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LaughingDove Goes Travelling - SE Asia and Australia

Discussion in 'Asia - General' started by LaughingDove, 19 May 2018.

  1. DavidBrown

    DavidBrown Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    @LaughingDove Did you get any pictures of the elephants or the proboscis monkeys from your river cruise?
     
  2. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    That wasn't what I heard at the RDC then. I had heard they sounded like a hornbill laughing but that's a bit different to what I was expecting.
     
  3. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    Yep, pictures of both.

    The elephants were right by the river bank and very visible. The proboscis monkeys were up in the trees and quite obscured by foliage so not great pictures. Perfectly good by wildlife standards, but not as good as the pictures of the habituated ones at the Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary of course.

    I've got lots of cool pictures from this trip which I really want to get around to uploading a few of at some point.
     
  4. DavidBrown

    DavidBrown Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    Would love to see some photos of your Bornean river adventure if/when you have time to post them.
     
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  5. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    On the Kinabatangan and the Astonishing Gomantong Cave

    I started my only full day at Kinabatangan with a sunrise cruise on the river. Unfortunately, some rather noisy dogs right outside my window during the night meant I hadn't slept as well as ideal.

    The morning cruise was nice at sunrise being cool enough with nice light over the river and a number of interesting birds like fish eagles and Storm's Stork. On the mammal front, the most interesting thing was a mother orangutan and youngster in some trees by the river. So it's very nice to see some properly wild orangutans now which I didn't really expect here but it's great to get them already. The cruises seem to generally last longer than advertised which is good and there's lots of cool stuff to see.

    After breakfast was a guided 'nature walk' in the later morning which is the sort of thing I find annoying because I don't need a guide to go for a walk in the forest obviously but doing a package like this with the transfers and food and accommodation and cruises and things works out cheaper than if you book each one separately (which you can do at the place I'm staying at. They charge RM60 per cruise if you book them yourself for example).

    For the guided walk, the guide said that Wellington boots were necessary and they provided horrendously bad ones. However I was told that this was just for mud and not for wading through water so I decided just to wear my normal hiking boots. The guide wore wellingtons, but he had otherwise only been wearing flip-flops.

    The walking place was a boat ride upstream and along a poorly marked trail through the dense forest itself so I wouldn't really have been able to do it on my own. Because it was already very hot and very closed low-visibility forest, there wasn't much of interest to be seen animal wise (in fact, I didn't see any identifiable vertebrate animals at all. Just some unidentifiable birds too high up in a tree.) But there were various signs of animals like orangutan nests and sunbear markings and there were a few Hooded Pittas calling though I couldn't see any.

    After returning, having had absolutely no need for Wellington boots whatsoever so I was right, there was nothing happening in the afternoon giving a few hours of relaxing time before a trip to the Gomantong Caves in the late afternoon. This is a bit on top of their standard Kinabatangan cruise package but not actually that much and the caves aren't far. But inaccessible with your own transport as far as I'm aware and I thought it would make a rather interesting place to visit as I believe they're the biggest caves in Sabah and part of the same forest area as the forest around the Kinabatangan River.

    I left for the caves in the late afternoon, driving through palm oil plantations to get to the bit of the forest with the cave. On the drive in, we found a fantastic white morph male paradise flycatcher.

    Now onto the caves themselves. They were absolutely amazing. One of the most amazing places I have ever been. I really cannot adequately describe how fantastic it was and pictures can't capture it eigber. I had high expectations for a cave that has featured in a David Attenborough documentary and for the sort of bat and swiftlet cave with mountains of guano that I have heard about and seen in documentaries since I was a child but this really exceeded those expectations. Unfortunately I'm quite tired now so my writing won't do it justice (and I have to write these posts as they happen otherwise I just will never write them) but the Gomantong Cave is fantastic. It's in the forest with a big cave entrance and inside is a boardwalk going through the cave which is good because otherwise you'd be wading through mountains of bat guane covered in cockroaches and beetles. The smell, the sound of the swiftlets, the absolutely bizarre otherworldly atmosphere of mountains of cockroaches and the occasional light streaming in from entrances is just fantastic. I was speechless. It's one of the most astonishing places I've ever been. There were at least four species of bats, four species of swiftlet as well as rats (I guess just House Rats?) and all the insects with everything covered in cockroaches, and just pushing your foot into the mound of guano off the edge of the boardwalk was amazing. A writhing mass of cockroaches as your foot slowly sinks in.

