Taman Negara (for, like, the fourth time)

---

Leaving Penang for Taman Negara I thought I might take the train, as for a multi-hour trip trains are more comfortable than buses and in Asia they are much the same price (or often much cheaper). For this route the bus takes five-plus hours while the train takes four, so it is also faster. I had only thought about this the night before leaving, though, so hadn't bought a ticket in advance. The train left at 7.30am but unfortunately it was fully-booked already so I ended up on the bus anyway.

The bus terminated at the TBS station in Kuala Lumpur which was good because I knew there was a city-train straight from there to the Pekililing bus station, from where my next bus would be leaving for the town of Jerantut. I got to Pekililing at 2.20pm - narrowly missing the 2pm bus. The next one wasn't until 4pm. It is three and a half hours to Jerantut, so I had to stay overnight there.

There are a few budget hotels and guesthouses in Jerantut. In the past (in 2006!) I have stayed at the Greenleaf Guesthouse but they were full on this night, so I found a place called the Sri Emas Hotel. Their single fan-rooms were 20 Ringgits, but they also had "hostel" rooms for 15 Ringgits which turned out to only have two beds inside (as opposed to a normal dorm room) and because the hotel was otherwise empty I didn't have to share it.

It is Ramadan at the moment so most people are fasting all day, meaning that it can sometimes be difficult to find somewhere to eat during the day! I went out not-so-early to find some breakfast and to check on the bus times to Kuala Tahan (the village at Taman Negara). It had been too late when I arrived to find out the bus schedule - there was nobody at the bus station to ask - but in the past the buses were spaced through the day so I wasn't worried. I went to the station and there was a bus sitting there. I asked the driver when he was leaving? 8am. It was about to hit 8am right now. When was the next bus? 1pm - and there were no others. Just two buses a day now.

The driver said he would wait for me while I rushed back to the hotel and got my bags. It is an hour and a half to Kuala Tahan and I still hadn't had anything to eat yet. More importantly, I had forgotten to go to an ATM. There are no ATMs in Kuala Tahan and no towns along the way. I had been going to get out some money in Jerantut the night before, but decided I could just as easily do so in the morning after breakfast, but then because I was in such a rush to get back to the hotel and then back to the bus I completely forgot until the journey was well underway.

There wasn't much I could do about it. When we got to Kuala Tahan I deposited my bags at the Liana Hostel which has 15 Ringgit dorm beds, bought some bananas for breakfast, and got back on the bus to Jerantut to get some money. So I made three bus trips today, an hour and a half each, just because I forgot to go to the bank.

When I got back to Kuala Tahan (again) in the afternoon, I walked round all the guesthouses to check prices. Usually when at Taman Negara I alternate between the Liana Hostel and the Tembelling River View Hostel, but the latter got washed away in a flood a couple of years ago. I was pretty sure Liana was still the cheapest, and so it proved to be. There was one other place with 15 Ringgit dorms, but otherwise they were 25 or 30 for a dorm bed, and single rooms were mostly 60 to 90 Ringgits.

I decided not to go to the Kumbang Hide this time (that's where you can see tapirs) because the boat trip up there is 130 Ringgits and even if I manage to share a boat I don't want to spend more money than is necessary. So I restricted myself to walking. My costs would just be the accommodation, and food and water. I did do one Night Safari though, which is 40 Ringgits.

...........................................................

As always I was staying in the little village of Kuala Tahan on the opposite side of the river from the national park. There is accommodation on the park side as well, in the Mutiara resort, but that is - how shall we say? - kind of expensive. The dorms alone are 80 Ringgits a night. For comparison the Liana Hostel where I was staying was 15 Ringgits a night. The benefit of staying in the resort is that one can be in the park at any hour whereas otherwise you are relying on the boat service, but really this isn't even an issue. The boats start at 7am, which is more or less when it gets light, and finish at 10pm. There is a small problem in that the earliest of the floating restaurants along the river doesn't open until 8.30am, but I got around that by just buying potato bread from one of the mini-marts each afternoon for my breakfast the next day. It is too hot in the afternoon to bother looking for wildlife, so I'd come back across the river for lunch, and then return around 4 or 5pm.

