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It was unusually quiet this morning at sunrise without the characteristic morning siamang screams this morning and much less bird song. The ground and leaves and everything were all very wet so I think it rained throughout the night although it was dry when I got up.
It was quite quiet on the bird-front although I got a nice view of a Slaty-backed Forktail at a stream, the same place as I had seen it yesterday as well as a nice view of the same group of three Malayan Laughingthrushes around the same place as yesterday. There was one especially nice bird that morning which was a very showy stunning male White-tailed Robin hoping up and down from the road into the nearby trees and back again.
After breakfast, I decided to do the Telekom Loop. There were lots of very fresh markings of wild boar which must have been made last night and I’ll go and have a look around there tonight and see if I can find them. Boar taxonomy is a bit messy, but I think there’s at least one valid split between the ones here and the ones in Europe. It was fairly
quiet on the Telekom Loop but I did come across a few bird waves with lots of nice views of the species that I’ve been seeing over the last few days as well as a few new additions. Particularly nice was a group of Golden Babblers which are an absolutely stunning bird as well as an impressive flyover by a Rufous Bellied Eagle. Loads of leeches around today though. I even found one on my field guide as I was taking it out of my bag, no idea how it got there. There were some more tarantula and trapdoor spider burrows around here too which is really cool.
The storm from yesterday seems to have done a bit of damage in a few places with a large chunk of the road having collapsed at one spot around the Telekom Loop with a chunk of the side of the road and some pipes lying broken and mangled with temporary bollards leaving a strip just narrow enough for a car to squeeze past. It really was an unusually heavy storm yesterday then.
The Telekom Loop is the ideal length for half a day’s birding. As I was getting to the
bottom of the loop is started to rain, but just an ordinary afternoon shower so I quickened my pace and got back to the town to wait out the rain in my room while I sorted my bag a bit, arranged the taxi for tomorrow etc.
I got the taxi for 10:30 which I think gives me a good balance between morning birding and having enough time to get the bus. The man at reception thinks that won't be enough time to get to Jerantut but if that looks like it will be the case when I'm at the bus station then I'll just go to KL. I've got at least 7 nights at Taman Negara anyway, possibly 8.
In the afternoon I just did a bit of walking around the nearby roads and trails. I went up to the supposed partridge spot but there were no partridges and no sign of disturbance by ground birds since it last rained either. While I was there though, the forest suddenly filled with really dense fog like I was in a cloud. I thought it was my glasses at first steaming up but it wasn’t because nothing changed when I
took them off. Then it started to rain, but it was raining from within the cloud that I was in so as well as rain falling, lots of water was condensing directly on me and things around me and of course visibility was extremely low making for quite an eerie atmosphere.
There was a bit of a drizzle throughout the afternoon and into the evening but I was determined to go out spotlighting for my last night here so I went out despite the drizzle, leaving a bit earlier just after dinner at about 7:15. My torch claims to be waterproof anyway. I decided to go around the Telekom Loop but just as I was leaving town, the rain got a bit heavier. No problem, I thought, thunderstorms normally happen in the day, convectional rainfall patterns and all that. Not too far after leaving town, on the road leading to the loop, I saw a small sounder of wild boar that grunted and went off into the forest as I approached so at least it wouldn’t be a complete wash out of a night.
As I was approaching the loop, there was a crack of thunder and lightning,
and this is when I though: this is stupid now. I shouldn’t be out spotlighting in this. I should go back. The rain started to become heavy too, not torrential like yesterday, but what would in Europe pass as extremely heavy but is normal in the tropics. I really should have gone back. I was getting soaked, although I had wrapped up everything thoroughly, and visibility was dropping fast. I’m stubborn though, and this was my last night and I was ready for spotlighting. So I decided to continue on.
The next mammal, a particularly cool one, came in the form of what I though was an odd looking bat ‘flying’ across the path. It then landed on the ground and started to scurry up the bank and into a bush when I realised it was a flying squirrel. So I ran up to the bush to have a closer look and it was the cutest thing. It had a pale underside and browny top with a strikingly massive eye relative to the size of the squirrel staring it me. I looked at it for about 10-15 seconds and as I was contemplating whether to try and get the
camera out, it ran off into the thick bushes. I wrote down as many potential ID points as I could and it turns out to have been a Red-cheeked Flying Squirrel. Possibly the same species as I mentioned getting a brief unidentifiable glimpse of a small squirrel on the first night.
Then, quite literally 5 metres down the road, I saw some eyeshine in a fairly exposed tree fern type plant quite low down and near the road. Must be a Red Giant Flying Squirrel, I thought. Nope. Not a squirrel. An actual, real, live SLOW LORIS! Just sitting there, staring at me. It was at most two metres away just sitting still in the leaves. Despite the, at this point quite heavy, rain I got my camera out. I know it’s bad for the camera and I really shouldn’t, but this is a real live Sunda Slow Loris not moving and posing perfectly right in front of me. My camera seems fine now anyway. Once I had got some pictures I wrapped my camera back up o minimize rain exposure and watched the loris for a while with my torch turned on low beam and pointing not directly
at it so I wouldn’t blind it. It sat for a while then moved slowly up the branch and was obscured, but still visible, slightly away. I was, of course, getting soaked, and actually slightly cold because it is high altitude here and a little bit chilly at nights so I didn’t spend too long watching it and I headed back. I was absolutely euphoric. There’s a very particular sort of excitement when you see an animal that you really really wanted and you had mostly given up thinking that you had missed it. This was it.
At some point, I had put my hood down and as I was walking back I realised and put it back up. Of course, I covered my head and face in a hood-full of rain water. But I didn’t care in the slightest.
This is what I refer to as the titular best terrible decision ever. The terrible decision to try and go spotlighting in a thunder and lighting storm. But a super-adorable slow loris, a super-adorable flying squirrel, and not to forget the wild boar at the start of the evening, mean it was the best terrible decision I could
have made.
Thank you, Bukit Fraser, for a great last night of spotlighting. That is why I love wildlife watching.
Birds:
Large Woodshrike Rufous-fronted Babbler Striped Tit-babbler
Black-crested Bulbul
White-tailed Robin Grey-throated Babbler White-browed Shrike-babbler Golden Babbler Rufous-bellied Eagle Mammals:
Asiatic Wild Boar Red-cheeked Flying Squirrel Sunda Slow Loris Not so many new bird species because obviously I’ve got all the common ones on the list but quite a babblery day today. Still great to see the common species though, big flocks of Chestnut-capped Laughingthrushes never gets old.
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Mother!
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More sense than to walk in a thunderstorm even for a slow loris!
William, surely that was unnecessary risk! Very pleased you got a walk away view of a slow loris but please be a bit more careful. Glad your last night of spotlighting in BF turned out so fruitful but more importantly, that you lived to tell the story.