A male Gurney’s Pitta. Pic – P.D. Round, Birdlife International

AN INTERNATIONAL environmental organisation has suggested that the government enlarge a national park in Tanintharyi Division to help protect a number of endangered birds, including Gurney’s Pitta.

The suggestion to add another 50,000 hectares to the Lenya National Park in the south of the division has been made by Birdlife International, a global partnership of conservation groups.

A representative of Birdlife International was among a five-member team headed by Dr Htin Hla, the president of Wild-bird Adventure Tours and Travels, which discovered a colony of 21 pairs of Gurney’s Pittas during a visit to southern Tanintharyi Division in May last year.

It was the first time the birds had been seen in Myanmar in nearly a century.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, which produces lists of endangered species every year, says Gurney’s Pitta is “on the verge of extinction”.

However, Birdlife International says it is possible that several hundred pairs of the small, colourful birds exist in the richly biodiverse 50,000 hectares it wants added to the national park.

Mr Jonathan Eames, a program manager at BirdLife International based in Hanoi, says the proposed extension contains not only Gurney’s Pitta, but “a suite of species found nowhere else on the planet”.

The lowland forest ecosystem in far southern Myanmar is reported to contain
fauna such as Asian elephants, tigers and tapirs and a wide range of endemic flora.

Mr Eames said the biggest threat to these species is habitat loss due to conversion to oil palm plantations, a fate met by most of the lowland forest regions in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

“Thailand has converted 98 per cent of its lowland forest to oil palm, so Thailand only has one or two little fragments left that it could consider protecting. In Myanmar we are not yet in that dire situation,” he said.

Mr Eames said lowland forests converted to oil palm plantations are unrecoverable, as the forest cover is completely removed.

“Oil palm plantations support the biodiversity of a parking lot,” he said.

Environmentalists say they are hoping the government will extend the boundary of Lenya National Park, as it did earlier this year with the Hukaung Valley Reserve in Kachin State to help preserve its tiger population.

“The government of Myanmar has acted in a very enlightened and responsible way to establish such a big protected area in the Hukuang Valley,” said Mr Eames.

Mr Eames said BirdLife would provide financial support for an extended national park. The organisation is working with a grant from the US-based Global Conservation Fund, which has provided a ‘planning grant’ for Birdlife to explore the possibilities of conservation in the region. Mr Chris Stone, a representative from the fund, said it would continue to support Mr Eames’ efforts in Myanmar.

“The assumption is that after that planning grant is done we will work with BirdLife to move towards a larger grant,” Mr Stone said.

The cost of extending the park could be $1 million or more, and Mr Eames said BirdLife will seek other donors if its negotiations with the government are successful.

Myanmar is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which requires member countries to establish protected areas representative of their flora and fauna.