Tiny parrots and giant rats

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I guess I should start this entry by contradicting what I wrote in the last entry, about Labuanbajo being an unfriendly town. I’ve been here a number of days now and the locals have gotten used to me walking back and forth around the streets looking for food and water, and now they’re always smiling and saying hello and asking how I am. So I have decided that its not an unfriendly town but rather a town full of unfriendly tourists. That may sound weird, me being a tourist myself, but I’ve watched the way most of them interact with the locals and they are just downright rude. Not all of them of course but a good percentage. If I was a local I’d be a bit sick of it all too.

Its so flaming hot here that you can’t do anything for most of the day. Even just walking down the road to get food or internet leaves you as drenched as if you’ve fallen in a swimming pool. Basically I go out early in the morning if I can muster the gumption, look for birds for a couple of hours until the heat starts building up (at say 8 or 9am), then I go lie down somewhere in a congealing pool of sweat and dirt until evening. How the British and Dutch managed to survive in Indonesia without electricity for fans is beyond me.

The two days after the Rinca visit were a complete bust as far as finding wildlife was concerned. There were two birdy spots I wanted to visit, Potawangka Road and Puarlolo, both fairly close to Labuanbajo and both technically easy to reach. The problem is that it is impossible to get anywhere very early by using the local buses, and hiring someone to take me places would cost more than I’m willing to pay (I guess I’m just not a very dedicated birder!). I tried going to Puarlolo first, which is where the endemic Flores monarch flycatcher lives. I had been told I could just wait at the crossroads at the end of town and hitch a lift but the only people who stopped wanted exorbitant amounts in the region of 300,000 rupiah (about NZ$50). So I went back to the hotel and discovered that by then there were a whole row of buses waiting about ten metres from the door. Every bus that goes from Labuanbajo to Ruteng passes Puarlolo because there’s only one road. The first bus I tried went to Ruteng and it was all good until I said I was only going as far as Puarlolo, then suddenly the bus was full. The second was also fine to start with but then the driver tried to tell me they actually don’t go past Puarlolo after all, which got some indignant responses from some of the other passengers, so he changed tack and said it would actually cost 100,000 rupiah to Puarlolo not 20,000 They obviously didn’t want someone on the bus taking up room that could be used for someone paying to go all the way to Ruteng, and at this point I got fed up and went back to the hotel for breakfast, and then went to Potawangka Road by motorbike instead. By this point it was already late morning and I wasn’t even sure at what point on the road I should be in order to find the target birds (Wallace’s hanging parrot and Flores crow) so I got off at the first patch of forest and then walked for several hours without really finding anything at all. The second day I dutifully went out of the hotel to try to get a bus to Puarlolo for the second time - and there were no buses! Eventually one drove past, I flagged it down, and then we proceeded to drive in circles round town trying to pick up non-existent passengers. I think there must be some mysterious Friday void where nobody uses the buses in Flores. Anyway, I didn’t get to Puarlolo till 10am and again the birds were all at siesta and I got nowhere with my searches. Rather than consider those two days as miserable failures I instead decided to call them reconnoiters for later visits.

Potawangka is only about 10km out of town so its readily accessible by motorbike. I decided to try my luck there a second time, but at a proper birding hour (6am), and as I stepped out of the hotel a bus to Ruteng passed by - right after I’d finished complaining that you can’t get anywhere early on the local buses! I stuck to the plan however and went to Potawangka Road. I got the driver to stop at what seemed like a good distance into the forest, and as I was paying him a hill mynah landed in a nearby tree, a bird I’ve wanted to see in the wild for years. So it was a good start. It took about two hours to walk back to the main road (it was downhill) and I saw a couple more of the birds that were on my most-wanted list, the red-cheeked parrot (like the hill mynah, a bird I’ve wanted to see for many years) and the Flores crow. Seeing a crow may not sound very exciting but this particular crow is only found in one region of Flores and nowhere else on the planet. Also its not all brash and in-your-face like other crows, its very shy and wary although I did see five of them that morning. They don’t exactly slink away when they realise you’ve seen them but its as good as.

A bird I didn’t find that morning was the Wallace’s hanging parrot, a little wee thing about the size of a sparrow. When I was a boy I read about this bird in Joseph Forshaw's brilliant encyclopaedic book "Parrots Of The World" and decided that one day I would go to Flores and see them. The bird itself isn't overly exciting to look at, mostly green with a bit of red, much like any of the other species of hanging parrots actually, but it wasn't the appearance of the bird that intrigued me it was the text in the book. The copy I have now, published in 1989, has a text column of only about ten centimetres that basically consists of a description based on the one known museum specimen, a note about some eggs that probably belonged to another species entirely, and just three sentences on its life history that starts off with stating that its "a mysterious bird, about which almost nothing seems to be known, and the type is the only specimen that I could locate." Since then of course Flores has become more accessible and birders go there reasonably often so I'm a bit late to the party, but that's all right because I never liked parties anyway. With all that in mind, for a third morning I returned to Potawangka and for a third time I failed to see a hanging parrot. Actually that third time I didn’t see the crows or hill mynahs either although there were lots of other birds in evidence. I’m going to keep searching…stay tuned for more failure!

People may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned the Flores giant rat for a while. The reason for that is that I’ve stuck it into the too-hard basket. There’s almost no information available on the internet or in books about it beyond its size and colour; even its habits and where it lives on the island seem to be unknown or at best educated guesswork. Absolutely nobody I spoke to about it in Ruteng or Labuanbajo had any clue what I was talking about. My searches in the forest were equally unrevealing. In the natural history museum at Bogor (in Java) there is apparently a stuffed specimen and I think that when I get there in September that will be the closest I will come to seeing a Flores giant rat with my own eyes.

The rat isn’t the only thing I’m having trouble with. I can’t seem to get to Komodo Island!! I could hire a boat just for myself but that would set me back somewhere in the region of NZ$200 and I can’t justify that. I’ve been sitting around waiting for some more tourists going to Komodo so I can join in and we all distribute the cost to everybody’s advantage. But nobody’s going to Komodo, they’re all going to Rinca because its closer and cheaper to reach. Its very frustrating! Some people said to me this morning that they’re going to Rinca because everybody goes to Komodo and therefore Rinca is more select and quiet. What rubbish! They read that in some guidebook and the reality is the exact opposite. I haven’t found a single person actually going to Komodo except a group of birders who refused to let me join their boat!!! How ironic is that?

Finally I have to mention last night when I was in the restaurant at the hotel waiting to be given food, and a medium-sized (about 20cm) tokay gecko fell from the ceiling to the floor and sat there looking a bit stunned. After a couple of seconds he recovered its composure and scuttled straight up my leg, round onto my back and then up onto my shoulder where he sat for the rest of the evening, either being under the impression that I was a tree or that he was actually invisible. I named him Mr. Tokay Gecko. He did little to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

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Photos

signpost at the entrance road to Puarlolo
showing from left to right, the Flores crow, Wallace's hanging parrot, and Flores monarch and scops owl

sign in Labuanbajo warning of speed-bumps day and night
(actually its a sign for a mosque, but I like my explanation better)