    At sunset, the bat exodus occurred as millions of bats left the cave to be attacked by three Bat Hawks and a peregrine. That was an amazing sight of bats streaming out in formations and bat hawks circling around and diving into the bat masses. In the forest outside the cave we also saw an orangutan as well as the mini-orangs: maroon langurs. I can't get across the sheer size of the cave as well as the numbers of animals and volume of guano. There were also some swiftlet nest collecting ladders (the nests are used for birds nest soup) which apparently are only permitted by the park authorities to be collected at three specific times of year to avoid breeding times. Wonderful place, unforgettable experience. I'm so pleased I spent the little bit extra to go (I forget how much exactly I paid extra for the caves compared to just doing the river, a little over RM100 I think, maybe 150) and it was only about 25 minutes drive away anyway.

    After dinner I had another night cruise. This is not normally part of the package and would have been extra but because the booking people messed up with that extra day as discussed previously, they didn't charge for it and said I can do an extra sunrise cruise tomorrow also free. So that's a nice RM120 saving and ultimately their mess up with the booking was fine. This evening cruise seemed to focus mostly on bothering roosting diurnal birds but we did see two Buffy Fish Owls which is a species I was hoping for here.

    I'm heading off from Kinabatangan tomorrow after breakfast, not a tremendously long visit just two nights here but very busy and lots seen and I'm pleased. Still in awe at that cave too. And the river really is lovely.

    Birds:
    Heard Only: Hooded Pitta

    Jerdon’s Baza

    Square-tailed Drongo-cuckoo

    Violet Cuckoo

    Bat Hawk

    Peregrine

    White-nest Swiftlet

    Black-nest Swiftlet

    Mossy-nest Swiftlet

    Malaysian Blue Flycatcher

    Buffy Fish Owl


    Mammals

    Bornean Orangutan

    Maroon Langur

    Wrinkle-lipped Free-tailed Bat

    Large-eared (Philippine) Horseshoe Bat

    Dayak Roundleaf Bat

    Fawn Leaf-nosed Bat

    (it’s difficult to be 100% on bat identifications, even when roosting, and the four I’m sure enough to count are based on the bats I could see close enough coupled with what species I know occur in the cave based on information from the guide – who is actually surprisingly knowledgeable beyond the basic touristy stuff and genuinely interested himself in the stuff which is often not the case – as well as from the internet. There were certainly more species than that. The Dayak is maybe a little bit sketchy because they are tricky to identify and I was looking at them through binoculars with a torch which is tricky, but I saw one patch low enough to be pretty confident with the ID and I know they do occur here as part of the main bat mass).
     
  6. FunkyGibbon

    FunkyGibbon Well-Known Member

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    It's worth pointing out that most people who go to the Kinabatangan do not see elephants and orangs....
    My tour was very focused on the cruises, so there was no caves option provided. I need to back to Sabah for Sipidan and Tabin, I'd really consider going back to the Kinabatangan.
     
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  7. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    Yeah I know, I was reasonably lucky to see both. No Flat-headed Cat or Bornean Ground Cuckoo though (not that I was actually expecting to see either).

    If you get back to Kinabatangan, definitely try and do the cave. I would recommend Sukau Greenview too although it was pricier than some options, at RM670 all-inclusive I thought my package was not bad value.
     
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  8. FunkyGibbon

    FunkyGibbon Well-Known Member

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    I'd stick with Nasualis Larvatus, who I had a really good experience with last time. But the cave, and more time at Sepilok would be a must it seems.
     
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  9. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

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    I have a friend who went to the Kinabatangan, and mentioned that he had been shown a Ground Cuckoo by the guide on one of his boat trips. When I expressed jealousy, he quickly found the photo to show me. It was a Greater Coucal. I'm not sure whether the guide was being deliberately deceptive or just didn't know one giant cuckoo from another.

    I have to go back to Borneo too, but I don't have any real wish to re-do the Kinabatangan. I would like to see the Gomantong Caves though.
     
  10. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    I did ask about ground cuckoos and apparently if you charter a boat specifically to go looking for them then one of the guides who I spoke to thought there was some chance.

    I was actually quite impressed by the general knowledge and level of interest of the guides at Sukau Greenview. The thing about the caves is that it#s basically like being in a nature documentary and it really is the sort of thing for me that I had always seen in various documentaries but never really imagined I could see in person.
     
  11. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    Kinabatangan Departure, Lahad Datu Arrival, and Danum Valley Tomorrow!

