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Published: July 11th 2009
because you should always trust your passport and money to a guy named Jimmy the Wolf!!
this was a sign in the hotel in Bali before I left for Sulawesi but I didn't have time to upload it thenMy plane into Manado in the north of Sulawesi went via Makassar in the south. I was told I would just stay on board because there was no change-over but in Makassar everyone had to get off, go to the transfer desk, get a new ticket and then reboard exactly the same plane with the same air-hostesses. It was very strange, I’ve never come across that particular way of doing it before. In Manado I stayed for the night at the Manado Bersehati Hotel because I arrived in town at about 11pm. It’s a nice hotel, quite cheap, has a tv in the room so I can watch Indonesian soap-operas, an internet café, travel agent, etc. The chap at the desk offered to take me to the village of Batuputih which is where you stay for Tangkoko National Park, my first wildlife stop for the island, for 100,000 rupiah on his motorbike the next morning. I had been going to go by local bus which would only cost around 40,000 (before the usual “tourist taxes” as I like to call them) but involves several transfers and would take twice as long, probably around four hours, so I took him up on
great white hunter in Manado
there are some interesting statues around Indonesia it.
First stop in Manado though was the fish market to see if there were any coelacanths there. The coelacanth’s a fairly famous fish, thought extinct for 60 million years or so then sensationally rediscovered at the Comoro Islands off Madagascar in 1938. A good while later (in the 1990s) further populations were found off Madagascar, South Africa, Mozambique and other nearby countries. That seemed to be that as far as the coelacanth was concerned but then quite unexpectedly an entirely new species of coelacanth was discovered off north Sulawesi of all places. In fact its probably quite likely that there are coelacanths all round the world in suitable deep-water localities but the local fishing techniques need to be very specific to catch them so they’ll generally remain unknown to anyone. That there would be a coelacanth at the fish market on the very day I visited was of course hovering somewhere close to zero, especially given that only two specimens of Indonesian coelacanths have ever made their way into museums (in 1998 and 2007, to Java and Japan respectively) but imagine how aggravating it would be to not bother checking it out and then finding out later that
there had been a coelacanth at the market on that morning!! I had a wander round, seeing everything from parrotfish to barracuda, but no coelacanth. Much as I suspected.
Before getting there I had for some reason been expecting Batuputih to be in the hills but its actually a coastal village. The National Park is rather dry lowland forest but there are also a couple of sizeable volcanoes there (the main one of which is called Tangkoko). There are at least five homestays in the village and a surprising number of tourists coming and going (most usually on day-trips up from Manado) but it’s a relatively expensive place to be a birder. I can see Sulawesi as a whole costing me an arm and a leg because the format is pretty much the same in all the National Parks. You stay in a homestay (which at Mama Roos in Batuputih is 200,000 per night, which is a typical price), but then you are also required to have a guide whenever you are within the boundaries which for a whole day birding is 250,000 (around NZ$47-odd). At Tangkoko you also need to make a boat trip into the mangroves to
see the endemic great-billed kingfisher, which is very expensive when by oneself, at a fixed-price 300,000 for the boat and 100,000 for the guide. Fortunately I did see the kingfisher (two of them in fact) otherwise I would have been pretty grim-faced on the return, but the pair of Sulawesi masked owls (like really big barn owls) that live in the nearby cliffs and are almost always reliable to see, were roosting elsewhere that day.
Now that I’m out of the Lesser Sundas my mammal list is starting to pick up a little. I missed the small cuscus and bear cuscus at Tangkoko so I’m hoping for them in some of the other places I go to, but I spotted two species of dwarf squirrels (
Prosciurillus murinus and
P. leucomus), the crested black macaque and the spectral tarsier. There are four intermingling troops of the macaques in the general area where the public are, two or three of which mainly hang out around the Tangkoko Research station funded by the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle in 2002 but now to all appearances used as a fishing camp. There is a lot of rubbish strewn all over this area, even
though the Park staff clean it regularly. Apparently the bulk of it is left by Indonesian tourists coming in to see the monkeys.
