It’s really shocking to know a well-known bird sanctuary in Vietnam’s capital city, Hanoi, is actually a disguised slaughter house where more than 700 poor little storks are killed a day.
The Ngoc Nhi Stork Sanctuary in Ba Vi District, some 60 kilometers away from downtown Hanoi, was once touted as an ideal destination for local and foreign bird lovers every weekend or holidays.
The garden is populated by thousands of storks due to its extensive bamboo forests – a preferred nesting site.
Hoc once boasted his garden was home to eight types of storks, including co trang (white storks), co lua (fiery storks), co trau (black storks) and co ruoi (small storks).
The local media has given it a lot of praise, but it was the "bloody business" that turned the sanctuary into the largest slaughter house of wild birds in Vietnam.
It is really weird that local authorities do not know that the sanctuary has for years become a restaurant where hundreds of storks are served each day in the very place where people flock to see how the birds are protected.
What a bizarre, unique and threatening job but it has been done for many years, right before the eyes of local authorities.
The poor birds are killed by the hands of their owners like this: Each night, they used nets, ladders and other hand-made weapons to catch the storks in a garden where thousands of storks seek for shelter.
Storks, night herons, pelicans, and other migratory birds are frequent victims of a ruthless massacre led by the sanctuary’s owner, Phung Doai Hoc.
Local forest management officers said they received a lot of accusations from local residents that Nhi used the name of “ecological tourism” to make profit from stork meat.
Officers have made several raids into the sanctuary, but they were told that the storks, which were about to be cooked, were dead storks.
The sanctuary’s owner, Hoc, has got quite well-off day by day since he established the sanctuary on his family’s land.
He has recently expanded the stork garden, erecting more fences and growing more bamboo trees to attract more storks to his garden.
Before the gate, a board which writes “Welcome to Ngoc Nhi forest stork" may play a hoax on bird lovers; if they go a little further, they will find a large yard where stork meat is served on the table.
The sanctuary offers different dishes from stork meat: roasted, grilled, steamed, and even stork meat hot pot!
Hoc’s wife, Ly, once revealed to a Lao Dong source that they eearned VND31.2 million from cooking an average 780 storks a day.
Thousands of tourists from all over Hanoi and neiboring provinces visit the Ngoc Nhi stork garden a week, but it seemed they come here not just for watching the birds.
According to Ba Vi District’s Forest Management Department, Ngoc Nhi stork garden is home to at least 50 species of birds, of which stork is the most crowded.
But the nature’s treasure is being threatened, while the department has showed they could not do anything to prevent the mass killing of poor birds.
Another shocking truth
Lao Dong reporters discovered a more terrible truth about the owner of Ngoc Nhi sanctuary: apart from killing the birds in his land, he bought storks from neiboring provinces for his restaurant.
Dang Dinh Quyen, the owner of renowned Dao My stork sanctuary in northern Bac Giang Province, said Phung Doai Hoc had continuously inducing him to sell storks to him.
Dao My is the largest stork garden in Vietnam, with more than 10,000 storks and 3,000 night herons, but Quyen also had to struggle with financial difficulties to keep his bird garden alive.
The same thing was revealed by Vu Thi Khiem, whose garden in Vinh Phuc Province became inundated with tens of thousands of the birds.
Khiem said the owner of Ngoc Nhi bird garden once asked her to sell storks to him, but she refused to do so.
BirdLife Internatioanl estimates 200 of Vietnam's 800 bird species, including several species of stork, live along the coasts and in wetlands, Vietnam News Agency reported.
Minh Phuong, an ornithologist at BirdLife told the VNA Vietnam's birds account for 9 percent of the world's total bird population.
A number of private-run parks throughout Vietnam have been established with the purposes of protecting the country's avian diversity, but with the story of Ngoc Nhi bird garden, it seemed the owners of these parks are making profit from the people’s love of nature.
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