Our drive from Sepilok to Tabin Wildlife Reserve was another depressing roll through acres and acres of denuded jungle. We stopped in a tourism office for the reserve in the town of Lahad Datu, the only large town on the way to the reserve, where we were each given a nice 120 page paperback book about the reserve. It talks about the wildlife, the ecosystem, the resort where we would be staying, and then devotes the last chapter to a lame defense of the oil-palm industry and tries to make a case for how everyone can work together in harmony. While I think cooperation is great, whitewashing the destruction caused by the oil-palm plantations is not. If the industry made any real attempt to protect any of the ecosystem I would be more lienient in my criticism, but when they decimate everything across the landscape and leave a miniscule 50m of jungle only along one major river in all of Sabah, it is disgusting.
We left Lahad Datu and soon turned onto a dirt road that wound through more oil-palm plantations. Occasionally we would end up following a tractor pulling a trailer filled with oil-palm fruit clusters, which it picked up along the road. Workers cut the fruit clusters down and pile them like trash bags by the side of the road.
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| Oil Palm Fruit | Oil Palm Fruit |
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| Oil Palm | Oil Palm |
At one point a large Monitor Lizard crossed the road, but didn't stay long enough to get a good picture.
Most of the Tabin Wildlife Reserve is recovering jungle; recovering because it has been previously logged, and is secondary forest. There is a small core area of unlogged terrain in the middle of the reserve. The Tabin Wildlife Resort is located in the secondary forest in the southwest part of the reserve. As we got closer to the resort, we were traveling down a dirt road with oil-palm plantation on one side and secondary jungle regenerating on the other. It was a pretty dramatic difference. Occasionally we would come upon a huge tree two or three times taller than anything in the regenerating forest; it would always be one of the "trash" trees left during logging operations because it was commercially useless. The tree, a Tualang or Mengaris , was not taken for timber because it is hollow. It can grow up to 80m (~250 ft) tall and has a very smooth lower trunk with few branches. Sometimes there are honey combs in its upper branches, but none of the large mammals can get up there to eat it! I kept trying imagine the whole forest having trees poking up which were that tall. Wow! What a place for a tree house!
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| Monitor Lizard | Tualong Tree
Note Oil Palms on Left, Secondary Forest Regenration on Right |
We got to Tabin Wildlife Resort and settled into our rooms -- they were great! We stayed in simple cabins set along a creek with a back balcony overlooking the creek; we could relax in privacy and watch birds and anything else that wandered along. There were five or six cabins along the creek, and another set on a hillside a bit further upstream. There were few other visitors besides us. After depositing my gear I headed to the open-air dining area / bar to look around and found C.K., clearly exhausted, dozing on a bench. He was coming down with some kind of cold, but had still been doing his darndest to give us a quality experience.
The afternoon rains set in almost immediately, and pretty much followed us around the whole time.
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| Tired Sick CK | Tabin Grounds |
We had planned to do some birding in the afternoon after we arrived, but it started pouring rain and we decided to postpone it. We did, however, go for a night drive to see what the jungle might offer up. We were not disappointed -- our big find was about a three meter (8 ft) reticulated python! Apparently this is not a particularly large one; they reach 20 feet and occasionally more. It was pretty cool, but it was difficult to get a really good look at it by flashlight.
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| Reticulated Python | Reticulated Python |
The next day was hot and humid; hot enough and humid enough that I wrote in my diary that Dona would not have enjoyed it. We hiked up to the "Mud Volcano," which is actually a mud pot not doing a whole lot, although C.K. said it had flowed and changed a lot since he was there last. I walked out on the mud flow a bit, to where it started being a bit like quicksand, then decided discretion was in order. You could see tracks of animals of various sorts which had walked across in many places; I guess they go out there to lick minerals. We were disappointed in that we didn't see a lot of birds, but we did see an orangutan in the jungle on the hike in.
There is a small tower overlooking the mud volcano, so I climbed up for a better view. It might be a good place to hang out early in the morning or late in the evening, although we did not do that.
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| Orangutan | Orangutan |
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| Mud Volcano from Tower |
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| Group Confab below Mud Volcano Tower |
It had been a slow morning. We spent time along a back road looking for birds and seeing a few, but not a lot; and it was getting on towards noon when things are generally slow. But C.K. heard a Pitta, and the Pittas are one of Ram and Dawn's favorites, and C.K. knew that. He spent over half an hour hunched down in the jungle just off the road whistling occasionally, and eventually frantically motioned to us in a non-obtrusive sort of way, if that's possible. He'd called in a Black Crimson Pitta. It was pretty cool, although it was too dark for me to get much of a picture of it. I'm sure Ram's turned out better...
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| Black Crimson Pitta |
While C.K. was whistling up the black-and-crimson pitta, the rest of us were trying to unobtrusively follow a scarlet-rumped trogon and a few others which appeared in the openings by the road.
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| Scarlet Rumped Trogon | Scarlet Rumped Trogon | Bushy Crested Hornbill |
Back at the lodge, the rain quit for a short while and the birds came out to celebrate. The local macaques also scurried around trying to find things to steal.
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| Long Tailed Macaque |
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| Yellow Bellied Bulbul | Xxx Asian Fairy Bluebird |
In short order the rain descended again, unfortunately just as a pair of bushy-crested hornbills showed up at our cabins. It would have been a good time to have a weatherproof lens and camera.
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| White Crowned Hornbill |
Up at the restaurant, a young Buffy Fish Owl getting ready to fly crawled out on a limb. It's parents stood by stoically, drenched in the pouring rain, looking miserable and not like they were encouraging any flying activity. It really appeared as if they were carrying out what they felt were their parental obligations, but they didn't really want to be there. They sat there for hours. If I were them, I would have crawled into a nice snug tree cavity or under a thick bunch of leaves and waited it out a bit more comfortably, and encouraged my kid to join us. But then I'm not a Buffy Fish Owl.
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| Buffy Fish Owls | Buffy Fish Owls |
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| Purple Naped Sunbird |
We went out for another night drive. Borneo has some small mammals called Mouse Deer, which look more like a small rodents than deer. We saw a couple of them under the buildings, along with another Buffy Fish Owl on a fencepost, and some leopard cats, wild pigs, and macaques. We saw a few birds resting for the night -- a prinia and a black and red broadbill.
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| Greater Mouse Deer | Buffy Fish Owl |
On our last morning at Tabin we saw some gibbon swinging through the trees some distance away. They always vacated the area rapidly when they saw us -- or at least by the time we saw them they were heading off. It was fun to watch them effortlessly moving through the trees; it looked almost as much fun as flying, and made me want to be a kid again.
Tabin has a veterinary housing where they are trying to expand the endangered Sumatran Rhino population. On several occasions we walked by the rhino facility, but it is off limits to visitors and we were unable to see any of the rhinos. We did hear one yelling at something, but that was about it. The captive breeding program is highly controversial, but I hope it's successful. A better solution is probably better protection for large swaths of inaccessible habitat.
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| Tualong Tree | Tualong Tree |
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| Gibbon |
We also found this really pretty butterfly, which to my surprise and delight I found on the web and could identify.
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| Butterfly Cethosia | Butterfly Cethosia |
Then C.K. drove us back to Lahad Datu and dropped us off at the departure point for our ride up to the Danum Valley.
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| Group Farewell |
This page last updated on 2013-10-23.
