For almost 30 years now, Cam has been working as a ranger at the Bach Ma National Park, a protected area in Thua Thien-Hue Province of central Vietnam. The path that led Cam, 50, to this job was quite unconventional. Growing up in a poor family near the park, Cam followed his father into the woods and learned how to catch birds at a very young age. They set up traps to catch birds and sold the birds to earn a living. It was illegal, of course. In 1985, Cam was caught by rangers as he was trying to sell two common pheasant birds. Two rangers from the Bach Ma park approached him as buyers, seized the birds and took him to their office. Cam then told the officers how he could catch birds so easily: he mimicked the sound of the birds and lured them to him. And at 17, he also knew the park, home to more than 1,400 species of fauna and flora spread out across 37,000 hectares and guarded by a mountain peak standing 1,430 meters above sea level, like the back of his hand. Truong Cam performs … [Read more...] about A man who tells it to the birds, literally