    I started with another morning cruise, and we went a slightly different route this time and rather than sticking to the main channel we went to an oxbow lake. It's technically not a true oxbow lake because it's still connected to the main channel by the remnants of a meander but it's very narrow and shallow and choked with vegetation and overhanging trees, nothing compared to the size of the main channel and the engine even got stuck in the mud at one point. So it was very interesting to cruise around the oxbow lake and morning cruises are really cool anyway with the vapour coming off the water. We did see one very interesting species which was a Mangrove Snake (or Gold-ringed Ratsnake as the guide called it which is an alternative name but I think not as nice as Mangrove Snake) in the trees right above the channel leading to the lake. Really cool.

    After breakfast, I was supposed to get the scheduled transfer back towards Sandakan to be dropped off at the Sukau Junction where I could hail down a bus to Lahad Datu. However, two guys who I had just met on the morning cruise were driving down to Tawau in a big 4x4 pickup and offered me a lift to Lahad Datu which is on the way so I could avoid faffing around with the local buses a waiting around at Sukau Junction so that was much easier. They also dropped me off directly at the accommodation making it even easier.

    The first thing I did after checking in was walk up to the Danum Valley Field Centre Office to check the situation. It wasn't a particularly long walk, less than 2km, but along some annoying highways to walk on. When I got there, everything was fine and I didn't need to do anything until tomorrow around 2PM before the minibus transfer at 3PM so in fact I didn't necessarily need a night at Lahad Datu at all, but I couldn't have been sure of that in advance.

    So I had lunch and sorted out a few things because Lahad Datu is my last major settlement for a while, until Kota Kinabalu at the end. I was going to go and check the bus schedule which I hadn’t done yet because I didn’t get a bus here, but I was very tired so went back to the accommodation for a rest. I've got all morning tomorrow anyway and I'll check it then to find out the situation with getting a bus to Mt Kinabalu.

    The town of Lahad Datu is quite rough around the edges and not touristy in the slightest - most tourists just fly directly into the little airport and go straight to their rainforest tour package - but it's right by the sea which is quite nice. In the afternoon I went to look at the sea which was good because it's been a long time since I've seen the sea and there were lots of egrets and a sea eagle. I also got (quite a few) supplies from a supermarket and got a light snacky dinner after a most obscenely large fried rice earlier for lunch.

    The complete lack of tourists here surprises me. I have seen quite literally no one who is not local. Not at the accommodation, not at the sea front, nowhere. Only in the rainforest lodge minibuses leaving straight out of the airport. I think it's a shame that so many people pass through Lahad Datu and none stop, but if I'm honest, that would have been me too had I been sure that I would have arrived in time tomorrow. It is interesting wandering the city though and seeing a place that is, apart from the (very) small airport, completely non-touristy.

    I'm just spending a single night here at Lahad Datu (at the Tabin Lodge – RM36 dorms) before heading off to the Danum Valley for 5 nights staying at the field centre. I don't believe I will have any internet access or phone connection when I'm there at all so (unless I'm wrong about this) I expect to be going silent for the next five nights on the blog-posting front obviously so expect this to be it for a little while. I’ve arranged to stay at the Danum Valley Field Centre which should be interesting. It's not cheap, but by booking directly by the field centre office I’ve got it for a price that is cheap relative to Danum standards. The Field Centre isn’t a tourist place, it’s primarily a research station, but they do allow tourists to stay when there’s space. The alternative is a super-luxurious 5 star resort type place, the Borneo Rainforest Lodge, which I obviously couldn’t afford, but I think the field centre will be interesting anyway. I’ve heard some stories of it being annoying and frustrating, but I do think it will be a good experience and obviously Danum Valley should be an amazing place to visit.


    Highlight Reptiles:

    Mangrove Snake
     
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  12. SabineB

    SabineB Well-Known Member

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    Having been at DVFC for a couple of nights I personally can not support the notion that it is by any stretch of the imagination annoying. It is just not a place where you can find people to 'entertain' you but then again that is the whole point. I found the staff people extremely friendly and I loved the field centre.

    And it is true however, that you will not have any decent cellphone signals. DVFC used to have an option to log on to there system but that has been gone for some years now.

    You will have a great time there, I am sure of that. Smack in the middle of primary rainforest and nothing else.
     
