07 JUL 09

Hello again!

It's a very busy week. The Cardiff students have arrived for this year's field course, and there are about 34 people milling about the centre today. So far it's gone very well, with the major drama being partly my fault. I lent a butterfly net to some colleagues in Sukau, not realising that it was, infact, our only net. I was happily listening to a talk about butterfly catching when it dawned on me that nobody would be catching any butterflies at all if we didn't get the net back. Unfortunately this only occured to me at ten o'clock at night! Frantic phonecalls ensued and eventually we managed to locate the net and arrange for it to be picked up the next day. I hopped on the boat to pick it up at Batu Puteh after finishing our 5.30am monkey-survey!

I've been allocated to the primate surveys, which means that we start very early and finish quite late, but have most of the day off in between. This is just as well as we still have a mountain of work to get done before we depart the jungle next week. As a result I'm quite sleepy and minorly panicking about getting everything finished but otherwise fine. It's nice to have some excited, new faces to talk to at mealtimes.

I'll write more when I get the chance.
Much love,
Rachel x

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!