It was fairly busy for the first few days because I'd arrived on a Friday. Weekends are busier than week-days due to the park's proximity to Kuala Lumpur. For two nights later in the week I actually had the dorm room to myself, although after that I had to share with some Brazilian girls. It's a hard life I lead.

On one of the afternoons I was at the river to get a boat across. There was a long-boat of new tourists arriving so the crossing-the-river boat had to wait until that had moved away. A French girl got off the long-boat, came straight over to me, and asked "Are you from New Zealand?" "Er, yes." "Are you the guy who's been travelling all over Asia for a year?" "Yes... I guess that's me." "Can I come out in the forest with you today, or tomorrow morning?" It seems my level of wandering-naturalist fame has reached France. Finally!

The last time I was at Taman Negara was in 2011, and there have been some changes. Previously there was a short boardwalk by the resort and most tourists didn't stray far from here. Now the boardwalk has been extended almost all the way to the Canopy Walk, including the whole of the Swamp Loop (now called the Forest Loop - or maybe it was always called the Forest Loop and only birders called it the Swamp Loop to deter non-birders from entering). In the other direction the whole River Trail and most of the Jenet Muda Trail are boardwalked. At first I thought this might be good for creeping and sneaking, but in actuality the boardwalk is so creaky that you can't sneak up on anything. I felt like Charles Darwin trying to spot a great argus on the Beagle, but never being able to get close because the boards of the ship's deck were creaking so badly in the swell. The boardwalk isn't even maintained - there were parts where a falling branch would have destroyed a section and it would be just sitting there smashed, and clearly having been so for months or years.

As always, finding any animals was jolly hard work. Taman Negara is one of the most difficult forests I've been in. The trees are so huge that most of the birds you see are a hundred feet too high to be able to see properly, and because the local Orang Asli are still permitted to hunt there all the larger mammals are pretty shy, except in the immediate vicinity of the resort. It did seem more difficult than usual though, and perhaps the boardwalk is to blame. There were a lot more people on what used to be pretty quiet trails and most people visiting national parks are not exactly stealthy. I met a local birder from Kuala Lumpur who has been coming to the park for twenty years and he said it is getting harder every year to find the birds. Still, it is the sort of place where every day you see a few more identifiable birds and the longer you stay the more you see.

Because of the "getting to the park" events it was afternoon before I crossed the river for the first time. I didn't see much at all - plantain and grey-bellied squirrels and crab-eating macaques were the only mammals - but the birds included several new "year birds" (and "trip birds", but not "life birds") such as short-toed coucal, grey-cheeked bulbul, and chestnut-winged and white-breasted babblers.

I was hoping the boardwalk would make spotlighting easy, but my attempts came to nought. The sun goes down about 7.30pm but it doesn't get properly dark until 8pm, and then you only have two hours before the last boat (although you could arrange a later time for a higher price). I was on the boardwalk leading to the Canopy Walk - this is one of the places I used to spotlight when it was just a dirt trail. Now it was the haunt of the Night Walks. After the fourteenth group passed me in forty minutes I just gave up and went back across the river. I got the impression the boardwalk had been built just for the purposes of doing Night Walks for the resort guests. The groups are so noisy and there is so much light that they aren't going to be seeing anything except insects and spiders. I think to see any mammals along that route you'd have to be there well after midnight.

The following nights didn't go any better, although I discovered that the Night Walks only use that one trail - they don't go on the Swamp Loop or the River Trail. I didn't see anything on any of the nights, although I did hear a few owls.

On one night I did a Night Safari. This was a bit more depressing than expected. The Night Safari is a jeep-drive through an oil palm plantation not far from Kuala Tahan. These plantations are rubbish for wildlife in general because they are monocultures, but leopard cats and owls like them because they are full of rats, and civets can live in them by eating the palm fruit. Pretty much any Night Safari you would have gone on would have resulted in leopard cat sightings. Now the plantation has been cleared of all the old palms and re-planted with baby palms. Previously it was like driving through a forest, even though I knew it wasn't, but now you can see the extent of the plantation - hill after hill of nothing. It's huge. You can see the headlights and torches from the other vehicles on neighbouring hills. It was like being in the abyss, with the lights coming from deepsea submersibles. Kind of eerie.

