Monday, June 29, 2009 at 10:46AM Kachin villagers in northern Myanmar use black tobacco and plastic string to keep the leeches away when working in the forest during the rainy season. No idea how effective this is. [NOTE: I had decidedly mixed results with the imported leech socks that I bought in Tanai.]
Friday, March 20, 2009 at 7:07PM Leeches are one of my least favorite aspects of doing fieldwork in tropical forests. After snakes. A new record for leech encounters was recently set while looking for a place to run an inventory transect in the Ngoc Linh Nature Reserve in Vietnam. The ground was boiling with them. [NOTE: I pulled off about 30-40 leeches, and two especially tenacious ones made it back to the guest house in my boot].