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Published: July 15th 2009
My second destination after Tangkoko was Bogani Nani Wartabone, formerly known by the more-easily remembered name of Dumoga-Bone. Nani Wartabone was a local hero who was an anti-Dutch guerilla. I'd read on the almighty internet that instead of staying at Kotamabagu as birders usually did, one could now stay at a guesthouse in Toraut about an hour further on from Kotamabagu (itself about three hours south from Manado) and right on the boundaries of the park so much more convenient. When I was at Tangkoko the first of my required guides was Samuel, regarded as the best there for birding but he got sick after the first morning so was replaced by Antri, who told me that the guesthouse in Toraut was called Tantemin and he would ring them for me and arrange the stay. I also met another guide called Bobby at one of Tangkoko’s other guesthouses, Tangkoko Lodge, who was taking a Belgian client to Nantu Reserve for babirusa-spotting and he said he would see about whether I could join in (thereby making it affordable for me to reach the expensive destination). He also knew of Tantemin and said he’d ring me there once he got the yay or
nay from his client.
So I set off for Bogani with high hopes of as good a wildlife experience as at Tangkoko. Travelling in Sulawesi really is a breeze, especially compared to some of the other places in Indonesia. I took a motorbike from the hotel to the bus terminal, which turned out to be not so much buses as 4-wheel drive Toyotas that fit about 8 or 9 people. The real buses are probably even cheaper but a seat in the taxis is only 45,000 rupiah (about NZ$8) and much more comfortable. Once in Kotamabagu several hours later the driver pulled over a bemo. As far as I could make out from the exchange, the bemo would take me to another place from where I could get a motorbike to Toraut. I really couldn’t follow the conversation properly but I got in the bemo and set off without a clue where I was, where I was going, or where my bag of expensive optics and lenses had gone (it had disappeared up the front somewhere while I ended up wedged in the back rear corner, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it). My pack was
put on the floor as an extra seat for other passengers. It’s a strange sort of feeling being on a bus not knowing where you’ll end up but really the worst that can happen is that you’ll have to spend the night in some random town and get to your true destination the next day.
After an hour we pulled into a town and all the passengers left on the bemo got off. I said that I now needed to go to Toraut, to which the response was did I want to go somewhere that sounded like “wallis”, which I didn’t understand. I said I was going to Tantemin, which they didn’t understand. After a few tries I wrote it down and they’re all immediately like “Oh! Tantemin!”, pronouncing it to my ears in exactly the same way I was pronouncing it. I get on a motorbike and head off again, not for a long trip as I thought, but just up the road and round the corner. So there was the Tantemin guesthouse, where they were actually expecting me although it wasn’t Antri that had booked me in but Bobby. Nice guy. So far so good but I
was still puzzled by certain things. By the end of the day I had discovered that the town I was in wasn’t Toraut at all but Dolodua. When Antri and Bobby had said Tantemin was in Toraut I think they must have been meaning just that that’s where they stayed when visiting the forest at Toraut. Which also explained how the internet report had said there were several species of forest owls around the guesthouse at night whereas Tantemin was in the middle of a village. Another thing that had initially been puzzling me was that in Manado I had been warned off staying in Toraut because it was too dangerous (its an illegal-gold-mining town and apparently the miners regularly get drunk and kill one another!) - yet I’d been thinking how friendly everyone was in this drunken miner town! And of course it also explained all the confused reactions I got when saying I was going to Toraut but then said I was going to Tantemin. (To wrap it all up, the guesthouse at Toraut is actually run by the national park people and is called Wallacea, hence the “wallis” questions).
