Greetings from Tung Ka Mang!

Tung Ka Mang is the name of the village where I live in PKWS. There are about 30 different posts throughout the sanctuary- most don’t have foreign researchers but instead are home to sanctuary rangers whose primary job is to combat poaching. There is quite a nice research community at TKM though; in addition to those of us working on langurs there are also two PhD students who follow Assamese macaques. Miranda is Dutch and is primarily interested in mating behavior, and Sebastian, a German, is focused on feeding ecology of females.
TKM is the home to a wide variety of wild and not-so-wild animals. In the former category, so far I have seen monitor lizards, barking deer, a porcupine, and some enormous insects (picture 4” long black/white/orange cicadas). At the station there are barking geckos by all of the lights and a house bat who comes to eat cicadas between the kitchen and office. In the latter category we have two saddle-backed jackals, hog deer, and sambar, a type of tame deer. Sambar are so tame, actually, that they like to come into the rooms if they can and stop by at least once a day to check that we have secured our trash in a deer-proof bin. The jackals are only slightly unnerving until you see how some of the Thais treat them like dogs. I had a close encounter with one earlier today and I think they are relatively harmless.
There are many important people in TKM too. Mr. Kitti is an assistant to the chief and is one of our major Thai contacts in the sanctuary. He helped design and build the station where we live and continues to be a useful resource for our concerns. Chet and Omnoi are our two Thai rangers. Both seem to be quiet, fun-loving guys (we had a BBQ last night and they demonstrated how to open a beer bottle with a single sheet of A4 paper- impressive!). Piya, Aim and Tam are three other Thai rangers who live in our station but work with Team Macaque. Krua and San cook for us, making them very important indeed.