30 MAY 09

We spent a week doing hardcore, statistical computerisation with our supervisor who flew out from the United Kingdom. It was a busy week at the centre, with our boss, the orangutan man and a friend from Kota Kinabalu also being present, as well as two zoo keepers from America! Despite my fear of numbers I surprised myself by surviving the intensive few days, and came away with what I hope to be an understanding of how to go about working with this orangutan data. I have to keep specifying 'orangutan data' to remind me why I'm doing it! Our supervisor is also 'a bird man', which was rather nice as we could spend two mornings netting and ringing birds. We caught several that had been ringed last year on the field course, so it was satisfying to know that at least some of our feathered friends are just as alive and well (and stupid/blind) as they were last year!

We drove the boat to deposit both our supervisor and Joao at Batu Putih. I can't begin to understand where the last three months have gone, but Joao (aka Spoonface, the Portuguese volunteer) has reached the end of his time here with us and has disappeared back to Portugal. Chloe and I had great intentions to pick up some Portuguese whilst he was here, but this sentence is all I can muster:
'Eu gosto de macacos, de vinho e de queijo'
which translates as 'I like monkeys, wine and cheese'.
Although we haven't exactly mastered the language, I feel this is a good start and am now confident that I could go to Lisbon and not go hungry or thirsty, and if I'm lucky I may find someone who also likes monkeys...

20 MAY 09

TARSIER!!!

I went out on a nightwalk with Rachel and Ridzwan again, doing what we call 'point sampling'. On this type of 'monkey mission' we walk to pre-decided points along a transect (straight trail), turn our head-torches off for five minutes, stand silently in the dark, turn on the lights and try to find nocturnal primates.
On this particular walk I'd fully resigned myself to the fact that we rarely encounter slow lorises or western tarsiers and was holding out hopes of catching a glimpse of a civet or an especially large frog. Up until this point we'd mostly found things whilst walking between points, as opposed to whilst at points, and so I'd spent the first three points trying to think of song titles beginning with each letter of the alphabet.
Amazingly, at our fourth surveying point, Rachel spotted a tarsier! They're peculiar creatures, resembling something caught between a gremlin and a teddy bear. The resulting effect is that of a small, evil-looking bundle of fur that doesn't want to be messed with. Rachel managed to get the data she needed and we left 'Samson' to it. This is the third tarsier spotted at the field centre, but for me it was a first and it's a sighting most people interested in primates would kill for!

16 MAY 09

He came back.

After another night of gnawing I wasn't very impressed, so I set out another trap last night. I caught him on the second night after his original capture, kept him in a cage (with food and water) until the following lunchtime and sent him on a boat down the river. The rat is apparently now happy and looking for a new home far, far away.

Thank goodness for that.

15 MAY 09

We returned from Cambodia safely, albeit tiredly, last week. It didn’t help that on arrival at Kota Kinabalu International Airport we decided to wait for the bus. They come every hour so we wouldn’t have to wait long. Naturally the bus came when Chloe was in the toilet, and the security guards took great pleasure in telling us that there wouldn’t be another one for at least two hours. Eventually we gave in and took a taxi into town. We spent Saturday in town eating and shopping with Francoise, LiYing and Yu Li before heading back to the jungle on the tedious six hour bus journey.
During the last week I’ve been occupying myself with three main tasks:
1. Getting my work sorted before our supervisor arrives
2. The occasional night walk with Rachel and Ridzwan or helping Joao with his trapping
3. Rat Protection

Although my interests lie in conservation it’s not protection of the rat that I’m concerned with at the moment. There’s one particularly evil rat that has now munched its way through two pairs of trousers, two shirts, three bags, a toothbrush and an inflatable kangaroo. And just to torment me a little more he spends all night either running around my room or gnawing at my door.

The first stage of Operation Rat Attack involved merely covering the hole in my door with gaffa tape. This has been successful for some time now, but for some reason the rat is on a real mission to enter my room. Since the tape ceased to be of any use when we returned, and having been severely annoyed at the loss of my monkey bag, I decided it was time for drastic action. Paper, cardboard, tape and wood are obviously no match for my attacker so I set off on a hunt for something metal. If nothing else it’ll give him toothache if he insists on chewing at my door. The only moveable metal item I could find was a water bottle left by Verity after the field course; other options included the sink and the metal pipe running down the outside of the house if I were able to detach them from the wall. A highly technical application of tape and a precise positioning of the bottle to cover the inside of the hole followed by further tape application would, I hoped, stop our rodent friend from entering my room. I took it a step further by attaching a piece of string to the back of my door which could be hooked up to a bungee cord outside my room to keep the door shut. As I don’t have a key for my door, the rat had been entering whilst we were at dinner and causing havoc before the lights even went out. All of this worked wonders. However a new problem arose: by keeping the rat out of my room it then focussed all of its energies on trying to gnaw its way through my defences, resulting in my average sleeping time reducing significantly. My solutions to this problem included throwing things at the door whenever the chewing began and spraying the door with mosquito repellent in the hopes that it also repelled rodents. No such luck.

