Qualla: Nakai-Nam Theun National Park

Nakai-Nam Theun National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The last time anyone documented a saola, the observer was a machine. A movement-triggered camera in the forests of central Vietnam took the photograph in 2013, and since then there has been nothing: no confirmed sighting, no carcass, no track anyone could stand behind. Fewer than three hundred are thought to survive, possibly as few as fifty, and the animal has been called critically endangered for so long that some biologists now use the word inevitable. Nakai-Nam Theun National Park exists in large part because the saola might still be walking through it.

Nakai-Nam Theun National Park: The Animal at the Centre

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Science met the saola in 1992, when survey teams working in Vu Quang in Vietnam found remains that belonged to nothing described before - a slender forest bovid with two long, nearly straight horns. WWF announced the discovery that July; the formal description followed in 1993. V...

Nakai-Nam Theun National Park: The Shape of the Place

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park covers roughly 4,270 square kilometres of the Annamite Range and the Nakai Plateau below it, spanning Khammouane and Bolikhamsai provinces. Its eastern edge is the crest of the Annamites, which is also the Vietnamese border, and the terrain there is rugged enough to have...

Nakai-Nam Theun National Park: Forest Sorted by Altitude

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Climb here and the forest changes beneath your feet. Dry evergreen forest holds the Annamite slopes below 1,800 metres, threaded between 1,400 and 1,700 metres with stands of Fokienia hodginsii, a cypress-like conifer valuable enough that its commercial worth is also its danger. ...

Nakai-Nam Theun National Park: Four Hundred Birds

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

More than four hundred bird species have been identified in the park and its northern extension. That is not merely the highest count in Laos - it is the highest recorded for any single protected area in Southeast Asia. Indochina's largest population of rufous-necked hornbill liv...

Nakai-Nam Theun National Park: The People and the Dam

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Vietic peoples are indigenous to this area, and their languages - many of them critically endangered - carry a working knowledge of its ecology that no survey has matched. Saek speakers arrived from Vietnam roughly three centuries ago; Bru speakers came during the 1800s and 1...