on the Tamil Nadu coast (embedding like this is the best way to ensure development projects really work), sorted out core funding support from DEEPWAVE, a German NGO, (a rare trick that every NGO fantasized about achieving) and is about to get married in a few weeks time.

We met at Robin Lewis' mangrove rehab training workshop (2005) and have kept in touch ever since. So it was wonderful to show him round Krabi, hear what he's been doing in India and take him to the pond. In true Balaji style he leapt straight in and started digging. Please come back and see us soon. We wish you all the best for your wedding.

Dr Ong and Stanley Tan

3rd /4th May saw Dr JE Ong (left) and Tan Kim Hooi (Stanley) from Malaysia visit the Krabi Ramsar site and the Pond. Great to see them again, after the ISME conference in Bangkok. These two have forgotten more about mangroves and their ecosystems than I will ever know, so had a fascinating two days picking their brains. Thank you gents for your comments and input. Please come back and see the site again.

Daily Mud - K Asae & K Suwit visit BLD

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.

PS can anyone tell me what flavour of snake this is?

Daily mud - control plots

Got to the site today about 4pm, having seen two giant fish in a bucket in the village, taking their last 60-a-day gasps. Today I wanted to finish putting the ropes around the metal poles D and I installed to mark out the six 3x3m control plots. But I was foiled because, as the rain patted my green Tilley hat, there were clearly not going to be enough Jubilee clips to go round. So some completed. Two more plots to finish tomorrow and some proper photos will be taken of them. Thrilling to see the R. apiculata growing so well on hill C. Really encouraging.

The drive back was ok today. Slow and cautious on the wet roads. No digging so the usual back-ache didn't plague me. But was almost smacked off my bike on the way to the site by some idiot undertaking everyone by using the hard shoulder / motorbike lane, and weaving through the other lanes. On that highway I spend a lot of time looking in the rear view mirror for just such an idiot. And not only is one born every minute, but some of them drive naff cars with cheap spoilers bolted onto the trunk. Chump.

Bang Land Da: an Introduction to the Village

The project is taking place in the Krabi RAMSAR site, southwest Thailand. RAMSAR is the convention that promotes wise and sustainable use of wetland resources. In Thailand RAMSAR site status does not confer protection, but denotes the importance of the ecosystems covered. Krabi's site is approximately 21,000ha, and including 9,000ha of mangrove among other features.
The village of Bang Land Da (BLD) (lat 8.006851, long 98.978647) is within the Krabi RAMSAR site. It was actually our third attempt to secure a site to rehabilitate (top right pin). The first two fell through due to either unsuitability of the site or a land ownership issue (to be covered in a later blog). My colleague Khun (Mr if you’re a Buddhist Thai) Donnapat knew people in the village from a previous project and discussed with them whether they had an area of inter-tidal land that could be reverted back to mangrove with our help.

That is how we came to this village. BLD is a small Muslim community of approx 300 people. Some people fish. Some rear crabs in crab ponds. Some make products from the local natural resources, like roofing sections from Nipa palm leaves. Krabi town is sufficiently close by to allow villagers to work there. So there is a variety of occupations. We have formed a good relationship with Bang (Mr is you are a Muslim Thai) Don and his family. He runs the crab producing and selling group, and is something of an elder statesman of the village.
At our initial meeting with the village, in what they called a sala, we explained what we would like to do; that, though wanting to involve them as much as possible, we were going to teach ourselves how to rehabilitate a pond; that we didn’t have bags of money to distribute but that certain capacity-building activities or training sessions could be arranged and run, if the community felt the need for them.
In response to the question of what they felt were the community’s challenges, no burning issue came to light. So during the course of our relationship with them we will continue to explore the livelihood / capacity building question from different angles, and at different times.

In an effort to bond with the community we’ve spent time talking with them, sharing a coffee and eating together. Sadly my Thai linguistic ability is terrible but one thing that has gone down well is printing out some of the pictures we have taken during the course of our time in the community, as well as laminating some Google Earth images of their community. These were cheap to do and greatly appreciated by the people.

Thank you

It's fitting that the first post is a thank you to lots of people who have helped me to get to this point. Mark Lindsey, one of the UK's top tree surgeons gave me my first job in the tree world, and had the patience to let me learn by some trial and much error.

Jack Kenyon at Merrist Wood got me through the professional arb exams, despite my inability to draw site plans. Jim and Ning Enright (below) have been great friends since 2005 and really supportive of my reincarnation into the mangrove world and physical move to Thailand. I would not have stuck it out without them.

Thank you to K' Asae Sayaka who gave me my first NGO job with Wetlands International and to K' Dos who has been a great colleague.

Finally, Robin Lewis (below). During his mangrove rehabilitation training workshop in 2005 all the bits fell into place. Thank you for showing me the way.