The Khilek tree to the rescue (a herbal cure to an old problem)
...as we bulge up towards storm time of year (the smell of rain is in the air this morning) it also seems to be time for the insects to wake up. All the eles tend to turn up after nights in the deep grass covered in ticks which luckily don't seem to be interested in humans but the babies are particularly prone - particularly that soft skin behind the ear.
With the adults we have some fancy powder with a scientific sounding name and a numbered suffix but we're not to sure about chemicals on the babies so it becomes the job of the mahout to pick out and squash the ticks, in a way a little satisfying but annoying for the poor ele.
The other day one of the Surin wives remembered an old remedy, a good old scrub with the leaves of the Khilek tree used to work in Granny's day, do we have any in the area? Well, our local Burmese town is called Thakhilek which, to my Northern Thai which tends to find meanings where there are none, sounds like it should be a river jetty where the Khilek trees are.
My big, thick tree book has the Khilek being one Cassia (Senna) Siamea and the gardeners look at me as though I'm mad (as usual) shrug and point to the row of trees under which we're standing - foriegners with fancy books know nothing.
So it is bath time I guess!
PS. The big book didn't mention this as one of the useful properties, but now you know.
Categories: Golden Triangle Elephants, General Conservation
UPDATE: In a great meeting of minds, East and West, the sort of collaboration that I like to think this is all about it was great to find out that, on reading the message above, some of you rushed out to herbal medicine stores to find a perhaps better cure to the little one's ills.
The most popular remedy found in Western stores was Neem Tree Oil - something I had heard of for mosquitoes while I was in Nepal but not for ticks.
At about the same time our sleuths were reading the labels on the backs of little bottles and attracting the attention of store security guards I was discussing with the mahouts the effects of the Khilek tree and was learning that the treatment had worked but there is a tree which works better.
The Surin name is different from the Northern name so we were all a bit confused so I went back to my big book (which is the excellent Forest Trees of Northern Thailand) armed with the Neem tree tip off, a Latin name Azadirachta indica and found the Thai variant A. i. var. siamea. Written in Thai next to it, was, of course, the name given to me by the Surin mahouts who knew all along what it had taken an international dot joining exercise to realise.
But do we have any on property? I've forgotten what the Nepali Neem looked like - armed with the Northern name we tracked down three - which the mahouts claimed to have spotted already so the only question that remains is...
"Well, why didn't you say so in the beginning?"
...guess that would have taken the fun out of it all.
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