Paddling with Tupperware (Gunung Palung, 2010)

Excerpts from an email I sent home after learning rather suddenly I had to leave Indonesia early on my current research visa, rather than extending my stay a final 6 months (for long, exhausting reasons that aren’t worth blogging about having to do with impossible amounts of red tape):

Greetings for one last time from Ketapang…I have no reasonable choice but to agree to leave Indonesia before April 5, so I will be allowed back in the country in the future. So I am heading back to the states next week…Hard to believe since this time I was only allowed two weeks in the forest (after over a month of trying to get permits from our project base in Ketapang) and must now leave for good. At least my last orangutan follow was with my favorite flanged male Prabu, but it was very hard to leave the forest on Friday and say goodbye to everyone. I had a really nice, albeit very sad goodbye party with everyone at the main camp the night before I left. The assistants/staff sang one of my favorite Iwan Fals songs, "Kemesraan", in addition to some songs that they made up for me. It was very sweet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeqA_FrXJ9M

on last morning at Gunung Palung, saying final goodbyes

Our trip back to Ketapang was more eventful than usual, although I am happy to say that it did not involve a python falling on my head (this time). Around hour three of the longboat trip, the engine died. I’ve seen the the engine smoke and even catch on fire on previous trips, but this time it could not be revived. For the next few hours we had to paddle the boat using a plastic plate, Tupperware, and a stick. Although we had a phone signal at one point, we couldn’t arrange for any help, since it was a Friday afternoon, so everyone was at the mosques praying. And they were all many, many hours away…

paddling with tupperware after the engine died...

We finally arranged a plan to get picked up at a small village several hours down river, but we eventually discovered that the truck sent to pick us up broke down and wouldn’t be fixed for days. Eventually we came across a fisherman who offered his paddle and said we could pick up a second one at his camp another hour down river. So eventually we made it to Semangjak. We caught part of our crazy boat trip on VIDEO: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W8EceQhQUo


The motorbike at the house where we waited at Semangjak was missing a wheel, so we ended up having to carry all of our bags through the mud for another two kilometers. But we did eventually make it back to Ketapang via a random pickup truck, terribly sunburned but otherwise in tact. And in just enough time to fly to Pontianak the next day, give a final presentation at Universitas Tanjungpura (during which the electricity went out about 10 times), and fly to Jakarta and finally home before the visa expired (just barely in time and the process of applying for an exit permit on such short notice was also quite the experience...) 

Attack of the Anacards (Gunung Palung, 2009)

Excerpts from email sent on May 19, 2009 titled “Attack of the Anacards, Back in Ketapang”: 

"Danger" tree on the Sg Lading pheno plot

I’m back in the city for the next few days, hoping to work on some papers and catch up on data entry while recovering from some nasty infections. I have been following a lot of orangutans recently who have either been eating various Anacardiaceae tree species (same species as mangos, but Gluta species give me a much more serious reaction) or are ranging in areas where they are flowering. And we have been collecting a lot of botanical samples for morphotyping, both during follows and at other times  with slingshots. When setting up Sungai Lading, one of my field assistants spray painted "Danger" on several Anacardiaceae trees on the phenology plot to help me learn which trees to stay away from. And somehow, no matter how far I try to stay away from the Anacards, they manage to get their oils on me.

The tree infections were always much worse when cutting through the forest with my machete during or just after big rains. It is also particularly difficult to identify the various tree species that I am allergic to when the trees are still small, which of course in a swamp forest (like my site at Sungai Lading, the Tuanan field site, and parts of Gunung Palung) accounts for most of the trees in the forest.

with friends at Sungai Lading soon after the short course

…and an especially memorable experience with an Anacard infection from 2005:

One day my advisor was visiting Sungai Lading, my field site…He arrived together with a group of Indonesian students and professors who came to do a “short course” like the one we did at Tuanan in 2003, doing gibbon triangulation and orangutan nest surveys to estimate population densities. I had assumed that by the time they arrived, the tree infection that had spread all over my body and had spread to my face would have disappeared. But their early arrival by boat (ten days early with a one hour warning) caught me by surprise. I participated in the last few days of the short course once the infection started to get significantly better, but then my advisor leaned up against an Anacard tree on my phenology plot, touched my arm, and I ended up getting an infection in my arm that lasted for the next month. Luckily this particular species only gave me a localized infection, but it left a scar on my arm. So I can officially say that graduate school scarred me J. 

with Wahyu Susanto (my long-time Indonesian counterpart and good
friend at Sungai Lading, who later worked with me  at Gunung Palung)

Flying the Friendly Skies with Arsenic-Laced Orange Juice (Ketapang, 2009)

Excerpts from an email sent on September 29, 2009 titled “News from Ketapang, Arsenic-Laced Orange Juice & Indonesian Peat Swamp Forest Fires”:

After being stuck in the Atlanta airport for a night and then San Francisco airport for two nights as the result of a delayed flight from Washington, I finally managed to fly to Taipei, Jakarta, Pontianak, and finally Ketapang. The flight to Ketapang was a little dicey, but after all, it was only recently that Garuda (the only Indonesian airline allowed to fly out of Indonesia), was given back their good status. Why was this status taken away? Apparently because a pilot and two cabin crew members were charged for murdering a rights activist passenger by lacing his in-flight orange juice with arsenic! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4133704.stm