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  13. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    Into the Valley! (20th)

    (The situation with internet here is that there is phone signal which only works in a couple of spots, none of which are anywhere near the accommodation so I will post stuff occasionally while I'm here, but probably not daily. Though having said that, I just went to a spot which I though had a decent connection and it will give me achingly slow download speeds but effectively no upload so ratg the than faffing around trying to upload I've written this post and you'll get it when you get it.)

    I had quite a bit of time in the morning and I had intended to have a lie in because I was feeling rather tired and a bit coldy. But I woke up naturally at 6:45 anyway.

    After breakfast I went to check the situation with buses to Kota Kinabalu and found that it was far from ideal. All of the operators had a morning and night bus at 9:30 or 10 AM and PM. I would miss the morning buses with the scheduled transfer from Danum and a night bus for 6-7 hour ride to the drop off point near Mt Kinabalu then trying to work out how to get from there to my accommodation near the park HQ at stupid-o'clock AM sounds pretty horrendous. One operator had a 4:30 bus which wouldn't be much better. There's flights form Lahad Datu to Kota Kinabalu too but then I'd have to work out how to get to the mountain and they're obviously quite expensive. Worst case scenario, I have one day fewer at Mt Kinabalu (leaving me with 5 nights rather than 6) and have to stay somewhere on the way but I'll leave that until after I get back from Danum.

    I relaxed a bit in the accommodation in the late morning then went out for lunch to a local restaurant nearby. This was my first time where I had a little bit of difficulty being understood with only English. None of the servers there spoke any, but they called someone out from the back who did a bit. I think this highlights just how widely spoken English is in Malaysia, the vast majority of people seem to speak at least basic English and it's used as an official language here. I think that makes Malaysia much easier to travel in compared to other countries in the region.

    After lunch I sat around in the accommodation a bit more, they had agreed to let me check out late, as I only needed to get to the DVFC office by about 2PM. I decided that rather than walking back up the hill the 2km in the heat with all my stuff, I called an RM4 Grab Taxi. There was only one other tourist going into Danum on this transfer, but there were a few researchers. The bus left the town and went through plantations for a little while and then into logged secondary forest with small trees which became larger and larger as we entered more primary forest. The driver stopped for wildlife along the way including a Bearded Pig running across the road in full daylight.

    It's a decently long way, 2 and a half hours in total, most of which is on appallingly rough gravel tracks. It would be fine in a 4x4 or just something with more clearance but it was fairly bad in a minibus. After a briefing and registration at the reception and dropping stuff off at the dorm, I went for a walk around the self-guided nature trail just for the hour of sunlight that was left and it was extremely successful. The best sightings were both flyovers one being a Bornean Falconet and before that, two massive hornbills flew over with extremely loud wingbeats and I noticed something: tail streamers! Only one massive hornbill with tail streamers around: Helmeted! That was quick for one of the biggest Danum targets! I'd still like to see one perched though to get a proper view of the distinctive 'helmet'. I've now got six out of eight Bornean hornbills: missing wreathed (which I saw in West Malaysia at Taman Negara anyway) and white-crowned. Beardes pigs and maroon langurs right in the field centre area too.

    I had a night drive after dinner which was split seven ways making RM160 for over two hours but split 7 ways quite cheap. There were lots of Sambar around the field centre and we saw two slow loris as well as lots of Red Giant Flying Squirrels. As we were on the way back, the guide spotted another Red Giant Flying Squirrel but it looked small to me just from the eyeshine and when it came into proper view on the trunk I suddenly sharply inhaled breath and said 'it's a Thomas'. One of the two spotters knew what I was on about and it was the much rarer endemic Thomas' Flying Squirrel which is smaller, brighter red, and with no black markings and we even saw it glide.

    The night drive lasted until 10 which is better than I had expected and they dropped me off directly at the dorms (which is a bit of a walk from the main area). The dorms themselves are very basic but fine and they wouldn't get away with charging RM95 if it was anywhere else but Danum. There are a few people in the dorm because there's a university group but apparently the female dorm is much fuller.

    New birds seen:
    Rufous-tailed Shama
    Helmeted Hornbill
    Whiskered Treeswift
    Crested Goshawk



    Mammals:
    Sambar
    Thomas' Giant Flying Squirrel
     
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  14. Yassa

    Yassa Well-Known Member 15+ year member

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    I really enjoy reading your travel diary! Thank you so much! I have been in Sabah a few years ago (Turtle Island, Kinabatangan, Danum) and totally loved it. I really want to go back (and spend a few days in Sepilok, which we skipped back then).

