Thanks to all and........ save Betty!!

Hi all, and especially our recently-departed volunteers,

As Dave mentioned, our final group of volunteers for this year have now bid us all a fond farewell, so the "quiet season" is now upon us. It's always sad to see people leave camp after spending so long living and working together, and that's especially so with groups as fun and hard-working as this one. Werewolf competitions will be much less fun and our most numerous friends for the next few months will be the dreaded mosquitoes, which are coming out in force now the rains are here!

We achieved an impressive amount during this last couple of months - Dave saw a great many more kelasi (red langurs) than he would have otherwise; we performed a great wee study on turtles (see pictures to right and below, showing us measuring turtle weights in the field), which had never been studied before in peat-swamp forest; planted a number of seedlings in the sedge (see Helen's last post); measured a number of plots of saplings planted in previous years to assess their survival (some did better than others, and more survived closer to the forest edge); helped with our on-going research on forest phenology, orang-utan density surveys and camera traps (see posts by Susan); and everyone got to see a fantastic array of wildlife, including orang-utans, gibbons, kelasi, macaques, sun bears, mouse deer, monitor lizards, numerous birds and many others - woo!!!


Our recent turtle project has been not only novel, but has produced some interesting findings and has been great fun to work on. As the first study ever (to our knowledge) on turtles in peat-swamp forest in Kalimantan, anything we found was going to be valuable. This study was conducted at the end of a long dry season, but nevertheless, we still managed to spot and record the details of a few turtles in canals, though we had less success with traps in the river, probably because of the unusually low water levels this year, due to this year's El Nino event. Talks with local fishermen have also revealed useful information regarding turtle by-catches, hunting and trade. Depressing information maybe, but turtles are rapid breeders and the results of the forest surveys indicate that there is still some hope remaining.

So thanks to all for a great last group and here's looking forward to 2010!

P.S. Wish us well with the mozzies and stumbling around the soon-to-be flooded wet-season forest!!

Re-planting Project

Hello, it's Helen Here, I have an update from the field on our reforestation project. Over the last 3 weeks, we have planted the remainder of Laura's seedling into the sedge (photo to the left).

The Sedge area was once riverine forest, but about 50 years ago it was burnt. Now each El nino year (which extends the dry season here), this area burns, thus the peat is very shallow and no trees grow. However, we are trying to see if we can re-forest this area. At the moment we have planted 8 species. Six of these species were left over from Laura Graham (a PhD student who was looking at regeneration) and 1 species was collected from the village across the river from our camp. This species (Galam) is adapted to surviving under water, and out in the open. So, all in all over 600 trees have been planted. It is November now and the rains have finally come, thus the area will be flooded, and the saplings will be under about 2 meters of water for about 6 months; so it will not be until next May/June 2010 that we will have access to the sedge again, and know if any of our seedlings have survived.

Our project is a continuation of Laura’s project, except next year we will be planting species which naturally occur near the forest edge. In conjunction we will also try some species which do not grow on the forest edge, but are pioneer species. We will collect seeds of these species now for germination in our nursery. We will also collect seedling for those species which are not fruiting, and grow them in the nursery, ready to plant in July/August next year 2010.


I will keep you up dated on our activities. Before I say good BYE, however, I would like to say a very BIG thanks to everyone (both OuTrop staff and vols) for helping clear, cut, plant and measure all seedlings, in what is a very very hot and unpleasant area to work in. So THANKS to everyone, it is much appreciated 

Tanjung Puting and the End of the Volunteer Season

Hello all,

I'm writing this now from a very quiet camp: the volunteer season is over and we're adjusting back to life without them - and it takes a while! Another wonderful and very hard-working bunch (especially on my project!) has just departed, with a good time being had by all.

This "volly" season was topped off with a fantastic trip to Tanjung Puting National Park in the southwestern corner of Central Kalimantan, home to Professor Birute Galdikas' orang-utan research projects and a dizzying array of biodiversity. The trip consisted of pootling up and down up the Sekonyer river searching for primates, birds and crocodiles, being fed fantastic food, and then stopping off at the Camp Leakey Research Facility to see some of the work going on there. Dozens of proboscis monkey and long-tailed macaque groups were sighted, as well as silver langurs, orang-utans, false gharials, hornbills, kingfishers and broadbills.

The first night was spent moored up next to Camp Leakey with a long-tailed macaque group in their sleeping tree nearby, while the second night was spent watching silver langurs settle for the night and later, fireflies dancing above the water on the opposite bank. Doesn't get much better than that!

The trip was a wonderful way to end a terrific volunteer season. Now its time to adjust to the wet season way of life once again - a much more sedate affair! Thanks to all our volunteers in 2009 for continuing to help make this project such a success. Here's looking forward to season 2010!

Sampai nanti,
Dave (photos by me, please click for a better look...)

