Call of the wild
Take a thrilling adventure to the jungles of Borneo, home to sun bears and pygmy elephants and one of the only places on Earth where orangutans still roam in the wild
It’s 3am. I jump off the back of the Land Rover and stand in the humid darkness, exhausted and elated, unable to believe what I’ve just seen. I’m in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo, somewhere that has long been on my wish list of places to visit.
Borneo is huge — the third-largest island in the world. The southern half is part of Indonesia, the kingdom of Brunei takes up a small corner in the north east, and the remainder is Malaysian. The whole island was once entirely covered in thick rainforest, which, at 140 million years old, is one of the world’s oldest. But for the past couple of centuries, it has been heavily exploited for its timber and in more recent times, huge swathes of primary forest on the flatter coastal land have been cleared to make way for palm oil plantations.
Europe is one of the biggest importers of palm oil, where it is used in hundreds of products, including (and the irony of this won’t be lost
on many of you) as a component of biodiesel. The timber and palm oil industries are the mainstay of both the Malaysian and Indonesian economies, but have come at a terrible cost to the island’s wildlife: iconic species, such as the orangutan, have suffered devastating losses in numbers in recent years and are now classed as endangered. So, although my reason for going to Borneo was for the wildlife, I did wonder, as I flew in over the serried, sterile ranks of palm oil plantations — how much I was actually likely to see.
Siti, my guide, met me at the airport and it became instantly apparent that this young Malaysian woman was fascinated by every aspect of the natural world. We dropped my bag at the Sepilok Nature Resort and headed straight into the forest, pausing to admire a pair of magnificent rhinoceros hornbills sitting in a tree just outside my room. “It’s a great place for birds,” she told me, pointing out swiftlets and swallows, “and it’s not unusual to see orangutans here, too.”
Dusk was falling when we entered the forest, and almost immediately Siti spotted a red giant flying squirrel perched high up on the trunk of a tree. Moments later, it launched into the air, limbs spread-eagled, revealing the wing-like membrane that allowed it to drift effortlessly to a tree over a hundred metres away.
We walked on, Siti’s torch alighting on a tiny mouse deer skulking in the undergrowth, and several jewelcoloured kingfishers, motionless, roosting at the end of branches. All this within only an hour of walking.
We left the next morning and took a boat to the Kinabatangan Wetlands, where, again, I was surprised by the sheer number of species we were able to see in a few hours of effortless wildlife viewing: short-clawed otters, Sambar deer, crocodiles and a wonderful array of birds including a fly-past by four great slaty woodpeckers — the biggest in the world. I saw my first Borneo primates, too — four different species including a group of the bizarre-looking endemic proboscis monkeys, sitting in a tree by the river, unfazed by the efforts of an unseen karaoke singer in the tiny settlement on the opposite bank trying — un
successfully — to be Beyonce.
So far, we had stuck to the wellworn tourist trail, but the next day, after visiting the stunning Gomantong Caves, we left for lesser-known territory. The drive to the forest of Deramakot is a long one, first on tarmac roads and then on a rough track that winds, somewhat depressingly, through acre after acre of palm oil plantation and past forestry depots where trunks of what were once mighty trees lie in towering stacks. It certainly doesn’t feel like the approach to what, just four years ago, was discovered to be a wildlife hotspot, with a diversity of species.
Deramakot is 55,000 hectares of rainforest and, although it hasn’t been conventionally logged for 20 years, it is still sustainably logged.
Finding and watching wildlife in an area with lots of trees is never easy. Deramakot has one main forestry track that runs through the whole reserve for about 40km, so our search would be done by driving very slowly along that road, standing in the open back of a Land Rover. And because many of the forest species are nocturnal, we would be going out overnight, as well as during the day.
Within moments of setting out that first night, Siti asked the driver to stop. I trained my binoculars along the beam of the spotlight and high above us, in the crook of a branch, was a saucer-eyed creature with orange fur, hanging upside down.
And so began five days and nights of wildlife viewing. Because if you are prepared to put up with torrential downpours, long hours of seeing nothing and not very much sleep, Deramakot’s rewards are many.
On our first morning, we woke to the song of gibbons, and not long after we were watching them dancing among the branches. We saw orangutan, maroon langur and got a glimpse of a yellow-throated martin. But it was after dark I got a real sense of the diversity of this forest. Because every single night, we saw something we had not seen before. Species that not only had I not seen, but I also had never heard of.
The ancient colugo, a sort of flying tree shrew that scientists thought was a primate. A moonrat. There were regulars: the flying squirrels, palm and Malay civets and the decorated banded civet and most nights we saw the small, exquisitely patterned leopard cat. One evening, we crept on foot into the forest to find tarsiers and a Wallace’s flying frog. A long night of seeing very little culminated in the sighting of sun bears. We followed a trail of vegetation and piles of dung and it led us to a family group of Borneo elephants.
There is one animal that has really made Deramakot’s name, though. It is a show-stopper; the rarest and least known of the world’s big cats: The clouded leopard. But there is another animal found here, one even more rare and elusive. It is called an otter civet, and there, in the beam of Siti’s torch, was this extraordinary animal, snuffling along in a ditch.
We humans make huge demands on our planet’s resources, often at the expense of all other species. But what I discovered in Deramakot, is that it is possible to use nature’s resources in a way that satisfies our demands for things, but not to the detriment of a habitat and its wildlife.