    Could you take a look at this picture I took in Danum Valley? Is this a giant red squirrel or another species?
    Identification help needed | ZooChat
     
  15. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    The Amazing Danum Valley

    (Note: this post covers my first full day at Danum and was written that day. The next three days will be in one post coming later)

    I started the first day at Danum with an obscenely early start for a sunset watch. They drive you to a view point early in the morning to watch the sunrise over the forest. I wouldn't have done it, but they offered me the last seat in an already full vehicle so the cost was split. It was quite spectacular to watch the sunrise over the forest with the tree covered hills like islands and the cloud filling the valley below. There were sunrise birds about too of course including two species of parrot and the morning gibbon chorus and on the return drive we saw a Bornean Yellow Muntjac cross the road. A bit of birding around the centre produced a female Bornean Created Fireback Pheasant.


    After breakfast, I had arranged to do a walk around one of the longer guide-only trails to be split with the one other independent traveler here (all the other tourists are with groups) because they charge a rather excessive RM30 per hour for a guide. This would allow me to determine whether a ranger was actually necessary or useful and whatever I could get away with doing the guide-only trails on my own. We did the rhino pool loop which is supposed to take 3 and a half hours but took almost 5 because of stopping for birds. Tick-wise I got three birds: Chestnut-bellied Malkoha, Bornean Wren-babbler which I was pleased with as I had looked for it and failed to find it at the RDC and most excitingly a species that has been high on my want list for years - the world's largest woodpecker - Great Slaty. A guide isn't necessary though. The trails are difficult but only in that they're slippery and steep, not that they're tricky to follow. And the guide just walks in front of you scaring away the wildlife and getting in the way when you do see something, although in fairness that's all they claim to do. They call themselves rangers anyway, not guides, and are just their for 'safety'.


    There were lots of pill millipedes too which are fun as well as loads of tiger leeches. I didn't see a single terrestrial leech so leech socks seem a bit unnecessary (though literally everyone wears them) but tiger leeches sit on leaves and attached to your body as you go past. They seem to crawl around for a while before actually biting though and their crawling as soon as they get to bare skin is very noticeable, unlike terrestrial leeches, so although I got loads on me, I was able to flick them off every time before they bit. Just as we got back to the field centre just near the dining room was a wonderfully showy group of Maroon Langurs and I got one a couple of metres from me at eye level eating leaves. I think I got some good pictures, they certainly look very good on the back of the camera.


    At lunch I had a rather coincidental meeting: a group of three French birders and mammal watchers who I met at Taman Negara and hung around with a bit. The three of them showed up here at the DVFC! So that's a fun coincidence (I don't recall if they made it into the Taman Negara blogs at any point? I think they did?). They're going to Deramakot after Danum, the lucky sods. And they got two Tapirs on their single night at Kumbang Hide with one coming out before dusk, while I had to wait until 4AM on the second night! Anyway. I should be able to get some locations off them for Mt Kinabalu though since they've just been there. This isn't the first time this has happened on this trip - birder/wildlife types tend to follow the same circuit. Though this is one of the more noteworthy coincidences.


    In the afternoon I went back to the dorm for a rest but it's insanely hot. The locals are all complaining too because apparently it hasn't been raining enough and that's making the animals come out less too. The dorm itself is particularly hot and I found that I just really needed salt so I just went to the dining hall and ate some salt. I've been sweating so much in these last few places that I've had to wear too shirts a day, the morning shirt just absolutely stinks by lunchtime. I could really do with a 100 Plus which is a drink that seems everywhere in Malaysia but not at the DVFC seemingly. It's basically like a salty cross between sprite and lucozade.


    That night's night drive was already full (I thought my issue would be finding enough people to share with! Not the opposite!) So I booked onto the next. They do night walks here, but I decided that if I went on the self-guides sections of the trail just spotlighting it would be fine and I didn't need a guide to do a walk. It started raining just as I was about to go for the afternoon birding which is kind of what I was hoping for? So I just went and had a cup of tea in the dining room instead and watched the birds and Maroon Langurs from the balcony. The temperature did drop pretty much straight away though so that's good. I though the rain had stopped so I went out for a little bit of last birding. It had not stopped. It came back. I got soaked, naturally.


    At dinner I got some good tips off the French guys and also gave them some suggestions and we decided to go spotlighting together thought it wasn't hugely successful with a small unidentifiable mouse, a slow loris, and a red giant flying squirrel and a Malay civet with quite a few hours of spotlighting (just briefly pointing out that I found all of them :p despite the fact that all three of them were also spotlighting :p. I think I might actually be quite good at finding eyeshine)


    New birds and mammals will come in the next post for all these days at Danum.
     
