Brunei bruisings and musings
Part of the trip -
Brunei - Tropical Ecology 1
The rain has brought brief respite from my constant companions of the last four days, or if not constant, then at least whenever I have tried to spend any time sitting quietly to drink in my surro
The rain has brought brief respite from my constant companions of the last four days, or if not constant, then at least whenever I have tried to spend any time sitting quietly to drink in my surroundings or have been perched statuesque while waiting for a trick of the light. The constant companions I refer to are not my students but bees. Not just the little stingless sweat bees that tickle away at ones ankles while lapping fervently at bodily waste products and which are no bother at all. No, giant Asian honey bees which have a similar penchant for sweat but with the added annoying habit of creeping between ones toes and under ones clothes to get best access, thereby forever trapping themselves and venting their frustration in an uncomfortable fashion... at least for me. Earlier, I lay along a log near the streambed ambushing Rajah Brookes' birdwing butterflies as they too sought salts and I sustained five stings in less than ten minutes!
That streambed is now hidden below a torrent of leaf-strewn water but in no time it will subside and return to be pristine and babbling, the gin-clear Belalong river in Ulu Temburong, and I'll avail myself of its cooling qualities while snorkelling among some of the weirdest fish on the planet. The sucker fishes of Borneo are like vacuum cleaners in fish-form, and as their name implies, they have highly modified pectoral and pelvic fins to create a sucker disc on the underside, while the head has taken on the profiling of a Formula One spoiler to create down force in the turbulent glides and riffles. Thus, they can maintain position clamped to the rocky stream-bed and leave trails across the cobbles where they have rasped off the biofilm. Yes, these plucky little suckers are vegetarian. They have also evolved incredible colour morphs: blues and purples, greens and pinks, some with stripes and dots to boot... marvellous in miniature as they rarely exceed two inches. Mental note to self: underwater camera next year.
Fresh rain had encouraged amphibians abroad. I stumbled across a walking pile of leaves yesterday, which, upon closer inspection had morphed into a horned toad. So confident was she in her unique cloak of camouflage that she did not attempt to escape from my clutch, and when I placed her upon a suitable background for a shot, I could position her with ease, even to the extent of raising her chin. She was a she, I surmised from her ample girth. A researcher at the University of Brunei Darussalam Kuala Belalong Field Centre (my home for the week) lost one of his tagged river frogs last night. Several hours of careful radio-tracking resulted in the triangulation of nine feet of rat snake coiled in a tree, and with thoughts of reticulated python fangs having to be levered out of my left hand with a Bic biro while the rest of the snake was simultaneously unravelled from my right arm in a similar encounter last year, I decided retreat was the best option... ecology in action!
The rain had also given me some time to contemplate closely the diversity of form in the tropical plants surrounding me. Almost every plant of any size had a plethora of smaller epiphytes using and/or abusing their position. Light and space are at a premium in the rainforest and plants are cut-throat neighbours it seems. In particular I had noticed drip-tips. Plants need to shed the rainfall from their leaves ASAP, partly for weight reasons, but also because there are numerous orchid species which would soon take root on their very surface if given an opportunity. Orchids may be plants that many will be familiar with. Fewer may appreciate the etymology of orchid, deriving from the Greek for testicles.
But what of cuddly, charismatic megafauna? No orang utan in this neck of the Borneo rainforest... well, not strictly true; there are, and clouded leopard, and sun bear, and a whole host of weird and wonderful forest dwellers but rainforest being rainforest means that more often than not, it is a case of 'See that flailing tree branch... well a giant squirrel just left it and it's now in the midst of that thicket'. I've ticked off some primates such as maroon langur with their magnificent mohawks and awoken to the whooping of gibbon. I sat sipping steaming coffee while two females swapped tall tales from ridge to ridge and finally caught my glimpse of an arm-swinging ape in the canopy. I've bagged a host of colugo in the mangroves of Selirong... the so-called flying lemur which isn't a lemur and cannot fly and resembles road-kill squirrel plastered onto a tree trunk. Less megafauna, more micro-, I have spent several hours with much more amenable plain pygmy squirrels... that's not me being derogatory, they're called plain pygmy squirrels... shrieking wildly (that's not me either) as they hurtle up and down vertical trunks at a pace that makes the eye water just trying to follow them let alone photograph them. Especially as all in, including their miniature bottle-brush tails, they're at most four inches.
I've seen some weird and wonderful birds too... racket-tailed drongo, crimson-breasted flowerpeckers, and blue-winged leafbirds are all that their names suggest. One pair of rhinoceros hornbills taunts me by flying back and forth across the Belalong stream but they go from emergent to emergent. These emergents are the 40-50m tall trees that push through the canopy, the canopy that is hoisted a further 150m above me by the steep-sided relief of the Belalong valley. So, although I can clearly view those magnificent casked beaks through my bins, I am left pictureless and will have to turn to AngelaR's video upon my return. My one hornbill trophy was opportunistic to say the least. I had clambered up a tree at Tasek Merimbun 10 days earlier to capture a rainbow and then was treated to a fabulous electrical storm. Soon, sharing my part of the forest was a spectacular southern pied hornbill which seemed intrigued by the clad ape on the branch. Closer to home or more precisely, my posterior, was a platoon of large and well-mandible'd ants that took umbrage to my presence, let me know it, and caused me to fall from my perch mid-shot. However, not before I had managed to capture fork-lightning across the rainbow that was stained sepia by the approaching storm.
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