Eventually I gave in and set a trap. I closed my door and locked it from the inside. Hearing an almighty ‘clunk’ I tried to unlock my door, only to find that the locking mechanism had come unattached from the locky-unlock-knob thing (technical term). So I was now locked inside my room. Fortunately I had my nifty multi-tool to hand and after some fiddling with various implements I managed to dislodge the lock with the pliers. Wondering how I could have such an unlucky door I propped a chair up against it and retired to bed. The rat didn’t wait long and after only seven minutes I heard the trap spring shut. I tried to make him apologise for destroying everything and keeping me awake but he just carried on sniffing around his cell looking slightly confused. At least he had an oil palm kernel to munch on until morning. Morning came and the rat was released a little way from the field centre... I now look forward to a good night’s sleep!
The Prisoner of War


The Rat-Prevention Mechanism: Mark II


My travelling shirt...

07 MAY 2009

I'm sat in the 'Singing Tree Cafe', Siem Reap, Cambodia.
We eventually arrived after spending 10 hours in Kuala Lumpur airport. It's a nice airport but not nice enough for that! We didn't manage to catch any sleep as we had to stay awake to keep an eye on the luggage. After watching the 'Friends' episode where Ross explains the concept of 'Oonagi'(vigilance in self defense, basically), we were in a heightened state of Oonagi all night, not helped by a phone call from my mother warning me not to get locked up in a Cambodian prison. Not that it's on the top of my 'to do' list...! We only had to relocate ourselves once after an Indian gentleman insisted on trying to sustain a conversation at 3am along the lines of 'will your father pay for me to come to England?'. I think I was a little rude to him but it's not the sort of chitchat we really wanted at that time of the morning!

The temples at Angkor are stunningly impressive. We can consider ourselves fully templed-out now, having very much made the most of our three day pass. Ta Prohm, the Tomb Raider temple, was visited twice! Of course we attempted a movie remake, earning us some strange looks from tourists pretending not to have seen the film... I'm sure they weren't all there to discover the intricacies of Khmer architecture though... My language skills were really put to the test on out second visit, with a German couple wanting tourist information and a French group assuming that I was a Swiss artist. My French is far better than my limited German phrases from school but I found trying to establish why they thought I was an artist from Switzerland far harder going than talking to the Germans. It was actually quite fun... I managed to get across what we're doing this year by saying 'I study biology. One year in Malaysia. Many tree. Biology. Apes.'and they seemed delighted to have such an intelligent conversation with someone other than their guide who seemed to be speaking something from another planet. I never did work out what the French were whittling on about but they mentioned mountains more than once.

Yesterday we cycled out to see Tonle Sap lake but didn't fancy paying for the boat ride at the other end. As a result we saw only mud and a police checkpoint. The Slovenian we'd picked up along the way and a guy from the village who knew far too much about Southampton Football Club were interesting company for our cycle back to town though. We then went out to the temples, covering over 50 km in the blistering heat! On the way back I saw something completely unexpected... macaques throwing themselves into the moat surrounding Angkor Wat... really strange!

01 MAY 09

...and then we missed the plane.

Well, not so much missed it as Air Asia kindly moved the departure time forward an hour without telling us! So we're in KK for another night, very, very kindly being looked after by Francoise, and intend to fly out to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow evening! We've managed to move all of our flights over a day as the next available flight doesn't leave until tomorrow morning, half an hour AFTER the connecting flight departs for Siem Reap!

You can imagine how pleased I was at the airport! Especially to be told that they couldn't let us know because I'd given them an international number. Assuming, then, that I'd given a parent's mobile number to counteract any potential 'no signal in the jungle' complications I was a tad irritated to spy on their computers that I had, in fact, given my Malaysian number. So nobody had tried to contact us, hence we arrived at the airport merely 15 minutes after our aeroplane had taken to the night sky.

Fantabulous.