Has it really been six days already? I was a bit slow off the mark this morning as you might expect, and I left the hostel just after 8 rather than just before 7 as I had been doing. I decided that I would spend the morning going to Tabing Hide which is 3.1km each way from the entrance with about the first km boardwalked and the rest on trails though it wasn’t a bad trail, it was certainly rather better than the one going to Kumbang Hide. I think I’ve said it already, but I really like the woodpeckers around in Taman Negara. There’s lots of diversity and a wide variety of different shapes, sizes, and colours, and woodpeckers are really cool birds generally. The top mammal is obviously the Malayan Tapir but for birds ... read more

I got the first boat across the river to go into the national park at 7. Around the headquarters there was a tame argus pheasant roaming around. It would be really cool to see a wild one and I’ve heard the calls around, but this one doesn’t count. I also found out that I had forgotten to get my camera battery out of the charger. I have a spare non-official one which I put in and the camera didn’t really like it very much and wouldn’t stay on for very long and then decided to die completely which was annoying. It wasn’t too long after walking around that I found another of the big targets for the area, a Crested Fireback Pheasant. This was an absolutely stunning male so I was really kicking myself for not ... read more

Just a quick update, this isn’t a proper blog post. I wasn’t sure whether to post about this or not, but I think it’s better that I do because it’s a fairly important thing. To cut to the chase, last night at Jerantut I had my wallet nicked. I don’t know exactly what happened, but between paying for food from my wallet and sitting at a table, the wallet was gone and it was not anywhere around and none of the people/staff around knew anything or had seen anything. The circumstances are not really the point anyway. So last night, once I was sure that my wallet had definitely been taken, I did all of the annoying and time consuming things like making a police report, calling the insurance, contacting banks, etc. I didn’t lose very ... read more

It was unusually quiet this morning at sunrise without the characteristic morning siamang screams this morning and much less bird song. The ground and leaves and everything were all very wet so I think it rained throughout the night although it was dry when I got up. It was quite quiet on the bird-front although I got a nice view of a Slaty-backed Forktail at a stream, the same place as I had seen it yesterday as well as a nice view of the same group of three Malayan Laughingthrushes around the same place as yesterday. There was one especially nice bird that morning which was a very showy stunning male White-tailed Robin hoping up and down from the road into the nearby trees and back again. After breakfast, I decided to do the Telekom Loop. ... read more

As planned, I headed out for some sunrise birding before breakfast which only begins at 7:30. I didn’t make it very far though, because I was distracted by a flock of stunning Silver-eared Mesias just on the edge of town. There was a White-thighed Langur just on the edge of town past the Shazan Inn too, there seem to be more of those around that I was expecting. Breakfast is included with the room so I made sure to eat as much as I reasonably could before heading out for the day. Today I decided to try and do quite a long walk with a rather nice loop covering a range of altitudes going down the mountain a bit and back up again. (Bukit Fraser translates as Fraser’s Hill, but given that it gets to over ... read more