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Published: October 24th 2010
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Danum Valley river
This is the main river that runs through the field centre--and a good place to spot hornbills! Danum Valley Field Centre, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo
Hi gang!
I’ve just wrapped up my first week at Danum Valley, and I have to say that it is everything everyone told me it would be. In a word: spectacular.
We’ve seen rhinoceros hornbills, black and red broadbills, spiderhunters, reticulated pythons, and 23 species of frogs, including six species of tree frogs, just to name a few. Not to mention that we have been seeing elephant footprints and dung all over the place! There’s a group of students here now that have seen them repeatedly, but we have yet to come face to face with them…I’ll keep you posted.
The forest here is some of the best primary lowland rainforest I have ever seen, and it reminds me of why I fell in love with tropical research. When I first came to Borneo about 14 years ago, I worked at a lowland rainforest site that had huge canopy trees, relatively few people, an unbelievable array of plants, and amazing animal diversity. It was the first time I was able to comprehend tropical diversity. That same site is now much more frequented by tourists, and the surrounding landscape has been
Lowland rainforest stream
This is one of the streams where we look for frogs at night--some of the deeper bits make perfect swimming holes. largely cleared of forest, so you don’t get a sense of the grandeur of the forest anymore. Here at Danum, it’s much the same as Poring was back then—there are trees the size of a 26 storey building, and it seems to be bursting with wildlife. I’ve seen trees that are rooted in nothing—their roots simply grow around and down huge boulders; there are scattered patches of forest floor covered in 2-leaved seedlings; a pond near our house has 10 species of frogs calling on rainy nights, all jostling for branch or leaf space and airwaves for their advertisement calls. I simply can’t get enough of it, and am looking forward to being here over the next two months.
We are lucky enough to have a small house here—we’re staying in one of the scientists’ chalets here at the field center. Our house has a front porch where we hang all of our field clothes to dry in between our morning and evening surveys, a living room, 2 bedrooms, a small dining room, a kitchen and bathroom. Our kitchen also has a refrigerator and a washing machine—I feel very spoiled! We have electricity most of the time, running water, but no hot water, and you have to boil or filter the water before you drink it. Luckily, the dining hall of the field center has a drinking fountain where we can fill up our water bottles before we go into the field. Our house sits a little ways uphill from the main river that runs through the field center, and we have to cross a suspension bridge every day to get to our forest plots and one of our survey streams. The dining hall where we have lunch every day (we elected to buy lunches from the station and cook our own breakfasts and dinners) also looks out at this river, and from there we have seen red leaf monkeys and hornbills, and people have said that orangutans occasionally perch in the surrounding trees! What a great place.
I hope this finds you all well—I look forward to getting your questions and posting them along with my replies in the coming weeks. I’m happy to address any topics you might be curious about, so please ask away! This coming week will be our first full week of regular work, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing heaps more wildlife. More about that in the next post!
PS: thanks to my field assistant Rachel for the great photos!
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marian
non-member comment
Hornbills
Jen, What is a hornbill?