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Published: December 24th 2013
Bukit Fraser (aka Fraser's Hill) is not far from Kuala Lumpur. In fact I hadn't realised how close it was – you could easily go here on a day-trip if you were pressed for time when in Malaysia. Last time I went there (in 2006) you took a bus to Rawang and then another bus to Kuala Kubu Bharu (KKB for short) and then a third bus from there to Bukit Fraser. There was only one bus a day between KKB and Bukit Fraser so if you missed it you either had to take a taxi or stay in KKB overnight to catch the bus the next day. The bus routes to Rawang and KKB still exist today but now there is also a train which is marginally cheaper, a little faster, and with much more leg-room. It is the KTM Kommuter train which you can catch at KL's Central Station. You ride first to Rawang (about 40 minutes) and then change over to the train going through KKB (about 30 minutes). The whole trip costs just 5.60 Ringgits. Unfortunately the bus service between KKB and Bukit Fraser has been discontinued so now you
have to take a taxi. It takes about an hour and the current price is 80 Ringgits. I left Kuala Lumpur at 1pm and was at Bukit Fraser about 3.30pm, so it is a pretty quick trip really.
Bukit Fraser is not exactly a budget destination. The cheapest place to stay is the Puncak Inn which can be considered “budget” only by virtue of them being cheaper than the
really expensive places. Their cheapest room is 100 Ringgits (120 on the weekends). There was no free room there for my third night so for that one I had to move over to the Silverpark Resort which is owned by the same people. My accommodation costs over my stay at Bukit Fraser were 100 Ringgits for the first night (a Thursday), 120 the second, 170 for the third (weekend price at the apartments), and 100 each for the last two nights. So fairly expensive! I was going to stay another night as well but that would have been 140 because it was Christmas Eve. Seriously, if someone opened an actual budget hostel there for birders they would do very well indeed. The Puncak Inn has been spruced up a bit since my last visit but the rooms are still the same tiny old rooms as before, given a lick of paint, but still with mildew, cobwebs and ripped mosquito netting. Barely worth half the price they are charging. The apartment at Silverpark was quite large but it was fairly obvious that the only cleaning done there was the superficial things like vaccuuming, changing linen, etc. I'm fine with staying in messy un-tidied places but for 170 Ringgit that's not what I expect! I didn't want to make a scene about it though because the Puncak
is the cheapest place to stay and I didn't want them getting in a snit and telling me to clear off. On the plus-side, the building at Silverpark is way up on top of the hill and overlooks the golf course area so there's a nice view and it makes a good vantage point for spying on the swifts because you can see their dorsal and ventral surfaces easily whereas from down on the ground you mostly just see their bellies. From here I saw swirling mixed flocks of fork-tailed swifts, glossy swiftlets, Himalayan swiftlets, and Pacific and barn swallows.
Bukit means “hill” and in Malaysia there are several hill-stations in the high country which were used as vacation retreats by the British when they had colonial rule. Bukit Fraser is the best-known for birders due to the ease of birding here, the ease of getting here, and the good infrastructure. It is a lot cooler up here than in the lowlands (which is why the British had their retreats up here), and there is still extensive forest cover which means there are loads of birds and mammals to be found.
After I had got my various rooms sorted out for my stay, and some food sorted out for my stomach, I headed off for the Jeriau Waterfall which is five kilometres or so from the Puncak Inn. According to Vladimir Dinets there are (or were when he was there years back) Malayan water shrews in the pool at the bottom of the falls after sunset so I thought it would be a good plan to go there before dark and then wait for night-fall; that way I could look for birds on the way there, look for water shrews after dark, and then spot-light for other nocturnal animals on the walk back to the Puncak Inn. Where-ever you walk at Bukit Fraser you are walking through forest, and because it is mountain forest there are birds
everywhere! Bird-waves are very frequent and they are spectacular here. Sometimes they have a dozen-odd species of bird in them. I'll come back to the birds later because a nice feature of the bird-waves at Bukit Fraser is that they invariably contain Himalayan striped squirrels as well. In China I saw quite a lot of Swinhoe's striped squirrels and maritime striped squirrels, but on the walk to the Jeriau Waterfall I probably saw more Himalayan striped squirrels than I had of both those other species combined in the whole time I was in China. They are incredibly common here, and they always seem to be in groups rather than the singles or pairs that I saw the Chinese species in. What was really noticeable too, having just come from China, is how small the Himalayan striped squirrel is in relation to those other species – it is tiny! It's almost like watching mice scampering about in the branches. The belly is orange, which isn't something I noticed in the other
Tamiops at all, but that may have just been because I mostly saw the Chinese species on tree trunks whereas the ones at Bukit Fraser tend to flit about in the outside branches of trees instead. As to whether I saw the water shrews or not, you'll have to wait for the answer. I'm putting all the night-spotting stuff at the end of the post because night comes after day....
