the dying mountain

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It wasn’t much fun getting from Way Kambas National Park in the south of Sumatra to Kerinci-Seblat National Park in the middle. I had been planning on taking a ten hour train ride from Bandar Lampung to Palembang then another ten hour train ride to Lubuklinggau followed by a ten hour bus ride to Sungai Penuh and finally a one hour bus ride to the final destination of Kersik Tuo, but from one of the film crew from Indonesian TV station Trans7 who were staying at Way Kanan I learned that there is an overnight bus from Bandar Lampung to Bangko and then its just a four hour bus to Sungai Penuh, so that is what I did. Overnight buses are good in theory because you’re saving on the cost of a hotel room for the night and you’re not wasting a day in travel, but in practice they’re not great. I had a twenty hour “overnight” bus ride in Sulawesi which was the worst trip I’ve ever had. This one was also twenty hours as it happened and while not as bad as the Sulawesi one was still very uncomfortable, largely because of the lack of room. The bus had started its trip in the town of Solo in Java (yes there’s a town in Java called Solo which by rights should have Star Wars fans making pilgrimages to visit but no-one outside Indonesia has heard of it); it was therefore already full by the time it arrived at Bandar Lampung, most of the passengers had been on it for twenty hours already, and I got the last seat. There was less leg-room than in a movie theatre. It was like spending twenty hours sitting in a television carton with a couple of other people jammed in beside you. You get a bit of sleep but the cramped conditions and the constant slamming on of brakes at near-misses on the highway make real sleep little more than a fleeting hope. Once in Bangko I had a couple of hours to grab some food before the next bus left for Sungai Penuh. This bus turned out to be a car, the 2pm departure time turned out (remarkably) to be 1.30pm, and the four hour journey turned out to be six hours. Because it was already dark when we arrived in Sungai Penuh I stayed there for the night at the Hotel Yani which is conveniently placed for everything a traveller needs except strip clubs. In the morning I took the opportunity to update my blogs and send emails because I’d been out of contact for a couple of weeks and with the recent devastating earthquake in Sumatra (over 700 dead) more or less right where my itinerary had placed me, there was some concern over my continued existence.

The next morning I continued my journey to the little village of Kersik Tuo, smack in the heart of a 6000 hectare tea plantation, apparently the largest in the world. A tea plantation is a funny thing. The plants are only a couple of feet high, the trunks and branches are all gnarled and twisted like those of ancient bonsai trees, and the tops of the bushes are completely flat because that’s where the leaves are plucked from. The effect is like having whole hillsides covered in neatly-clipped topiary.

Kersik Tuo sits at the base of Mt. Kerinci, which is the birdy place I was heading. The forest on the mountain is fantastic, easily the best I’ve seen anywhere in Indonesia and possibly all of southeast Asia. Its sort of weird though having so many different species of begonia growing all along the trails when you just automatically associate them with indoor pot-plants! The mountain is actually a volcano, and an active one at that. On the rare days when its not covered by rain clouds you can see a thick column of smoke rising from the summit, and when you’re standing on its slopes you can hear its odd almost-continuous rumblings sounding variously like a constantly-circling jet airliner or the roar from the firing up of a hot-air balloon. But there were occasions too when everything would suddenly fall silent. No noise from the volcano, no wind, no rain, no birds or insects calling, just complete and utter silence. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere before where there was absolutely nothing to be heard at all. It was an incredibly eerie experience every time.

There were birds everywhere on Mt. Kerinci. Often mixed flocks of little babblers and things would surge past through the undergrowth making the plants heave and writhe like they were trying to pull themselves out of the ground. A lot of the species were ones I’d already seen in other mountain forests in the region, at Mt. Gede-Pangrango on Java and Mt. Kinabalu on Borneo, but there were a number of “new” ones too like the blue-tailed trogon. Normally I’m not that great at finding trogons but the montane species seem to be much more active than lowland ones. I’d found lots of Whitehead’s trogons on Mt. Kinabalu and I found lots of blue-tailed trogons on Mt. Kerinci; and I have to say that the blue-tailed leaves the Whitehead’s in the dust as far as beauty goes, and the Whitehead’s isn’t exactly a slouch in that department. Among the other birds I missed were that stupid pitta that's found there (can't remember its name, don't care), the whatchama-call-it pheasant, and something by the name of the Sumatran cochoa. I did try really hard to find the cochoa but apparently its a difficult bird and difficult birds were never my forte (although I did see the Javan cochoa at Gede-Pangrango which was nice). One of my favourite birds wasn’t actually in the forest but in the fields outside. The long-tailed shrike is a common bird and attractively coloured, but the reason I liked it was because of the way it pumped its tail up and down after landing as if winding itself up for its next burst of activity, and when it flew its plump body and frantically-whirring wings even made it look like one of the wind-up toys you put in the bath-tub. A day-trip to the Tapan Road section of the park, about two hours from Kersik Tuo, fixed me up with even more birds, including excellent views of a rhinoceros hornbill perched in a tree and calling for about ten minutes, another tree with about forty Sumatran green pigeons jumping around in its branches, cute little long-tailed broadbills, and (after a long time creeping around like a hobgoblin in narrow gullies) a black and crimson pitta. I decided I did like pittas after all.

