Kinabalu II: return to which mountain

---

On the way back between Poring and Kota Kinabalu, I stopped off for a few more days at the Mt. Kinabalu National Park. Its good there because there are no leeches or mosquitoes. The only thing that’s of the bitey persuasion are these big horsefly type jobs with a really painful stab. It’s a fly of such a size that you can actually see it preparing its proboscis as it readies itself to jab you. They usually come in ones or twos so technically shouldn’t be as much of a problem as mosquitoes but I found them much worse because of their tenacity. Once they have you in their sights then there’s no escape. I became quite proficient at snatching them out of the air on their approach and crunching the life out of them. In the jungle its kill or be killed.

It does rain a lot there though. On my first visit it rained on me every day at one point or another, in varying amounts of intensity and duration. On my return visit, the very first day it thundered down with such ferocity that water got inside my binoculars and one lens completely misted up which, needless to say, was a trifle devastating. Going birdwatching without a decent pair of binoculars is as useless as going to play soccer without a ball, or going to watch an Adam Sandler movie. To show there were no hard feelings, for the whole rest of my visit it only rained briefly once and fortunately the binoculars unfogged themselves so all was right in the world again.

The reason I went back to Mt. Kinabalu was (surprise, surprise) to try and find some of the birds I missed last time. Two of them, the indigo flycatcher and the grey-chinned minivet, proved so common that I wondered if I’d been walking round with my eyes shut before. Last time when I’d been up the Summit Trail to Layang Layang, I vowed I wouldn’t do that again, but once back at the park I decided I wouldn’t be much of a birder if I didn’t give the Kinabalu friendly warbler a second try, so up I went. I found another bird on my list of wants, the white-browed shrike-babbler, and saw the black-breasted fruit-hunters again, but the friendly warbler was again a no-show. To compensate I achieved another of the reasons for the Layang Layang climb, to get some photos of the mountain ground squirrels which unlike the warbler are actually friendly, especially if you’ve got some biscuits for them. Lower down the mountain on the forest trails I found three Bornean stubtails which are little tiny birds that live on the ground like mice and have soft calls that sound like crickets. They’re really nice wee things, especially with the stripe above their eyes that glows gold as if they have little lights shining inside their heads. After days of wandering up and down the Bukit Ular Trail I finally found a covey of the red-breasted partridges; and I was practically knee-deep in Whitehead’s trogons (thirteen sightings in all) but the other two-thirds of the Whitehead’s bird trio - the spiderhunter and the broadbill - still couldn’t be found no matter how hard I searched.

Another item on my Kinabalu wanted list were the pit-vipers. The Kinabalu pit-viper is a ground-dweller endemic to this one mountain and the Sabah pit-viper is a montane tree-dweller found over a wider area. I actually found a Sabah pit-viper on the first afternoon as I was trudging back to the Bayu Homestay in the downpour, but it was dead in a roadside ditch. It may have drowned but I think it more likely someone had killed it and thrown it in there. I went out at night a few times in the park because its common to find the pit-vipers along the roads in there but I found none. I did find some other nice herptiles though, including the Kinabalu flying gecko which is endemic to the mountain, the poorly-known Schmidt’s reed snake which is likewise an endemic, and also the montane large-eyed litter frog which is preposterously cute.

The final animal I found that was on my list was one of my most-wanted, and it wasn’t a bird or even a vertebrate, it was the trilobite larva. Now I know what you’re thinking, trilobites are extinct, but the trilobite larva is actually a female beetle that sort of resembles a trilobite. The male is more standard and just looks like a beetle. There are several species found throughout southern and southeast Asia, all in the genus Duliticola I believe, and they’re actually much smaller than I’d imagined. They turned out to be not that uncommon either - I found three of them. They really are the most bizarre-looking insects with their body plates and spines and sharp prickly legs. At the rear of the body is a round sucking disk they use when walking, sort of like a caterpillar. Most surprising to me was the miniscule head! I’d imagined that under the large frontal body-plate there’d be a big munchy set of jaws but instead right at the tip is a little tube from which appears a head about the size of a biro nib, which retracts when danger threatens. The beetles can be found just wandering on the trails and don’t seem overly concerned about being handled, but if you turn them upside-down they curl the two ends of the body together for protection, and when you set them down again they remain in a looped position until they think they have the all-clear. Very very cool insects. I was very pleased (hence the number of photos I posted!).

One thing I wasn't so pleased about was headlice! First time ever that I've had them I believe. I was wondering why my head was all itchy when staying at the Bayu Homestay at Mt. Kinabalu, and then one morning when I looked in the mirror there was a louse in my beard! I thought it must surely be an isolated louse of no consequence, but no, when I washed my hair that night the towel was absolutely crawling with lice. It was so disconcerting! I read up on the internet about them and found that all the sites said they're small like a sesame seed, but the Malaysian ones must be super mutant head-lice because they're the size of rats. Its so nasty because you can feel them crawling all through your scalp, like there's a litter of kittens on your head. Apparently it takes a couple of weeks before you notice their presence but I'm sure I would have noticed them on the towel before then because they're so big and numerous. So I believe I must have got them at Bayu; one of the hazards of travelling. Its way worse than other parasites like bed-bugs or leeches or whatever because they're living on you and you can see and feel them but can't get them out. Anyway once back in KK I got some head-lice shampoo and killed them all with it, but now I'm paranoid they're still there or in my clothes or bags (your scalp keeps itching for days apparently, and then you have to do a repeat kill in a week just in case of survivors or newly-hatched eggs). So that's the end of my no-shampoo experiment, not that it was really working the way it was supposed to anyway - the hair's supposed to go very clean and shiny but instead it just settled into a clean but sort of straw-like state. I don't have my beard anymore either because I didn’t trust putting the insecticide shampoo near my mouth (!) and thought it better safe than sorry so I shaved the whole thing off. Now I look like a right goober without it. First time I've been completely clean-shaven in many years (normally I have an evil goatee). It is doubly annoying too because I had a nice three month shrubbery going on there, and was looking forward to finding a Rafflesia arnoldi in Sumatra and getting my photo taken with it wearing my five-month beard, thereby recreating the moment when Sir Stamford Raffles first discovered the flower. Now I'm only going to have a loser two-month beard when that happens.

Even worse perhaps, was that I now had no proper clothes to wear because I needed to super-wash all the ones I had to get the lice and eggs out, so I was wearing this T-shirt I got free in Bali. Problem was it was an Indonesian T-shirt so of course it was too small so it was skin-tight like a muscle-shirt, and the material was really thin so even when dry you could see my tattoos through it and of course its so hot in KK that as soon as I started walking round town it got soaked in sweat and went semi-transparent! I felt ever so slightly stoopid walking around in a semi-transparent top stretched tight over my muscles, especially as I had to go the fancy Indonesian Embassy to see the requirements for the visa I need to get.

Even even worse, one of the side-effects listed on the shampoo bottle was “coma”!!!! This morning I had the shakes real bad and now I'm worried I've got insecticde poisoning and I'm going to slip into a coma. If I don't post any more blogs that'll be why.....

---

Photos

Sabah pit viper (Popeia sabahi), dead
it looks like its swallowing something but I think that's its insides coming out its mouth

Kinabalu flying gecko (Ptychozoon rhacophorus)
terrible picture because I couldn't get very close and had to use maximum zoom on my little camera

predatory glowing larva
the head is luminous to attract the nocturnal insects that the grub feeds on. This photo was taken with flash so you can see it.....