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New baby gibbon Chilli

Introducing new baby Chilli from Group C - he/she is the 4th offspring (that we know of) of mum Cokolat and dad Captain Kalaweit and is a new brother or sister for Ceeka and Cynthia. The whole OuTrop team are very pleased with this latest arrival born on 4th November 2009

Inaugural Bornean Wildcat Workshop in Sabah

Dr Susan Cheyne was in Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) last week to attend an international workshop entitled "First Steps towards the Conservation of Wildcats in Sabah". This workshop was organised by the Bornean Wildcat and Clouded Leopard Project, collaborators of OuTrop and our cat research here in Indonesia.
The workshop was attended by Malaysian and International scientists who are working for the conservation and increased understanding of these elusive cats.
Susan presented the preliminary results of the Sabangau work at the workshop. While we do not have the same level of detailed information as the long-term research in Sabah, the Sabangau results were comparable to our Malaysian colleagues and showed some new and interesting information about these cats.

In news from camp, we have another clouded leopard male. This means we have 3 confirmed males and 1 female clouded leopard. Our project remains ongoing and we are striving to survey more of the forest and to collect more detailed habitat data about the camera locations to help understand how the cats (and other animals) are using the forest.

Gibbon blog for October

October has proven to be quite an exciting month with new babies, sleeping trees, more group interactions and longer follows on the less habituated groups. It was also time for the third volunteer group to experience the very early morning wake up and a hectic day of following our slightly crazy gibbons. They were all very lucky as they got to witness lots of exciting events with the gibbon groups.

Click on Full Post to find out more and see the latest camera trap photos.

Group C and Karate were again observed having another very long interaction. The two groups ended up hanging out for 1hour and 45 minutes after we found them together at the same location as last month. We also had a volunteer with us, so Amy got loads of great photos and saw 9 gibbons all within 20m of each other. It seemed as though Captain Kalaweit (adult male from Group C) had a strong interest in Chunli (adult female from Karate) as he approached her several times throughout the interaction. This resulted in lots of aggressive chases between Captain and Brucelee. This is the third interaction of this nature we have witnessed in the last couple of months and we are unsure why they are spending time together.

We have had the first ever sightings of two new babies…. One baby from the less habituated group, Tower, which Mark and Lis found when checking for fires up the observation tower. The two were very lucky as they got a unique bird’s-eye view of the adult male (Titus), female (Tallulah) and her baby (newly named as Terry) in their sleeping trees. The following morning Tallulah and Terry were able to be followed for 40 minutes by Aman, Yudi and Paul (a volunteer)!

Coklat and Chilli taken by Chris Nall

Yesterday myself and Chris (another volunteer) were over the moon to discover that Coklat (pronounced chocolate) from Group C had given birth to an infant late afternoon or during the night! It was amazing to see this tiny hairless alien-like baby cuddling Coklat. Coklat is a very popular gibbon here at Sabangau, known for her grumpy face and crazy Einstein hair, so everyone has had lots of name suggestions for her baby. After going through loads of ‘C’ names we finally came up with Chilli. For the last 2 years we have all been under the impression that Coklat was just a fat gibbon as she was easily distinguished by her enormous belly, but given that the gestation period for gibbons is only 8 months maybe she’s a bit of both. Chris was able to take some great photos of day old Chilli.

Malam Malam (Diospyros bantamensis) has come into fruit, which is considered by the Indonesian guys here to be the gibbons’ favourite food in the forest. This is quite obvious as we have spent a lot of time following focal individuals from tree to tree as they feed on this fruit. Also epiphytes, ant larvae and water were seen being consumed by numerous individuals in October.

The orangutan behaviour team also came across the sleeping trees for Group C while one of their orangutans was making his night nest. The orangutan and gibbons seemed to have no interest in one another even though they all ended up spending the night within 30 meters of each other.

Camera traps have also been extremely exciting and eventful during the last few weeks, with the first ever photos taken of a female clouded leopard Neofelis nebulosa in the Sabangau! More photos of marble cats Pardofelis marmorata, leopard cats Prionailurus bengalenis and flat headed cats Prionailurus planiceps were also captured. Also, the first known sighting of a banded linsang Prionodon linsang in Sabangau was caught on camera on the 25th October. This species was not known to be found in the Sabangau forest up until the 5th November when the cameras were checked!!!!

Banded Lindsang Prionodon linsang

Earth Report on Fires in Kalimantan

The third in the trilogy of today's fire-related posts is to let you know of a new short video available online that was produced by tve's Earth Report, part of a longer documentary that was shown on BBC World News last month. This footage was taken during September, and features Dr Suwido Limin, Director of our Indonesian counterparts CIMTROP and long-term partner of OuTrop, visiting Kalampangan and demonstrating the intense heat generated by peat fires.

Watch the video here

Dr Suwido Limin having a 'Hamlet' moment.

