It’s dawn in Thailand’s Eastern forest, and the sound of combat boots echoes through the jungle mist at Ta Phraya national
park’s headquarters.
The stomping boots belong to forest rangers on a counter-poaching tactics course. They are training with Hasadin, a team
of elite rangers formed in June 2015, whose mission is to stop the Siamese rosewood tree from being driven to extinction by
poachers.
“The poachers don’t care if we’re rangers ... if they meet us and they have weapons in their hands, they shoot immediately
without warning,” says Piroon Pilaphop, leader of Hasadin’s Dong Yai wildlife sanctuary team.
Siamese rosewood is a hardwood species confined to the remaining forested areas of just four countries in the Mekong
region – Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. Renowned for its blood-red colour, the highly coveted endangered species
is illegally logged in Thailand and smuggled through mainland south-east Asia to luxury “hongmu” furniture markets in China.
Conservationists have warned that with rates of illegal logging increasing by 850% in recent years, Thailand’s Siamese
rosewood trees could be extinct within a decade.Large trees in protected forests have become so scarce that their plunder
is more akin to wildlife poaching. Increasingly large groups of illegal loggers cross the Thai-Cambodian border with weapons
and are willing toengage in firefights in order to get the highly valuable “blood wood”.
“Rosewood is becoming harder and harder to find. The last big rosewood trees are in the deep forest, so the smugglers are
moving deeper and deeper into Thailand,” says Khajornsak Anantuk, a sergeant major with the Ta Phraya border police,
who is helping to train the rangers.