"Asian unicorn" spotted in Vietnam forest
For more than 14 years, conservationist Dr. Barney Long has been researching and trying to protect the saola species in southeast Asia. But in all that time, he never spotted a living saola in the wild. Neither did the cameras that he has helped set up over the past decade.
The saola, biologically related to cattle but looking more like an antelope, gained the "Asian unicorn" nickname because it is so rarely seen. The animal sports two parallel horns that extend upwards of 50 inches.
Long, the Director of Species Protection and Asian Species Conservation at the World Wildlife Fund, spent six years working in Vietnam, where the first saola was discovered in 1992. He helped create the Quang Nam Saola Nature Reserve. He collected saola carcasses from hunters and interviewed locals who thought they'd spotted the elusive animals. But there'd been no confirmed sighting in the wild in well over a decade.
And so, when he received an email at 1:03am on Nov. 1 from colleagues in Vietnam, asking if he was awake, he immediately respond. A second later, they followed up. "Confirm the identification to show I'm not going mad," the email read.
With haste, Long downloaded the attached photo.
"I jumped up and down with joy," he tells CBSNews.com, recalling his first glimpse of the photo, showing a living saola in the wild. He'd just checked into a hotel in Mexico City. "I literally downloaded it and was running around the hotel, not the most professional way of reacting, but it was a huge amount of relief," he said.
"This is an historic moment in Vietnam's efforts to protect our extraordinary biodiversity, and provides powerful evidence of the effectiveness of conservation efforts in critical saola habitat," he said in a statement.
When the saola was discovered in 1992, it was the first large mammal to be newly identified in more than 50 years. There is no exact population data, but the number of saolas is estimated to be as low as a few dozen and up to a few hundred in the wild along the Vietnam-Laos border.
It is hard to confirm the size of the population because the animals are so rarely spotted. Through community interviews and survey work, researchers estimate that between one and 50 saola live in up to 15 areas. A population that small is threatened by size alone -- if even one or two breeding females are killed, it could decimate the entire species. There are also genetic threats if too many brothers, sisters or cousins start mating with each other, or if a single disease outbreak wipes through the population.
And then there is the man-made threat of illegal hunting. Since 2011, a team of local volunteers has worked with WWF to remove more than 30,000 snares and 600 illegal hunters' camps from the area.
Within minutes of receiving the email, Long was on the phone to colleagues in Vietnam to discuss next steps. "So firstly, how do we ensure this animal is 100 percent protected?" he says. "We immediately started working on protection strategy for this area."
