All Tapired Out

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With Indonesia finished for this trip I was heading for Malaysia to look for tapirs in Taman Negara, the country's foremost national park. The name Taman Negara itself literally translates as "national park". If you don't know what a tapir is, imagine a pig-like creature but the size of a small cow, with a short trunk like a mutilated elephant, and the black-and-white colouration of a giant panda. You can't make this stuff up! Or you could just look at the photo I posted on this blog. Sort of gives the game away as to whether I succeeded in finding any doesn't it?

Of course I had to start with a travel day. I got up at 3am to get to the airport in Bali at 4am for the 6am flight to Kuala Lumpur, arriving there at 9am. I stopped by the airport McDonald's for breakfast where placing my order was like being served by brain-dead monkeys. Then there was a one hour bus ride into KL Sentral, followed by a short monorail ride to the Pekeliling bus terminal. I got there at noon, just in time for the 12.30 bus to Jerantut, three hours away. Once there I had a bit of a wait for the last bus of the day at 5pm, heading for Kuala Tahan, the village at Taman Negara. I got to my final destination at 6.30pm, with nothing left to do for the day but check into the Tembeling River View hostel, have some food and sign up at the LBK Restaurant for a "Night Safari" (a drive through the oil palm plantations outside town to look for nocturnal wildlife).

It has been raining a lot in Taman Negara lately. Great masses of water bucketing down from the sky like God has been doing water changes on his fish tanks. The river was higher than I'd ever seen it (this being my third visit to the park) and it just kept rising. On my last day it was so high that the shoreline was entirely covered and to get onto the floating restaurants where the river-crossing boats leave from, I had to wade to their gangplanks like an animal, risking the contraction of Bilharzia like an animal, and then put my shoes back on like an animal....well, that last one maybe not so much like an animal.

It was raining on and off most of the way from Jerantut, and naturally enough it rained during the Night Safari too. There were six other people taking part. I was, of course, the only one with binoculars and when the driver saw them he suggested I should sit up on the roof with the spotlighter where I could get the best views rather than in the back of the 4-wheel drive with the other people. It pretty much rained the entire two hours we were out and we all got thoroughly soaked. Once in the palm plantations I soon spotted a barn owl perched on a frond. Nobody seemed overly impressed, it was just an owl, and the driver scared it off anyway by driving straight at it too fast. Not long after the spotlighter picked out another "owl" on top of a palm. When I pointed out that it was actually a Blyth's hawk-eagle I immediately became the trip's "biologist". Any time you show even the slightest hint of interest in animals beyond the normal "oh my god a monkey!" you get asked if you're a biologist. It wasn't actually birds I was on the Night Safari for though, it was leopard cats. I'd only seen one wild cat before, a flat-headed cat on Borneo's Kinabatangan River, and while that is a most excellent first wild cat to have seen it would be nice to get some more under my belt. Leopard cats are really common in southeast Asia and being an adaptable species, the rodent-filled palm plantations are ideal habitat for them. Sure enough it wasn't too long before I saw a youngish leopard cat bound onto the road ahead. It didn't stay on the road for long though, because the driver immediately sped up and raced towards it as if trying to run it down, and it scampered up the bank and slunk off into the undergrowth. That seemed to be the main technique: spot an animal and drive as fast as possible towards it so it ran off and nobody got prolonged views. That was unfortunately the only leopard cat of the night (probably due to the rain) but one of the guys in the back noticed a common palm civet in one of the palms -- really it did seem like the spotlighter shone the torch all over the place like a madman but it was us passengers actually finding most of the animals. I really wished I'd brought along my own torch. The civet wasn't on the road so the driver didn't get to try and run it over, instead he just stopped and we all got excellent views. Being a considerate fellow I shared my binoculars around so everyone could enjoy.

The last animal of the night was found by the spotlighter, a snake on a palm frond just by the road. "Paradise tree snake," he said confidently. "Oh! Really?" I said enthusiastically, because that's one of the so-called "flying snakes" and I've always wanted to see one. I needed a closer look because all I could see were pieces of white belly through the leaves, so I jumped off the vehicle and pulled the frond down and around so everyone could see it (remember I was the designated "animal guy"). "It's not poisonous, you can grab it," encouraged the spotlighter, but the snake wasn't a paradise tree snake at all and while it looked like a species of bronzeback (which are non-venomous) I really didn't know and I'm not stupid enough to pick snakes I can't identify! Later back at the hostel I looked it up in one of my books, and it was a painted bronzeback.

The place in Taman Negara to see tapir is the Kumbang Hide. In the morning I went to the park HQ to book four nights stay in the hide. They were a bit surprised anyone would want to stay four nights there but that was fine. Now I had to get a boat upriver. The boat costs 120 Ringgits one-way and I was expecting to have to carry the cost alone, but back at the hostel I discovered that one of the guides was taking a group of four French people up there that very morning and I could join in on the boat for just 30 Ringgits. Talk about luck! The drop-off point for the boat is just half an hour up the river at a place called Kuala Terenggan which was built as a resort about twelve years ago. No tourists showed up and it was abandoned after about six years. Now all the buildings are just sitting there decaying. From Kuala Terenggan its only an hour's easy-but-muddy walk to the hide. Alternatively you can walk all the way from Kuala Tahan but that's 5 to 7 hours and who wants to do that? The French group were only staying one night, as almost everyone does, and were keen to see a tapir, but as the night went on one by one they gave up and went to sleep until I was the only one left. I'd been up for over twenty hours the day before (from 3am all the way through to the end of the Night Safari at 10.30pm and finally bed about 11pm) and then from 7am that morning so by midnight I was falling asleep at my post. I had another three nights to go, so I packed it in and went to bed without a single animal having shown up. It was thundering down for most of the night though, so that may have had something to do with it.