On my first morning I walked the Telekom Loop which is probably the best road for birds. All around Bukit Fraser there are paved roads which are excellent for looking for birds because they all run through forest. There are a lot of trails inside the forest as well but I never seem to see much on those; I like the roadside birding much better. I did do some trails, mainly the short Hemmant Trail and the slightly-longer Bishop Trail, but they are in bad shape at the moment and some points take some scrambling and near-crawling under fallen trunks etc. It was on the Hemmant Trail that I saw my 1300th species of bird (a female Siberian thrush). I did the Bishop Trail because that is where I saw siamang in 2006 (as well as an impressed tortoise which was cool – and still the only tortoise I've seen in the wild) but although I heard some siamang going absolutely nuts with their calling they weren't close enough to be seen. It was pleasant memories though, when I found the spot where I had seen the siamang, and another spot where I had found my first ever giant millipede (but I couldn't remember where I had found the tortoise). You don't usually see anybody except birders on the trails so if you are on one then you usually have it all to yourself. Everyone else seems to just hang around the little town centre and drive up and down the roads in their cars.
There's a longish road between the town centre and the start of the Telekom Loop (so-called because it is a loop road around the top of a hill where Telekom have their towers). Right at the start of the road, on the edge of town, I had a fantastic bird-wave in which, amongst all the common stuff I'd seen in 2006, was a black-eared shrike-babbler which was a lifer. It is always nice seeing a new bird, and it is even better when it is a beautiful one (google a picture to see). Not part of the bird-wave but on the side of the road nearby was another lifer, a male Mugimaki flycatcher. When I say “common stuff” this is actually a rather derogatory term for a lot of really brilliant birds, things like golden babblers, mountain fulvettas, chestnut-capped warblers, mountain tailorbirds, grey-chinned minivets and blue-winged minlas. In 2006 there were silver-eared mesias all over the show, the sort of bird that starts to get annoying because they are so common that their presence almost hides the less common birds. If you google a photo of a silver-eared mesia you might find it hard to believe that a person could get blasé about them, but you do. This time round, while I still saw a few each day, they seem to be far less common. I'm not sure if that is just random chance or if they have actually decreased significantly. Two birds still overly-abundant, perhaps even more so than in 2006, are the chestnut-capped laughing thrush and the long-tailed sibia. The latter in particular is pretty much ubiquitous.
I did the Telekom Loop three times (and once more at night), in both directions. There's no real difference as to whether you go left or right when you reach the start of the Loop. Whichever way you go you are walking uphill first and downhill after. But I preferred taking the left-hand route. On the first morning I saw the good bird-wave at the start of the road before even reaching the Loop, and then barely anything much at all after that; it was one of those dead days you get even at Bukit Fraser. However it was a four-squirrel day on the Loop with two Himalayan striped squirrels (the only two all day which was surprising after the numbers I saw the day before), a grey-bellied squirrel, two red-bellied squirrels and several slender squirrels. Most days turned out to be four-squirrel days at Bukit Fraser. I also saw a greater tree shrew and twice what I was sure were lesser tree shrews. I did some googling to see if lesser tree shrews are found up here because they are mainly a lowland species; I couldn't find anything on them being at Bukit Fraser so I have left it off the list.
On the way up to Bukit Fraser in the taxi I had given a lift to a UK birder called Dom who was walking up the Gap Road, and he reckoned the Telekom Loop was better for him in the afternoon, so the next time I did the Loop I did it later in the day which was indeed better. There was an awesome bird-wave right at the start of the Loop (when going left) which had Javan cuckoo-shrike, greater yellownape woodpeckers, verditer flycatcher and black and crimson oriole amongst the other birds. Further along I found a variable reed snake (
Calamaria lumbricoidea) on the road, so I moved him off to the side so he wouldn't end up like the Malayan flying frog (
Rhacophorus prominanus) I had found the day before, squashed flat on the tarseal. About halfway round I ran into Dom and we watched two consecutive bird-waves passing through the same tree. One of them had sultan tits in it, which were new for me (my fourteenth new species of tit for this trip!). In the same group of trees, but being shy so harder to get a look at than the birds, were some dusky langurs. Dom then continued on up the road and I continued on down the road where I spent some time looking for trapdoor spiders' trap doors in the roadside banks, the location of which I knew about through a lucky meeting with another birder named Jos who had an additional interest in spiders. Remember me talking about the “living fossil” trapdoor spider
Liphistius batuensis at the Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur and how I had always wanted to see a
Liphistius? Well, I found out from Mr. Internet that the trapdoor spiders here are
Liphistius malayanus. How about that. I found one little trap door but I couldn't see the spider when I lifted up the lid. These trapdoor spiders get pretty big and obviously you can tell the size of the spider from the size of the burrow – this trap door was maybe thumbnail-size so belonged to a baby; I didn't find any adults' trap doors unfortunately. There were also some really interesting (and big!) non-trapdoor spider burrows in the banks where the spider had dragged leaves in and lined the burrow entrance with them to make sort of a funnel entrance. Late in the afternoon, further down the road leading up to the start of the Loop, while I was trying to simultaneously watch fire-tufted barbets in a tree on one side of the road and sultan tits in a tree on the other side, I heard a loud “whoosh whoosh whoosh” coming from overhead. I jumped out to where I could see the sky and saw a great hornbill flying overhead. Magnificent bird.
