Borneo - primates, elephants and birds

 It had been a while since I had taken a really long vacation, and a trip across a couple of countries in the southeast Asian side could make it a fairly varied vacation. Coming out to Malaysia, the first stop on the trip was to the island of Borneo. A 3 hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to Sandakkan got us to the island in the evening. We got to know from the hotel desk that there was a mix-up on the pick up early next day from our resort, so we took a Grab to the rain-forest development center for an early morning birding session. The entire area is huge, and we were able to cover a small part of it, but where we really spent time is on the canopy walk, which allowed us to get a peek at the top of the trees. Looking at the vegetation, we would see nothing at the ground level. While there were a multitude of bulbuls, green ioras and other smaller birds, the pick of the morning were the black and yellow broadbill, a giant squirrel and hawk. A couple of kingfishers - collared and stork billed made their appearance as we hurried to the hotel and then to a long drive back to resort.

The journey by road was largely through farmlands, and some of the other resorts, bring you in by boat which is more of a safari than a transfer, however we had booked late, and our resort didnt have the boats, so we missed that. The safaris though more than made up for the missed boatride. Being, a tropical rain forest sliced through by a river in these parts, so all trips into the jungle were by boats. With the dense trees blocking out most views inside, we scanned the banks and treetops for the wildlife. We caught a herd of pygmy elephants crossing the river a couple of times and a crocodile lazing out in front of the resort frequently while monitor lizards laze out on the banks during the day. A couple of mangrove snakes were spotted occasionally. A civet, a slow loris and a few warthogs would visit the resort at night for leftovers and fruits that the nearby people left out.

Among the primates, the macaques were the easiest to find, with some of them making their way into the resort frequently as well. The proboscis monkeys were the next most abundant primates, with quite a few groups foraging near the banks. We also spotted a couple of leaf macaques, but the main draw were the orangutans. After the first few safaris, we were spotting quite a few of them early in the morning or late evenings. The bad light made photographing them difficult, but we spotted quite a few of them including a mother with a baby.

The bird life though was what kept us really busy. We found 7 of the 8 species of hornbills found in Borneo after some relentless searches. The afternoon boat-rides, got us a bunch of raptors - sea eagles, fish eagles, hawk eagles along with woodpeckers, adjutants and raptors. Evenings would send green pigeons and imperial pigeons flying about. We saw owls and kingfishers in the night safari while dollarbirds and black and red broadbills basked in the sunlight during the day. Most birds were photographed flying over the river, and other than the pigeons and hornbills, a falconet was a welcome surprise. A total of 8 boat rides later, we would have wanted more despite the wildlife we were able to see.