…I fly back to Pontianak later this week to complete my visa extension, then back to Ketapang, hopefully only a few more days to wait for my new forestry permit to arrive from Jakarta…Pretty much the only news worth mentioning, besides the fact that our project will be moving to its own little house soon, is the interesting slogan on my friend's motorbike: "boys only dream, man really fly"...

with friends in Ketapang

...and the lack of water. When it rains in Indonesia, it pours, floods – it’s amazing…but when it does not rain, it is horrific. It has rained only 2x in the last two weeks, which finally brought a little water into the Ketapang river. At least we finally have running water, but no new water is coming into the tank, so the only way to mandi (bathe) is to use what is left of the accumulated rain water.

I have heard that there is little visibility up at camp, but I imagine that it isn’t nearly as dire as the situation back in Central Kalimantan (in Indonesian Borneo), where I used to work. Researchers were only recently allowed back in Tuanan and Sabangau, and I don’t even know if Sungai Lading (my old site) even has trees left. It is another El Niño year just like in 2006 when we nearly evacuated from Sungai Lading after fighting fires twice and lost several hectares of forest (about 20% of the site, which I learned was burned down in 2010). A Russian plane came with their “water bombs” as promised, flying over my site 7x, but only after it crashed in Sumatra and was delayed until the rainy season had already started…

This year as in 2006 the Palangkaraya airport was closed for several weeks and everyone has been wearing masks in both the city and in the forest...

at Sungai Lading after the first of two fires in 2006

On a happier note, those of you who know me well will be glad to hear that bananas are finally available again and I ate 35 of them (very small, put into a blender and then froze them) this morning! Nothing like lots of potassium to help my work productivity. I was also greeted on the street with a “hello misses”, rather than the typical “hello mister” (having nothing to do, by the way, with my short hair or tomboy appearance; all westerners are greeted this way in many rural areas in Indonesia), “hello boy” or “YOU – bule!” for the first time, which brightened my day considerably.

Close Encounters of the Python Kind (Gunung Palung, 2009)

From an email sent January 12, 2009 titled “Close Encounters of the Python Kind”:

a reticulated python

I had a fairly eventful boat trip back to Ketapang from the forest. Most of this boat trip is sort of like the 2km we went through from the Kapuas River to my site, where sometimes it was necessary to get out of the boat and haul it over fallen trees or shallow water, but it takes 8 hours or so on a good day... 

About three hours into the trip what I thought was a huge branch fell on my head, very painful. But then it slithered down my legs, I realized it was a not too long but very fat reticulated python, everyone in the boat except for me, Wahyu, and the python threw themselves overboard. Josie, the Kiwi and only other foreigner in the forest (well, not at the moment, she is currently being treated for a serious infection and is on IV antibiotics...), dove over me and our National Park counterpart Roni threw himself over the front. Roni is a big guy, so when he went over the boat nearly flipped over on my side, since my side had me and the python...

with Wahyu & Josie on the trip when a python fell on my head

I was still fairly stunned by having been hit in the head by a python  and was holding my laptop (in a dry bag, but those things always leak), so just sat there, unsure what to do. Luckily Wahyu has Cheryl-like reflexes (when she was here in October a pit viper fell onto the front of the boat and she managed to fling it away before it entered the boat) and when he realized that it was a python and not a viper (so not venomous, though they give a nasty bite and have been known to squeeze people to death in Borneo), he grabbed it in the middle and threw it overboard, causing the people overboard to jump quickly back in. It was quite amazing.

on the LONG (all day/evening) boat trip back to the forest and to camp

Orangutan Poetry (Sungai Lading, 2006)

Over the course of a few days while following animals at Sungai Lading in 2006, I jotted the following poems about some of my focal subjects down in my field notes (what can I say, living in the forest for lengthy periods of time without anyone to speak to in English can cause a person to write some pretty nutty things!):

RHOMA’S STORY

March 14, 2006

Rhoma has a big long beard

And watch out, he should be feared

He throws branches big and small

It helps not if you’re big or tall

Rhoma is lazy today

 My assistants say hooray!

Only five more hours of this

Then back to camp for sleeping bliss

I should not write on my data

But better than on the peta

I do not want to go crazy

Which I will if I am lazy

He kiss-squeaks now and will more later

I think he’s a human hater

Rhoma is so light in color

Only paler is my mother

But he’s red and she is not

Unless the sun is very hot

Well, I guess that’s always true

But to rhyme that’s what you do

Today with me are two local men

I feel like a mother hen

Here assistants call me “Mother”

It’s a place like no other

Other times they call me “Boss”

Which is better? It’s a toss

At least here they don’t call me “Mister”

