Vietnam Sets Aside a Mountain for One of the World's Rarest Monkeys

In late September 2026, authorities in Ninh Binh Province in northern Vietnam established the Kim Bang Delacour's Langur Habitat Conservation Area — roughly 3,182 hectares, about 7,500 acres, of karst limestone escarpment and forest set aside for a single critically endangered primate. The reserve spans the wards of Ly Thuong Kiet, Tam Chuc and Nguyen Uy. Within it, around 4,400 acres will be strictly guarded for the species, while a further 3,500 acres are earmarked specifically for ecological restoration. Beyond those boundaries there is neither suitable habitat nor land-use law that would permit the kind of buffer zone a monkey this rare would ordinarily warrant, which is part of why drawing the line here mattered.

Delacour's langur, named for the French-American ornithologist who first described it, is endemic to northern Vietnam and is hanging on by a thread: something on the order of 250 individuals spread across roughly seventeen populations. Vietnam already has national parks across the region the langur lives in, but the parks and the monkeys do not reliably overlap, so protected status on paper has not always meant protected habitat in practice. The species also recovers slowly by nature. Females reach maturity at around four years, carry a single infant through a seven-month gestation, and do not wean it until about twenty-one months — there is no quick rebound available to a population this small. Alongside the guarding and restoration work, the plan calls for improving overall forest quality in the three wards, raising public awareness, drawing local communities into conservation activity, and gradually developing ecotourism tied to the area's natural heritage.

The photograph is a Delacour's langur on bare limestone — black coat, pale cream flanks that look like a pair of trousers, and a tail considerably longer than its body. For a jigsaw that means one small, high-contrast subject in a very large field of grey rock, so the strategy inverts the usual one. Build the animal first: the white flank patch, the crest on its head and the pale muzzle are the only strongly coloured pieces in the image, and the tail then gives you a long, thin, dark line to trace down through the middle of the frame. The green foliage in the top-right and far-right corners is your second anchor. Everything else is weathered grey karst, and the trick there is to stop looking for colour and start reading the rock's vertical grain — the pale streaks and cracks all run the same way, so a piece whose streaks sit at the wrong angle is simply in the wrong place.