Mapping Fire Hotspots - Launch of the FireWatch Indonesia Project

Followers of past and recent fires in Kalimantan will be familiar with hotspot maps - images showing when and where fires occurred. These are generated using satellite technology, with sensors identifying areas of extreme heat, and then mapping their location. With fires threatening to return following recent rain, we are watching these maps with interest. For example, here is a hotspot map for Southern Borneo for the first week in September 2009, sourced from the University of Maryland's FIRMS Web Fire Mapper. (Click on the image if you want more detail)



Nearly all the spots are the result of land-owners clearing their land by fire - sometimes the landowners are small-scale farmers, sometimes they are large plantation companies. Sometimes the land-owners assiduously tend the fires and keep them within their plot, but in many cases the fires get out of control and spread to nearby forest or peatland. The big cluster of hotspots in the south-east is the ex-mega-rice project, the failed agricultural conversion project that resulted in over a million hectares of drained, degraded, cleared and burned peatland. Sabangau is directly to the west of this, the little oasis of green with hardly any hotspots, but still major severe risk of fire.

The latest hotspot mapping service was launched in Jakarta last week, the FireWatch Indonesia Project, which is a collaborative project between Indonesian and Australian government Departments. This generates fire monitoring information for the whole of Indonesia including near real-time monitoring of active fires. This resource also allows overlays of many different images and map elements and promises to upgrade to include burnt area datasets and time-series analysis of hotspots. For example, here is the current (midday, Tuesday 2nd November 2009), zoomed-in image of Sabangau (to the west) and the neighbouring mega-rice area (to the east) showing active fires; overlaid on radar imagery which delineates areas of forest (green) and non-forest (pink-purple-blue).

Again, click on the image to see more detail. Fire hotspots recorded within the last 12 hours are shown in red, and the developers of this site claim it will upload new hotspots within one hour of their being detected. The site could be of immense help for fire-fighters on the ground, enabling early detection of fires and hopefully minimising their spread, although fire-fighting capacity still needs to be radically improved.

Fires revisited

In previous posts I talked about the rains coming and the fires stopping. Well, that was partly true - we had a sustained period of rain that extinguished many fires and cleared all the smoke from the air. But maybe I spoke too soon. Peat fires are notoriously difficult to completely put out - the fires hold extreme temperatures, and the peat burns so slowly, that there isn't a single fire-front but a mass of hot, burning peat covering many hectares which requires huge amounts of water to douse - water that can only really come from a rising water table. The rains, meanwhile, have been sporadic and although we have had several big thunderstorms, the volume of water falling has not been huge. As a result there are still many fires smouldering, and every time we have 3 or more days without rain, they gain in intensity and the smoke haze drifts back.

The good news is that even sporadic rain makes it difficult for new fires to take hold, particularly in forested areas; and CIMTROP's fire-fighters have gained control over the fires in Kalampangan. The bad news is that there are still peatlands burning and emitting CO2, we still have to put up with the smoke pollution and the weather forecasts are still suggesting that drought conditions will persist into the new year.

A New Project!

Hello all,

Continuing the theme of introductions, here comes mine! My name is David Smith, from Oxford in England and I've returned to the Sabangau Forest to begin a brand new project studying the red langurs, or kelasi as they are known in the local language. I first came to Sabangau last year as the Gibbon Behavioural Project Field Manager for six months and as the tradition here seems to go, have returned for a two year study (minimum...) of these wonderful leaf-eating monkeys in this strange and unique habitat!

I have been back in Borneo for three weeks now, and the project is well underway. Not much is really known about the endemic kelasi. They've only ever been studied in a handful of sites across Borneo, and only three studies have yielded published results, so this study is very exciting indeed. Furthermore, kelasi populations whose ranges are restricted exclusively to peat swamps have never been studied, so this is another proud first for the Sabangau Forest! The kelasi are leaf eating monkeys with specialised stomachs which allow them to digest the tough fibrous foliage that makes up approximately 35% of their diet. They live in groups of between three and ten individuals, comprising an adult male, his mating females and their offspring. They are a beautiful brick red colour with long tails and blueish faces, characteristics which one would expect would make them unmissable in the forest. Unfortunately however, in a dense forest like the Sabangau, this is all too often not the case....!

Currently, my research is focusing on density estimates of the kelasi - discovering how the groups within our "behavioural grid" are distributed, exactly how many groups are in this habitat type and how many individuals are in each group - an essential starting point for assessing their conservation status. This work requires a large survey effort, which could not be done without the work of our excellent volunteers. The surveys will be repeated next year at the start of the dry season in the other two habitat types of the Sabangau for comparison purposes. Once this initial stage has been completed, we can move on to selecting groups for habituation, the process of familiarising the kelasi to our presence to the point where we can obtain information on their behaviour and feeding habits without them constantly running away from us, which they currently do consistantly and at great speed! The project will then be gathering a (minimum of a) years' continuous feeding and behavioural data, essential for the conservation planning that is so vital here on Borneo. All the new and unique information about kelasi in peat swamps will be revealed here on the blog as it is discovered, so keep reading!

Sampai junpa lagi! (Until we meet again...)
Dave