The other main attraction at Tangkoko for regular tourists, both local and international, are the spectral tarsiers. There is a strangler fig in the forest where three tarsiers live. I went along there on the second and third evenings to see them. It really is a circus. The first evening there were about 25 other people there. Their guides were walking back and forth in front of the cleft where the tarsiers hide, periodically shining their torches up inside to see if they were coming out, which seemed rather a counter-productive sort of behaviour when waiting for a nocturnal animal to emerge from its den. When one tarsier did come to the opening, immediately a barrage of camera-flashes went off in its face. It sat stoically in place, no doubt blinded, then edged round to another opening, followed naturally by all the cameras. It was really sad to watch. On the one hand you couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little creature but on the other hand this happened every evening and if it was too
disturbing to them then they would go find somewhere else to live (like all the other more sensible tarsiers had done, apparently). And of course it did keep all the people at this one tree and away from all the other tarsier roost sites. It’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other really. I tried taking about ten photos without a flash with no result, so even though it makes me a massive hypocrite I took one photo with a flash. I’m not proud of it but it was a drop in the ocean amongst all the other flashes, and the way I see it when I die I’ll be judged by the Tarsier God and he will decide on whether I suffer eternal Damnation for my actions. The second night was better because there were only about five other tourists, they took their snapshots and left, and I stayed behind with two girls doing their university theses at the Park (on the macaques and the local bush-meat trade respectively) who were also doing a tarsier survey recording the numbers of people at the tree each night, the people’s behaviour, the effect on the tarsiers - such as how
long it took them to come out, when they started vocalizing, etc. Just before dark the three tarsiers all came right out of their holes and bounded off through the trees like tiny arboreal kangaroos. It was really amazing to see. Before leaping they urinate on their hind feet and then rub them together to make the soles sticky for the landing, an action that results in a very amusing little bottom-wiggle. Tarsiers are my new favourite mammal that I’ve seen in the wild (the previous was the Kitti’s hog-nosed bat from Thailand).
The birds in Tangkoko are all amazing (people not interested in birds can just skip over this next paragraph). I was surprised how few small ones there were though. In most forests there are flocks of white-eyes and babblers and all sorts flitting through the canopy and flycatchers sallying back and forth, but in Tangkoko with few exceptions most of the birds were larger species. My first full day birding was fantastic, with rare and endemic birds literally falling out of the trees and into my pockets (well not “literally” obviously but as good as). I saw three red-backed thrushes, described in the field-guide as uncommon
and difficult to see, the fabulous yellow-billed malkoha (one of my favourite bird groups, malkohas), lilac-cheeked and green-backed kingfishers, the extraordinary finch-billed or grosbeak starling, silver-tipped and green imperial pigeons (the latter with a strange rufous nape unlike in the rest of its range), excellent views of a pair of perched red-knobbed hornbills, and most surprisingly a pair of lesser sulphur-crested cockatoos. I had been disappointed not to be able to get to Komodo to see these and I really hadn’t been expecting to see them anywhere else, especially not in Sulawesi where they are so close to extinction. On the morning after I went about ten kilometers back up the road from the village to where there is a viewpoint over a forested valley. At first nothing much was happening here and I was thinking that it was going to be hopeless without a scope anyway, when a Sulawesi hanging-parrot landed in the tree right above my head, and then a pair of the gorgeous yellow-breasted racquet-tailed parrots sat in full view on an exposed branch. Then we heard the curious call of the Sulawesi dwarf hornbill and eventually tracked down five of them in the trees right beside
the road, the females all black and the males with stunning yellow faces. On the way back to Batuputih a Sulawesi black pigeon landed in a nearby tree, the sun showing off all its iridescent glory. The rest of the day was somewhat slow bird-wise with notable sightings only of several bay coucals, a zonking purple-winged roller (yes I know, “zonking”: I’m running out of toothy descriptives to head up the bird names), and ashy woodpecker.
I wasn’t long at Tangkoko, just one afternoon and two full days due to my restricted time in Sulawesi, but it’s a great place, fully deserving of a longer stay. The local villagers are all well aware of conservation issues and take care to protect their forest because it brings in the tourists and the guide fees go straight into the village, but disturbingly most of them still eat bush-meat regularly, including monkeys and cuscus (bush-meat is the meat of wild-caught animals). They don’t hunt in the National Park because that would be wrong, instead they buy the meat in the market at the nearby-ish town of Tomohon. There seems to be no connection in their minds between the two. You may wonder
where the bulk of that meat comes from - that’s right, the National Parks. At Tangkoko the rangers are always finding snares in the less-visited regions, set for warty pigs, monkeys, birds, you name it and its on the menu.
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Radha
non-member comment
Keep up the great photos!
Wonderful photos - especially the tarantula!! We're loving all the animals, and still laughing at that "Jimmy the Wolf" sign. Lucky you took a photo or we'd think you made that up. I'm so changing my name to "Radha the Wolf". Or maybe "Radha the Snake" ...