When the organization Save Vietnam’s Wildlife receives a pangolin rescued from the wildlife trade, it can take months to remind the scaly, housecat-sized mammal how to be a pangolin again. After treating any diseases or injuries, SVW caretakers place the pangolin in a small, semiwild enclosure. Here they monitor the rehabilitating animals to see if they’re behaving the way they would in the wild: if they’re investigating tubes of bamboo filled with ants, if they’re climbing trees, and if they’re digging burrows in the soft dirt. It can take up to a year for rescued animals to start acting like wild pangolins again — a delay compounded by ongoing criminal investigations, in which the animals are evidence. But once a pangolin has been approved for release, SVW’s veterinarians might take an additional step: puncturing a hole in one of the pangolin’s fingernail-like scales and fastening on a small radio transmitter. Then they reintroduce the pangolin back to Vietnam’s forests and marshes, hoping that each animal has remembered enough to survive. For the pangolin, radio tracking offers a tremendous boon to research. These mammals are shy and nocturnal. Because they live in dense forest and burrow underground, much of their habits are still unknown. For SVW, radio tracking pangolins on foot and using a new radio telemetry-equipped drone is revealing previously unknown facets of the animals’ lives, as well as refining the reintroduction process. But like many conservation organizations, their work is also limited by funding challenges. A rehabilitated pangolin being…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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