Apart for birds the forest here is also very mammal-y. The local subspecies of mitred leaf-monkey is very pretty, all reddish and grey like an orangutan with a tail. There were several species of squirrel and tree-shrew sighted, including the Niobe ground squirrel and the spotted giant flying squirrel (also almost-oxymoronically called the lesser giant flying squirrel!). Fresh droppings of a sun bear on the track was both exciting and unnerving at the same time given that species reputation for unpredictable aggressiveness, but I didn’t see the bear in the end. As at Way Kambas, siamang were calling every morning but I just couldn’t connect with them. I’ve seen siamang before, in Malaysia in 2006, but I was hoping to see the Sumatran subspecies as well. Interestingly, the montane siamang here start calling an hour later than the lowland ones at Way Kambas, and only call for a short sporadic period whereas the Way Kambas ones call almost through-out the day. Possibly its because there aren’t as many siamang here because there’s less forest to support larger populations. I thought I wasn’t going to get to see siamang in Sumatra at all, but in the very last hour of my very last day on Mt. Kerinci I stumbled across a pair in a tree. Maybe its my memory but they seemed much larger than the Malaysian ones I’d seen, and certainly larger than any captive ones I’ve seen. Their thick fur to cope with the cold of the mountain made them seem even bigger, like small gorillas. I was very pleased to see them. The siamang weren’t so pleased to see me though. The male hung upside-down to get a better look at me through the branches then decided I was too threatening and he and his mate took off through the trees.

The night-birding on the mountain went surprisingly well for once, with the three main target birds all seen over two nights: Salvadori’s nightjar, short-tailed frogmouth and Rajah scops owl. The nightjar is a mountain bird also found at Gede-Pangrango but it had rained every night I was there so I never managed to get out to find it. I had thought that was it for the nightjar as far as I was concerned because the field guide for the region (published 1993) says the only Sumatran record is a single specimen caught in 1878, but when I arrived at Kerinci I discovered it was easily seen here by every birder who visits. (Other Kerinci birds for which the field guide has out-of-date information are the graceful pitta, last record in 1918 according to the book but common at Tapan Road where I saw it; and the Sumatran cochoa, in the book known only from four specimens and for which the call and the appearance of the female and immature are all unknown, but which many birders see on this mountain, although I was not so lucky in that case). Unlike most nightjars, of which you normally only get flight-views, the Salvadori’s that I saw kept returning to the same perch between hunting moths so I got some really good looks at it in the torch-beam. The frankly bizarre-looking short-tailed frogmouth and the magnificently-scowling Rajah scops owl also provided excellent viewing, but a barred eagle owl refused to turn to face me so all I saw was its back.

I would like to end this entry on a happy note talking about all the fantastic animals I saw, but the Kerinci-Seblat National Park is in just as much trouble as every other natural site in Indonesia. At Mt. Kerinci the forest is being eaten away from the edges a little more each year. From Kersik Tuo, standing in the doorway of the Subandi Homestay where I was based, you can easily see how the forest is being pushed up the mountain to make way for fields to grow cabbages, tomatoes, potatoes and other temperate crops. The forest edge is now a kilometer from the entry sign, which itself is now half-demolished with what look like bullet holes in the remaining section. Every day in the forest I heard chainsaws and every evening I saw motorbikes heading back to town laden with firewood. There’s no hiding which individuals are responsible because you just need to stand there and look at the people working the fields, but there’s absolutely nothing being done to stop the destruction of this supposedly protected area. I can see a time not too far in the future when there’s no forest left on the mountain at all, but by then all the animals will have gone to the poachers anyway. Subandi says the Salvadori’s pheasant is getting harder to find, and I suspect that rather than there being a proper population there, birders are just seeing the same few individuals. The formerly-common silver-eared mesia appears to have been trapped out completely (Google Image it and you’ll see why its such a popular cage bird). On my second day, coming down from the higher slopes in the late afternoon, I ran into a pair of bird poachers which fair made my blood boil. I did briefly contemplate just walking on by but then I thought, nah to hell with that, there’s only two of them and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let poaching go unhindered right in front of me. They had a number of bamboo tubes into which long-tailed sibias were stuffed and I made them release them all, then made them empty their bag in which were more empty tubes and a small box containing a decoy green magpie which ungratefully slashed my thumb open with its unexpectedly-sharp beak as I was getting the string off its leg. I have little doubt that that particular bird was recaptured as soon as I’d left because once I’d released it and it had shot off into the undergrowth it was clear that it could no longer fly, either because it had been cooped up in a little box for too long or because its wings had been broken. Once the birds were released and their equipment smashed up into pieces there wasn’t much else I could do. If I’d done what I would have liked to have done to the poachers then I’d have been the one getting in trouble, and the conservation laws here are so pathetically weak that even if I’d dragged both of them all the way to where-ever the nearest police station is, all that would have happened was that they would have been told not to do it again and then sent home with their nets and snares, and then probably that night the police and the poachers would have got together for a drink and had a laugh about stupid interfering tourists. It’s the downside to being a wildlife traveller that its not all just looking at cute animals and pretty birds, you have to be constantly faced with seeing the destruction of the very things that you’re travelling to see. It would be like going to Egypt and seeing the locals chipping away at the face of the Sphynx with picks and not being able to do anything to stop it and knowing that they’re going to just keep chipping away until all that’s left is a shapeless chunk of worthless rock. Releasing those birds made absolutely not one iota of difference, except to the individual birds themselves. Those men would have gone right back to catching more - they’re probably out there catching birds even as you read this - but at least….well I don’t know how I’m supposed to finish that sentence, but at least “something”.


Photos are now on the last two entries (there's good internet in Bukittinggi!) so you can go back and look at them if you so wish.

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Photos

Mt. Kerinci, from Kersik Tuo
if you click on the photo to get the large size you'll be able to see better the deforestation and also the smoke rising from the summit. The green fields in front are the tea crop.

another unidentified frog
I couldn't get into a position to get a proper shot where his head was unobscured, but you can see his nice red feet well