On my third full day at Bukit Fraser I was trying to see siamang. I'd heard them calling frequently but not seen them yet. I have seen them in previous years – both subspecies in fact, in Malaysia and Sumatra – but I wanted to see them again. The New Road was supposed to be good for them so that's where I went. Bukit Fraser has two roads for entering and exiting, one for traffic going up to the town (that one is the “Gap Road” because it comes up from The Gap, but is also known as the “Old Road”) and one for traffic going down (the “New Road”). In times past there was just the Gap Road and being one-lane it was on a timer, as it were: for parts of the day it was open for up-traffic only and for other parts of the day for down-traffic only. The Bukit Fraser town centre is at an altitude of 1150m, while The Gap is at 820m, so as you move down the roads you start to see different birds. Scarlet minivets instead of grey-chinned minivets for example, and things like white-bellied erpornis and greater leafbirds appear. It does mean a fair bit of walking however: the New Road is 9km down to The Gap while the Gap Road is 8km back up to the town centre. The first stretch is easy because it is all downhill, the return walk's a bit of a pain; however the road has fairly regular traffic so it wouldn't be hard to hitch a lift back to the top if you're feeling tired or lazy. I heard a lot of siamang along the New Road but they all remained unseen. I did see three different groups of white-thighed langurs during the day, and a mixed group (a monkey-wave?) of dusky langurs and southern pig-tailed macaques on the New Road. There are six species of primate at Bukit Fraser (two langurs, two macaques, the siamang and the slow loris) and having seen three on this day I thought if I saw any siamang then I would have to try for a full house, but I didn't see any siamang so I didn't bother looking for crab-eating macaques again (I had seen them by chance on my first afternoon, just near the Puncak Inn). The two best birds on the New Road were blue nuthatch, my favourite nuthatch by far, and a pair of wreathed hornbills flying overhead (“whoosh whoosh whoosh”). On the walk back up the Gap Road I was checking out the trees for two mammals in particular, siamang naturally but also colugos. With the colugo I was in luck and found one fairly low down on a trunk and got a few good photos of it. I love it when a long day of walking pays off with something really cool like a colugo. Just as cool was a trilobite larva I found on the road. Again, I have seen them before (on Mt. Kinabalu in Borneo and on Mt. Kerinci in Sumatra – the latter time at night, when I discovered to my surprise that they were bioluminesent!) but when an animal is something like a trilobite larva or a colugo then there is no way anyone could say “bah, already seen it, moving on.” Not so happy were some other animals on the road, but a lot flatter and more dead, including a fairly long but unidentifiable snake (I think it used to be a blue bronzeback
Dendrelaphis cyanachloris) and a giant centipede.
The day after I had walked down the New Road was my final full day at Bukit Fraser. Dom had said he had seen siamang on the road to Jeriau Waterfall a couple of days ago, so I did that one in the morning. On the way I saw some cute little buff-breasted babblers in the undergrowth along the road – no doubt very common but one of those birds that is really sneaky about being seen. Orange-bellied leafbirds were also new for the trip list. I was in luck with the siamang at last, seeing first a half-grown juvenile and then his mother with a new baby on her belly; I don't know where the male was though. They were right by the road and fairly relaxed (i.e. they didn't flee immediately, but by the same token they didn't stick around too long). I saw the juvenile a couple more times at further bends in the road. So I had now seen five of the six primate species present here. Number six was the slow loris, and I only had one more night to look for it.......