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  16. SabineB

    SabineB Well-Known Member

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    I believe that you do not really need a guide at DVFC, what I found most problematic was to estimate times needed for any given trail you can do there. We were constantly wrong in that department and needed generally longer than we planned.

    Funny enough, I did not see/encounter a single leech due to a dramatically long period of no rain. The Sagama river was basically dry and we crossed it by foot rather than using the bridges many times and as you wrote it took really going deep off the trails to encounter birds.

    This is such a great report and I am amazed that the DVFC seems to be so full with guests. Good for the centre to make some money. Btw. they should have some drinks at the restaurant for the usual cray cray prices and they should be able to bring drinks from LD on their pick up tours, don't they?
     
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  17. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    I'm now at Lahad Datu and I've been waiting for a while now for a bus direct to Kinabalu leaving at 3:30 apparently (though the sign says 4:30) another hour or so and hopefully I'll be on my way. It's later than ideal, but I think still quicker than trying to go via Sandakan.

    The post for the last few days at Danum will hopefully follow later today.
     
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  18. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

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    In The Middle of The Forest: Danum Days Three to Five

    I’m including these three full days in one post because my routine was much the same for all three of these days (and much the same as for my previous post which covered the first of my four full days at Danum) just looking for wildlife in the rainforest. It really is an amazing place here: it’s just right in the heart of a vast area of virgin primary rainforest with lowland forest stretching as far as you can see which is about as close to the natural state of Borneo as you can get. Borneo never had any open land or grassland naturally, just rainforest stretchinv to coastal mangroves. It does feel remote too, it’s two and a half hours along dirt roads to the nearest civilisation and there’s no other connection: electricity is from a generator and what little phone signal there is is provided by a dedicated mobile telecoms tower on top of one of the hills.

    It’s also crawling with leeches here. The terrestrial leeches aren’t that bad, certainly no worse than Taman Negara or Bukit Fraser and maybe not as bad as the former, but the forest is full of tiger leeches which sit on leaves and latch onto your upper body as you walk past and their bite is actually slightly painful, you certainly feel it unlike the terrestrial leeches which means you do get them off before they do much blood sucking. I’ve stopped bothering with leech socks for the terrestrial leeches though. Literally everyone, even the locals who live here, wear them when going off the road but not wearing them I find that I will only get one or two leeches after a whole day in the forest and I think that’s less annoying than dealing with the socks and taking them on and off whenever you go in any buildings. It’s definitely more tiger leeches than normal ones.

    It’s very hot too. Really, extremely hot, and the dorm gets very hot during the day with a corrugated iron roof and insufficient ventilation. I’ve actually found that I’ve had to go through two shirts a day: the morning shirt just stinks of sweat by lunchtime. I also found myself getting extremely dehydrated despite drinking loads of water and I’ve been taking electrolyte powder sachet things that I had with me in my first aid kit. Normally just having salty food is sufficient for me in the tropics though I suppose I have been outdoors doing things in lowland forests for quite a few weeks now and I’m actually over a month into the trip at this point. Salt dehydration is quite interesting though because I found myself getting headaches and feeling lethargic and a couple of sachets of electrolytes made me feel much better and that’s purely due to salt loss from sweating. The plastic of my glasses has also been getting so hot that it’s actually malleable so they keep getting bent but it’s ok because I can just bend them right back.

    Being very hot and primary rainforest with tall trees and a dense canopy naturally makes the wildlife watching very difficult, but with perseverance the sightings slowly trickle in and there are lots of wonderful species here to see. It’s just a matter of finding them. I’ve got great views of gibbons though on multiple occasions, Bornean, or North Bornean if you’re feeling splitty. Lots of maroon langurs around too which are wonderful and orangutans too. I got a tip off from the French wildlife watchers about where they had seen a mother and baby making a nest but when I got there, they were already in the nest with just some orange fur sticking out. But I went down early next morning and got an absolutely amazing up-close and clear view of the mother and baby coming out of the nest and sitting on an exposed branch before moving off. The same French wildlife watchers also managed to find a day sleeping slow-loris. I’d love to take credit for finding it to boost my loris-finding street cred but I don’t know how they found it. It took me twenty minutes to find it searching in the patch of trees where I knew it would be. Quite cool though, a ball of fluff with some feet sticking out rolled up on a tree.

