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!
No comments:
Post a Comment