There were no leopard cats or, indeed, any other mammals. Two painted bronzebacks were seen ("brown-backed tree snakes" according to the spotter), tangled amongst ground-hugging vines because there were no trees left, and one brown wood owl. I was a bit confused over the owl. I knew it was a brown wood owl and not a spotted wood owl - just the week before I had been photographing the two species literally side-by-side at the Penang Bird Park - but when I checked the field guide it said that the brown wood owl is only in broadleaf forest and the spotted wood owl is the one found in plantations and degraded habitats. This was definitely not broadleaf forest - there was no longer a tree of any kind for probably several kilometres. However, looking online, I found photos on Oriental Bird Images of brown wood owls taken in this very plantation. I'm not sure how long they will last there now though. It will be at least two years before the plantation is a "forest" again. I did, in fact, wonder why the Night Safari doesn't move to a different plantation but I think there aren't any others near enough so they are stuck with the barren hills.

...........................................................

Where the River Trail boardwalk diverts off to the Jenet Muda boardwalk, there is a mud trail continuing on to the Tabing Hide. I did this trail just once. I had leech socks on so no bites, but when I got back to the resort and emptied my boots there were at least fifty leeches in each one. Just balled masses of them, trying desperately to get through the socks into my tasty tasty flesh.

What was more interesting on this trail were trilobite larvae. I had seen one at the Penang Botanical Gardens the other week, and here I found four at once, on one log. I've never seen more than one at a time before so I don't know what attraction this log held for them. Perhaps it was their mating season.

There was nothing seen from the hide except a slender squirrel, but on the way back I spotted a cream-coloured giant squirrel in the canopy. This species is common in Borneo where it comes in all sorts of colours (hence I tend to prefer the name variable giant squirrel) but on the mainland it just comes in solid cream or red and is seemingly not as common as the black giant squirrel.

Another non-boardwalked trail I did was the one to the Blau and Yong Hides, over a side-river from the resort. Strangely there were no more than a few leeches here, although the mosquitoes were certainly swarming. The trail clearly isn't used much any more, being pretty overgrown in parts and littered with fallen trees around which detours must be made. This was a lot more work than just walking along a boardwalk and by the time I got to the Blau Hide I was one hundred percent drenched in sweat. There was literally not a dry inch of clothing on me. And I did not see a single vertebrate along the way!

The Blau Hide had a notice on the door, "closed until further notice". I went in anyway and it was a real mess. It looked like it had been abandoned for at least a couple of years. There were ferns starting to grow on the floor where light came in from one of the windows, and the benches were beginning to rot. But in the trees outside I saw an olive-backed woodpecker, not only a lifer, but also the 700th bird of the trip and my 42nd woodpecker. There were slender and plantain squirrels too, and just up the trail was a Prevost's squirrel. I've seen this last species on Sumatra and Borneo but for some reason, despite them supposedly being common, never on the mainland. The ones I've seen most of are the pluto subspecies of Sabah which are pitch-black with a red belly. The mainland subspecies is much more brightly-coloured - you'd need to Google a photo to see what I mean. Unfortunately the one I saw was too high up to photograph.

Along the trail to the Blau Hide there had been disconcerting amounts of large animal droppings, as in the sort of droppings an elephant might deposit. They weren't fresh so I wasn't too worried about encountering one, but I was still wary. I tried to wave it aside by pretending they were from gaur or banteng and not an elephant. I figured the Yong Hide would be in as bad a state as the Blau Hide, but wanted to go see anyway. A few hundred metres up the trail from Blau, though, I heard an elephant rumbling followed by breaking branches. The rumbling that elephants make is quite distinctive. Maybe there is some other animal in the forest that makes elephant-rumbling noises, but I wasn't going to go find out. I turned around and went back the way I'd come. You really don't want to meet a wild elephant on a forest trail. On the way back I spotted a three-striped ground squirrel, which was a good return I guess.