    Speaking of loris though, I do seem to be quite good at finding them at night. I’ve been spotlighting on foot and from the night drive, both with the French guys,e and I do seem to be quite good at finding eyeshine and I think I can fairly say that now because they’ve got spotlighting torches and know what they’re doing too and I seem to be finding the vast majority of the eyeshine.

    Nights at Danum have generally been slow though, it’s much tougher here then any of the places I’ve been so far on this trip, even Taman Negara which was hard. People write lots of good things about these night drives, but they don’t seem particularly great. The two people spotlighting certainly don’t know what they’re doing: they’re just looking for shapes and apart from a roosting fireback pheasant, which is cool, they found nothing on the night drives that I was on. You’d be just as successful hiring your own vehicle and driving around but there is certainly the potential for amazing mammals here. On the nights drives I did, I found Red Giant Flying Squirrels, Slow Loris, Malay Civets, Palm Civets (the arboreal species), Mouse Deer, and Sambar, but that was it. One of the night drives apparently saw nothing but Sambar which is definitely believable given the spotlighting abilities of the spotters but the thing is that driving along the road at night there’s always a (low) chance at the really cool species, including cats, but I didn’t think the night drives were as good as I had heard. So I did a few night drives on days when there were lots of other people so the cost was split making it very cheap but most of my success has come from long hours of spotlighting on foot, not hiring a guide, but just walking around, sometimes with the French guys but generally I kept going longer. Until 1:30AM one night, but staying out until after 11 is annoying because that’s when the generator is turned off and you have to shower in the dark otherwise.

    The night were I stayed out to 1:30AM was good though, eventually. I did the first couple of hours with the French guys and saw a small black-and-white banded snake and a couple identifiable bats, as well as hearing a Barred Eagle-owl in the distance but it was very slow. I continued for quite a few more hours after them though because it was an ear that seemed like perfect tarsier habitat and I could hear them jumping around as at Sepilok and I knew that here, without time limitations, it was just a matter of keeping going until eventually I would have to find one. It was edging towards midnight but finally I did get a tarsier moving about in the understory which I could actually see properly. Fleetingly, but fleetingly a few times before it moved off. Wonderful animal. A lot of work, but really a super target mammal species. And the day before, I had managed to find a group of Hose’s Grey Langurs in the forest, also a fleeting view of them (and barely countable if I’m honest, good enough to ID and tick but a bit borderline. Apparently they're better and more reliable at Tabin which is a place I won't make it to on this trip) and with those two, I’ve got 10 primate species in Sabah which I believe is all of Sabah’s primates. Apparently Hose’s Langur is scare in areas where Maroon is common which is the case here at Danum.

    That same night though after 1AM as I was heading back, I did get a rather interesting sighting on the road just before the turn off for the road to the hostel area (the hostel is a little bit of a way down the road from the main area, 600 metres maybe) but I don’t know for sure what it was. It had bright, bold, orange eyeshine, was noticeably bigger than a Malay Civet but not much bigger and was holding its head up as I walked across not down. I obviously went up to try and see it, but it vanished into the forest before I got anything of a view other than eyeshine. I really don’t know though. Orange is normally a carnivore and that size and shape… hmm… (as judged only by the position of the eyes and the way they were moving across the road – it was just too far to see anything else). Both birding and mammal watching does leave you quite tired though because with birds you've got to be up first thing and with mammals you need to spotlight as much as possible so obviously you don't get much sleep. Most people seem to focus on either one or the other but the French wildlife watchers are in the same position as I am, trying to do both to the detriment of sleep.

    Plenty of cool stuff during the day too, including lots of Hornbills which are very conspicuous flying over the forest and across the road when viewed from the open area of the centre, two species of pitta (both endemics) – Black-hooded (as at Sepilok) and Blue-headed (new) – and various other cool birds around. Often difficult to actually see though. There’s a Rufous Piculet which lives around the dorm and is an awesome little bird but very difficult to photograph. And really fun are the funky looking Whiskered Treeswifts that sit on the railing of the suspension bridge across the river. There are two of them, and they just sit on the railing as you walk past and you can get insanely close, like 20cm away and they just sit there funny and really cute looking as they stare right back at you. They only fly away if you really are about to touch them and they will just circle right back to the bridge a few metres down.