And finally we come to the night-time explorations. As you will recall, on the day I arrived I had walked in the afternoon to the Jeriau Waterfall about 5km from the Puncak Inn to see if I could spot Malayan water shrews in the pools there after dark. Before I got to the waterfall it started to rain. There are several shelters dotted about the waterfall area so I got under the one nearest the pool in which I hoped to see the water shrews and waited for the rain to stop. It kept on raining. At dusk the rain suddenly increased dramatically in intensity, and the thunder and lightening made it clear I was in for a miserable walk back to the hotel. I kept waiting, partly for shrews and partly because I hoped the rain would die off in an hour or two. No shrews appeared and the rain did not stop: I did indeed have a miserable walk back to the hotel! All my attempts at spot-lighting while at Bukit Fraser were pretty useless, although only on the first night was it ruined by rain. The second night was perfect for going out looking for night-time animals so I went off down the Gap Road to search for slow loris. Unfortunately my torch decided to choose that night to pack it in. Maybe it has been knocked around too much over my travels but there's obviously some sort of loose connection in there and it kept cutting out. I would fiddle around with it until I got it going again – and five minutes later it would cut out once more. And when it
was going the light was only half-strength, except when it would suddenly flick to full-strength for a few seconds then dim again. It was
really frustrating and after an hour I just gave up and returned to the hotel wthout having seen anything. The next night was again good with no rain, although the lightening over the horizon kept me guessing, but I was reduced to trying to spot-light with my little LED torch – one of those ones that are about finger length – which was about as much use as going out bird-watching after having smeared vaseline over your binocular lenses. Again I saw nothing and gave up after a couple of hours. Fourth night, again good weather, and I had borrowed a torch from the Puncak Inn security. It was a good torch actually, the light carried well and it had one of those twisty ends for narrowing or widening the beam; I think I will buy that one when I get back to KL. I spent hours on the Gap Road and still could not find a slow loris! I know they are common on the Gap Road – I actually know someone who saw five there in one night a couple of years ago; and the guy in the little shop just where the road hits the town centre says they see them on the power lines outside sometimes – but I didn't pick up any eye-shine from any sort of animal at all, let alone a loris. There were only two noteworthy events of the night. First some sort of cricket or katydid with a call so strong that I could hear it easily a couple of hundred metres away and when standing next to it almost deafening. I couldn't actually see it but judging by the magnitude of its call I would estimate that it was approximately the size of a capybara. The second thing was a peninsula pit-viper (
Trimeresurus fucatus) squashed on the road which had definitely not been there when I was walking up the road earlier in the day, about four hours prior. When out at night I had to keep remembering to make sure the road was clear as I walked – of the three snakes I had seen on the roads (two dead and one alive), just one (the pit-viper) was venomous but it would hardly have done my jungle-cred any good if I was bitten while out looking for lorises!
On my last night I started out at the Telekom Loop because I wanted to try to find a trapdoor spider and to see the mygalomorphs (tarantulas) that lived in the big burrows I mentioned earlier. The first thing was to find the burrows. What was weird was that there were lots of the burrows along the roadside bank and during the day they were quite obvious because they are open burrows (not trapdoors) but I had a devil of a job trying to find one by torchlight at night. I had thought I'd be able to get their locations by getting eye-shine from the spiders but when I finally found one I discovered that they weren't sitting right at the entrance as expected but crouched just inside so the torch couldn't pick them out. I used a long twig to tickle at the entrance and the spider rushed out to grab what it thought was an insect, but quickly retreated before I could get a photo. I gave it another go and this time the spider stayed out, probably wondering where the heck the insect was! In theory I like spiders, in actuality they tend to freak me out, especially when they are really big and scary! If you hold out your first two fingers next to each other, the first two joints would be about the length and breadth of this spider's body. That is an approximation: I didn't actually use my fingers to get an accurate measurement of the spider because I am allergic to deadly spider bites. What I want to know, if there are any spider-men reading this, is how do the spiders dig the burrows? Do they use their fangs? The burrows are perfectly round, the perfect size for the spiders' body, and they go straight back into the bank so they aren't root-holes or something which the spider has moved into, they are actual constructed burrows. Next I re-found the burrow of the trapdoor spider which was easy because I knew its exact location right at the end of the bank. I lifted the lid with a twig and the spider was sitting right there. He was just a little bubby spider, maybe fingernail size, so I didn't need to whimper in fear when I saw him. I couldn't get a photo of this one because I needed one hand to hold the twig keeping the lid open, one hand to hold the torch, and a third hand for the camera. Also the spider kept swivelling round to grab the lid and pull it closed. Whenever I lifted the lid he would glare at me, spin around in the entrance, wrap his legs round the lid, pull it closed, and then hold it down from the inside. He was cute as a button that one. And so now I have finally seen a
Liphistius. I spent a couple of hours on the Loop looking for lorises with no luck and then went to the Gap Road but it started raining just after I got there, and once it starts raining at Bukit Fraser it really starts raining, so I returned to the hotel. Slow loris still reigns supreme, but I shall get him one day!
If you want to know what sort of mammals can be found at night here – you know, if you're not me – then check out this site:
http://www.cicadatree.org.sg/discoverydiary_mammalsoffrasershill.html (and yes that is a photo of a pangolin on there, damn it). If I lived in Malaysia I would be up at Bukit Fraser
all the time!!
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nic
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Merry Christmas!!!!!!!
I hope you get a slow loris for Christmas. I got a DOC trip to Maud Is. And 2 baby chickens. Have fun in Myanmar!!