The next day came another instance of mild confusion over destination. Every birder that goes to Bogani goes to a place called Tambun to see the nesting grounds of the maleo, a big megapode that buries its eggs in volcanically-heated soil for incubation. They are now very rare over most of Sulawesi due to the usual scenario of over-hunting and in this case, over-collection of the eggs. After their visits the birders write reports on the internet for the benefit of other birders (because we’re an agreeable bunch) but they all just write something along the lines of “went to Tambun in the morning to see the maleo”, which is all well and good but doesn’t actually help in letting you know where it is or how to get there. I thought I had it sorted in Manado when someone told me that Tambun was the name of a nearby village and easily reached by motorbike, and I envisioned a small coastal village with a black-sand beach beside it where the maleo came to congregate. The owner of Tantemin had, I thought, arranged a motorbike for the next morning at 5am to take me to Tambun and she also said that I didn’t need a guide to visit, both of which were wrong. In the morning she said I had to walk to the terminal and get a motorbike from there, so I set off down the road thinking that this was pretty stupid because it was still dark, but there was one bike there. He said I needed a guide at Tambun, I said I didn’t, he no doubt said the Indonesian equivalent of the sarcastic “um, OK then buddy”, but he took me anyway. Riding on the back of a motorbike in the dark in the tropics isn’t very pleasant because instead of little weeny insects like in the daytime you are constantly getting hit with huge katydids and beetles and owls. There are few things more painful than having a rhinoceros beetle hit you in the eye at 50kph. Tambun turned out to be not a village at all but the name of a site within the national park where the only building is the guard post and I did in fact need both a guide and a permit. After a lengthy wait a guide was rustled up and we entered the nesting grounds, which are completely enclosed with a padlocked mesh fence to keep out pigs and dogs and poachers (the maleo can fly over the fence of course). Rather than the black-sand beaches where maleo are normally photographed and filmed, Tambun is inside a geothermal area of forest, complete with boiling-water streams. There were nest holes everywhere but, as misfortune would have it, I was outside the main breeding season. In fact my visit coincided exactly with the very absolute lowest point of maleo activity in the area! In high season you can easily see five or six pairs at once as soon as you arrive, but now all I saw were two distant birds scuttling rapidly off into the lantana thickets. The view wasn’t good enough for me to be able to say I’d “seen” them - I wanted to get a good look at them for that - so it was disappointing but that’s the way it goes sometimes.
At Tambun all the eggs are collected every afternoon and buried inside hatchery cages to protect them from predation by monitor lizards. In the high season they collect 50 or 60 a month on average; in the low season only a handful. There were two chicks ready for release that very morning. They were a day old and about the size of guinea-pigs! I got to hold one to release (you know, doing my bit for conservation) and it flew like a pigeon off into the scrub. The eggs of megapodes are so big and take so long to hatch that the chicks are fully-developed upon hatching. I did know they could fly as soon as they had dug their way out of their nest-holes, but it was still pretty amazing seeing it in action with my own eyes. I was tempted to count that chick as me having seen a maleo (after all, it was wild as soon as it left my hands) but I decided that would be cheating.
There are three sites you have to visit at Bogani as a birder. As well as Tambun there is also Toraut which is primary forest, and Tapakulintang (trying saying that fast!) where you just walk along the main road through the forest looking for birds in the trees either side. I went to both of the latter and in both the birding was very very poor. I’m sure that’s not always the case but it certainly was when I was there. At Toraut I stayed out till after dark to look for owls with no luck at all. Owl-hunting really is a fool’s game. The guide was all like “normally there’s owls all over the place here!”. I did find a green tree viper coiled up in a palm frond about eight metres off the ground. I’ve seen six snakes on the trip so far and all of them have been dead on the roads, starting with a metre-long baby reticulated python in Bali, so this was the first live one. One of the guides (there are always two for some reaosn) cut a big long stick and headed for the tree. Either he thought I would want a closer look at it - and having an extremely-venomous agitated snake landing at my feet in the dark isn’t my idea of fun - or more likely he was going to knock it down and kill it, which I would have liked even less. I told him to put the stick down.
I only had a short stay at Bogani (two days) due to time limitations (ie visa expiry date approaching), so I used the last afternoon to have a final go at the maleo. We hung around the nest sites for a while but when we heard a male maleo calling up in the forest we went in after him. For the next several hours we scrambled about in the jungled hills, once even coming close enough to hear a maleo dashing off into the undergrowth. Tracking down another calling bird we found only its scratchings in the dirt and a solitary white feather. So I’d seen the nest holes, seen two distant un-tickable birds, seen an egg, released two chicks, heard maleo calling, heard maleo running, found their scratchings, found a feather - surely that must all add up to the same as one good bird? There wasn’t much daylght left so we had to give up. As we trudged wearily back to the road we suddenly, almost literally at the last minute, spotted a maleo perched in the top of a tree about ten metres above us preparing to roost for the night. Through the binoculars it was as clear as day, the sun’s final rays illuminating its unusual rosy-pink belly as if it had perched there specifically for that very reason. Then its mate flew in to join it and together they strutted about on the branches, snaking their ridiculously small heads about as they called back and forth. Seeing a maleo on the nesting ground on the first try would have been good, but these two birds were so much better because of all the effort we’d had to put in to see them. Is the maleo the best bird of the trip? Yes it is.
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Radha
non-member comment
LOL
still laughing ... that rhinoceros beetle in the eye comment is so going into my Christmas newsletter ...