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

---