    No one seems very fussed about guides here either. There’s lots of posters and people saying how you have to have a guide/ranger for any walks on the trails but no one actually cares and once you’ve realised that you can just go off and walk quietly on your own at a birding pace. There are theoretically dangerous animals at Danum: elephants, sun bears, and clouded leopards. But the only one of those I’m actually worried about would be elephants and they’ve not been seen anywhere near here in a very long time. Nor have the bears or leopards unfortunately and I don’t think cats are actually as commonly encountered here on the night drives as e.g. trip reports on mammalwatching.com suggest. That’s definitely the impression from the night drive spotters and guides. I suppose it gives plenty of employment for guides anyway and the people who will go into the forest on their own after they've been explicitly told that it's not safe and guides are needed for 'safety' either know what they're doing or probably deserve a Darwin Award for removing themselves from the gene pool. I like to think that I fit into the former category. I'm not entirely sure what the guides intend to do to protect tourists if they suddenly encounter a large herd of elephants in the forest anyway.

    It is very relaxing here at Danum though and there’s so much cool wildlife around that the longer you spend here the more you’ll eventually see and I would spend longer here if it wasn’t so ridiculously expensive. Five nights, full board, including the transfers, in a dorm, is costing me RM1350. They charge 130 ringgit per day for food and 95 ringgit per night in the dorm. Where’s all this money going? And I managed to book directly through the office as well as I managed to get the email of the person who works at the reception at the office so that’s the actual price, there’s no tour-operator middle-man (which is the case for most visitors). I don’t get why it’s quite so expensive. Even bringing everything in, running a generator, and paying staff to live in the middle of nowhere, there’s no way it’s costing them a third of that price. Oh well. It is amazing though. It really is a wonderful forest with so many cool plants and invertebrates and things as well.

    I’ve written all the above on my last afternoon here while I wait for it to cool down a bit before I go out for some more birding and I’ll update this if there’s anything hugely exciting on my last afternoon and night.

    The last afternoon wasn't very productive and there was nothing new at night, but worth mentioning are a roosting Black-crowned Pitta and a particularly wonderful close-up slow loris sighting on par with the one at Bukit Fraser at the beginning of the trip. Lorises are pleasingly common at Danum and even the normal non-wildlife people are seeing them on the walk from the main area back to the hostel. Although I'm a bit disappointed with nights at Danum generally with the exception of tarsier. I think my expectations were too high from trip reports on e.g. mammalwatching.com but I guess they mostly hire a vehicle and drive around all night. Spotlighting is particularly random and luck-based possibly to a larger extent than birding. Still plenty of amazing sightings in general though and for a wildlife watcher/naturalist, Danum is definitely very high up on the list of must-visit places.


    The list below includes all four of my full days at Danum, including the last post (which was written ages ago but I never managed to get posted). There will be a separate list in the next post covering the final morning.

    New birds:
    Spotted Fantail
    Blue-rumped Parrot
    Bornean Crested Fireback Chestnut-bellied Malkoha Bornean Wren-babbler
    Great Slaty Woodpecker
    Rufous Piculet
    Bar-bellied Cuckooshrike Rufous-fronted Babbler
    White-necked Babbler
    Grey-headed Canary-flycatcher Chestnut-naped Forktail
    Banded Broadbill
    Dark-throated Oriole
    Scarlet-rumped Trogon
    Blue-crowned Pitta
    Maroon-chested Philentoma


    Mammals:
    Bornean Yellow Muntjac
    Bornean Gibbon
    Hose’s Langur
    Slender Treeshrew
    Masked Palm Civet
    Cantor’s Roundleaf Bat
    Short-nosed Fruit-bat
    Long-tongued Nectar-bat
    Western Tarsier
     
  19. Chlidonias

    Chlidonias Moderator Staff Member 15+ year member

    Joined:
    13 Jun 2007
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    23,397
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    New Zealand
    Well done on the Hose's Langurs! I didn't expect you to see them at Danum.

    How well did you see the Yellow Muntjac?
     
  20. LaughingDove

    LaughingDove Well-Known Member

    Joined:
    16 May 2014
    Posts:
    2,492
    Location:
    Oxford/Warsaw
    I was very surprised at the langurs too! And so was one of the guides I spoke to and said it's quite rare for him to see them anywhere near the Field Centre (apparently some other areas of Danum have them more commonly).

    Decent view of the muntjac, running across the road on the return from the sunrise watch thing and it stood by the road for a couple of seconds too (therefore just after sunrise so in the day). I know there's the potential for Red Muntjac too but this was definitely Yellow.