...........................................................

Most of my days at Taman Negara I spent on the boardwalks. I would usually sneak slowly around the Swamp Loop and then go sit in the Tahan Hide for a bit, or I would use the River Trail. I found an Amorphophallus right beside the River Trail boardwalk, although sadly someone had broken its leaf down. Amorphophallus is also known as the titan lily for its gigantic flower spathe. It grows just a single multi-branched leaf which looks like a small tree. I propped the leaf back upright, hoping it might recover, but I think it had been killed. Nearby were some hollow logs in which horseshoe bats were roosting. I was going to try and get some photos to ID them later, but accidentally spooked them before I could. So I just left them alone from then on.

Mammal-wise, on the Swamp Loop I saw a lone white-thighed langur and on the Jenet Muda Trail a large troop of dusky langurs. White-handed gibbons were heard every morning, and I missed seeing them on the Swamp Loop one afternoon by less than an hour (another guy had got some video of them before I came along). There were lots of squirrels about, but no black-banded squirrels were seen. Nor any shrew-faced ground squirrels which I was particularly looking out for - these look just like common tree-shrews (of which I saw a few) and the only place I've seen them before is at Taman Negara. None on this visit though. Lesser mouse deer were seen most days, with probably four or five different individuals between the two boardwalked areas. Some muntjacs were seen from the Tahan Hide, and wild pigs were common around the general area.

As mentioned, finding birds at Taman Negara is a trial. There are some great species here. Crested fireback pheasants were seen most days. On my first visit to the park I found crested wood partridges easily on the Swamp Loop but never since. I'm not sure if they are still found in this area or not. One pheasant I had not managed to see previously, or at least not well enough to "count", was the Malayan peacock-pheasant. On one of my other visits a peacock-pheasant had walked across a trail I was on, but when I put up my binoculars the lenses steamed up and I couldn't see a thing. This is a big problem at this park because it is so hot and humid here, and it is frustrating indeed when it happens if the bird you want to see is a "new" one. Anyway, that pheasant had disappeared before I could see it properly. This visit, as I was walking around the Swamp Loop, I came across Ti (the Kuala Lumpur birder I mentioned earlier) who had seen a peacock-pheasant walk across the boardwalk a few minutes before. I moved as quickly and quietly as I could in the direction it had gone, and amazingly I actually saw it. I couldn't photograph it through the undergrowth, let alone the low light levels, but I got to see it fantastically well. That made the third peacock-pheasant I had seen on this trip (the others being grey peacock-pheasant at Kaeng Krachan in Thailand, and Germain's peacock-pheasant at Cat Tien in Vietnam), so from zero species to three and I saw all of them well. On a later day I came across the same peacock-pheasant and then just ahead a male crested fireback stepped up onto the boardwalk. I could literally look from one to the other from where I was standing. It can't be often that a birder can see two different species of rainforest pheasants at the same time!

I couldn't find any pittas while at the park, but that's normal for me. In fact on this whole trip the only pitta I've seen is Indian pitta in Sri Lanka and India. On the River Trail where there's access down to the bank at a swimming spot, a blue-banded kingfisher came flying in and landed on a nearby branch, one of six lifers seen over the ten days I was at the park. The best lifer for me was while I was trying to find what was up in a fruiting fig tree. There was a lot of debris falling through the lower trees but I could not see anything. I figured it had to be primates or hornbills, because it seemed likely to be something large. Whatever it was I never saw it in the tree (although I saw a Malayan black hornbill nearby later, so it was probably those). While craning my neck I spotted something small and green with a bright red beak in the crook of a branch. It was a male blue-rumped parrot. These are common enough but I haven't ever managed to see them in the wild, apart for possible fly-bys. They are really unobtrusive when perched, just sitting silently or clambering slowly about like lorises. Neat little birds.

---

Photos

Great Argus (Argusianus argus)
a tame bird hanging around the resort, not a wild one.

male Crested Fireback (Lophura ignita)
best photo I got, but not ... well, it's not good.

... and how high above the river that flood marker is!
(For those who have been there, it is at the very top of the steps up to the resort)