The next day, after a very late start, I tried some casual birding in the forest around the hide but it was too late in the day and there weren't many birds active. More importantly, it had rained so much on the Night Safari that my binoculars had all fogged up inside and I could barely see through them. I gave up and went back to the hide where I made do with identifying a few easy birds in the trees outside the viewing window. By the next day the binoculars had cleared up so that was alright.

On my second night three guys turned up to stay. Two didn't know what a tapir was and one didn't understand the purpose of a hide. They were quite enthusiastic about seeing a tapir once I explained what one was, but by 8.30 all of them were asleep. I wasn't really too sure of the proper approach for seeing tapir. I had had a red filter on my torch (a very high-tech one made from red cellophane held on with a rubber band) but had lost it out the window on the first night. I decided that rather than just randomly turning the torch on and off in the dark hoping there'd be a tapir there, because that would just be stupid, it would be less disturbing to have a continuous light shining over the clearing (fingers being crossed of course). Just before 10pm two big red orbs of eyeshine suddenly appeared in the trees to the right of the waterhole in front of the hide. I turned my torch on them and there was a tapir! It wasn't the best of views because it was half-obscured by the undergrowth but I could easily tell what it was. The tapir hung around in the bushes for about five minutes but seemed reluctant to come out into the light, even when I turned off the torch, and after a while it left. Ten minutes later I picked up some eyeshine from the left of the pool, but that animal also declined to show. Then, just on 10.30 an adult tapir with an almost full-grown young one trailing it walked out from the left into the clearing, down the stream, looped back up to the right and off into the forest. Some eyeshine a few minutes later was either one of them or the first one back again. To say I was ecstatic would be an understatement. Kumbang Hide is supposed to be pretty reliable for tapir so long as you stay a few nights, but as we all know animals are anything but reliable when you're actually looking for them (or at least when I'm looking for them!). I didn't think I'd do much better that night but thought I'd wait for at least another hour. Just half an hour later another tapir appeared from the bottom of the clearing, coming up the stream, and spent the next five minutes wandering around in the clearing in the torchlight. Absolutely fantastic! This one was about the size of the young one from earlier but was alone so may have been a fourth individual. I went to bed very happy. Amazingly, the next morning when I got up just before 9am, there was a tapir standing at the pool in broad daylight. I grabbed my camera and managed to get off a flurry of shots before it strolled back into the jungle. Now that was more than I'd hoped for! Who else can say they have Malayan tapir as first-animal-of-the-day?!

On the third night there were five other people in the hide. The first tapir arrived at 8.30pm so everybody got to see it. Two people then went to bed and three stayed. Two tapirs (presumably the adult and young from the previous night) showed up at 9.30 but didn't like the light and never really came properly into view, but there was another adult on the scene as well, so for the next half-hour between one and three tapirs were in or around the clearing at the same time. These were the only tapir of the night, but I got up again at about 4.30am and there were two adult tapirs in the clearing. One left straight away but the other stayed put for the next ten minutes browsing.

On the fourth night, my final night, there were eight people including a family with a little kid of about 5 or 6. The first tapir turned up at 8.45pm, the next at 10.00, the third at 10.10 and the last of the night at 10.30. Again everybody there got to see a tapir (except the little girl who was already asleep). This was actually the best night so far because apart for the third tapir, all the others (probably the same individual returning) were completely unconcerned by the light. When the one at 10.30 showed up he stayed in the open for twenty minutes, half of which was spent browsing on bushes only about ten metres from the hide. So close I could see his tongue through the binoculars!

So, over three nights (the first night doesn't count because no tapirs showed up) I saw a minimum of four individual tapirs in thirteen separate sightings, three of which were of two animals at the same time, and one was at 9am in the morning. Couldn't ask for more really! If you want to see wild Malayan tapirs, go to the Kumbang Hide!!

It wasn't all tapirs at the hide though. There was a friendly pair of Sunda black-banded squirrels living nearby who would come to the windowsills for food. A troupe of white-thighed leaf monkeys passed by in the morning and back in the afternoon on one of the days. On the way to the boat (a free ride back with the family!) I saw a pair of white-handed gibbons. There were also rats in the hide at night, very attractive red ones (they turned out to be dark-tailed tree rats Niviventer cremoriventer). I wanted to get some photos to see if I could get an ID for them later so I put out some food as bait. A girl in one tour that passed through asked if it was for birds. You should have seen her face when I said it was to attract rats!

There were also insects, it being the jungle and all. Every night there would be swarms of thousands of little flying things around my torch-beam. I don't know what they were but it felt like clusters of needles being dragged over my skin. I ended up covered in flea-like bites all over my forearms, neck and face. I think the Malaysians must have invented flying fleas.



Because this post has rambled on for long enough I'll talk about birds in the next one.....

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Photos

Malayan tapir (Taprius indicus)
just awesome.

Sunda black-banded squirrel (Callosciurus nigrovittatus)
eating rice....

water scorpion
I had no idea these guys could fly until I saw this one coming in to land in this puddle. I thought it was going to be a big beetle until I went to "rescue" it from the water and found out what it really was!

Cryptocorynes in the stream by the Kumbang Hide
(you probably need to keep tropical fish to appreciate this photo)