Or ask me if I have a sister

I was bit by two big ants

Through the leg of my field pants

Then I sat on a big worm

My assistants sure did squirm

The worm was green

The guts were too

They’ll stick onto you like glue

Only one more page to go

Before jam golek, that I know

Rhoma just awoke from sleep

Before no not a single peep

Standing way too close to me

Is a very big dead tree

I hope that wind does not come round

And knock the tree onto the ground

Rhoma shook that tree, you see

He even tried to flatten me

He just wanted to snag crash

And after have himself a bash

Because we’re here he eats so little

He thinks we get in the middle

Of his plans to procreate

But he should just habituate

Two leaf monkeys came to eat

In Rhoma’s tree, that sure was neat

May this poem give you pleasure

Read it now or at your leisure

This is Rhoma’s only story

Hope it brings him lots of glory

Rhoma should get his due fame

And if he doesn’t I’m to blame

Studied for my dissertation

He gave me a laceration

But I am not really mad

He is really not so bad

But why not start to make a nest

So we can all go home and rest

We’ll follow him into the night

For late to golek is his right

It is we who follow him

So we must accept his every whim

He made not one nest but made two

What is it that we are to do?

First we must wait to be sure

Which nest he’ll choose to endure

If we must we’ll wait all night

We cannot put up a fight

Then he’ll start another day

By 4 AM, he won’t delay

   ELVIS’S COPACABANA

August, 2006

His name is Elvis

He sometimes long calls

But when he tries to be the star

Suni he is never far

Elvis can kiss-squeak

And throw epiphytes

But assistants they don’t run

For with Elvis all is fun

Across the flooded swamp

Elvis he sure can romp

He has missing teeth and a loud grumble

But branch missiles he does fumble

In the swamp, Sungai Lading swamp

The hottest spot north of Palangka

In the swamp

The deep peat swamp

Elvis’s yawning is always the fashion in the swamp…

 Elvis is not dead

  LALA’S FAMILY

August, 2006

Lala she has real big hair

But when we search she’s not there

She looks so much like Elvis

Lala’s family

Lala, well she is crazy

Snag riding! She’s not lazy

If she would party with Gula

A “Gulala” we’d have

VELVEETA IS A CHEESE

August, 2006

Velveeta is a cheese

She really likes to sneeze

When she enters thick rotan

You must have a good plan

Pregnant she may be

We have to wait and see

High ho the dairio

Velveeta is a cheese

Franklin knocked her up

Like me she does hiccup

High ho the dairio

Velveeta is a cheese

SUNI IS MADE FOR WALKING

August, 2006

Suni is made for walking

And that’s just what he’ll do

One of these days that Suni

Will just walk all over you

Assistants they do scramble

Underneath the bramble

When Suni leaves the trees

We all get right down on our knees

One day he came to camp

Without even a headlamp

Suni is made for walking

And for causing lots of gawking

And this bizarre little poem, written by whoever manufactures Snowman brand markers in Indonesia, is too amazingly odd not to share:

a similar caption appears on this box of Snowman markers and reads: This talk, truth was some the sad thing, Is the love and the geological features it is...FLY TO THE SKY...

SNOWMAN

6 Coloring Markers

Pencil Type

FLY TO THE SKY…

The tree

professional

everyday looks

the sky which

is the fairy

and it does

cluck cluck

and it cries

Held Hostage in Borneo by an Oral Presentation (Palangkaraya, 2005)

Excerpts from an email sent home December 30, 2005 titled "Held Hostage in Borneo by an Oral Presentation" and from an email sent on January 4, 2006 titled "Pacifying the Immigration Officers":

I arrived here in Palangkaraya yesterday and will be here until January 5th, when I must go to Jakarta for 5 days so I can give at least one presentation in order to satisfy the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI). One day a few weeks ago Happy, one of our security guys at Tuanan, suddenly showed up at my camp to say that I had to go to Tuanan immediately to have urgent communication with one of our Indonesian counterparts in Jakarta. Of course communication with Jakarta is impossible from the forest, but after a series of radio communications we found out enough to know that LIPI would not grant me permission to go home or extend my visa for another 6 months unless I agreed to give a presentation at UNAS in Jakarta…

Nicole, getting into a typical kamar kecil (i.e. WC, toilet)
in Katunjung, the village across the big river from my site

It was weird to miss the holidays this year. Of course there is no Thanksgiving…and I worked over Christmas, best a person can who has a nearly-broken metatarsal. I was sure I had broken part of my foot, as I couldn’t feel anything or walk for about 5 days over Christmas, although now it is just black and blue and I was even able to follow orangutans just before returning to the city. We have 2 toilet rooms about 5 meters over the swamp at my site, and while I was in one of them the floor, which had apparently rotted, fell from under me. I was able to catch my fall enough that I didn’t end up in the swamp, but was positioned rather awkwardly, one half of my body still in the toilet room, the other half suspended from it, until my cook eventually heard my screams over the noise of the generator…


New Years Eve here in Palangkaraya. Licen and Happy (Indonesian friends), Anne and Fleur (Dutch friends) and I went “downtown”, where there were surprisingly good fireworks at midnight and people blew their noisemakers constantly for two days straight. We even got ourselves invited to a private party held in a Simpati store (where you buy handphone minutes). That was weird, yet fun, but not as weird as the lack of alcohol on New Years Eve…we had lots of really good avocado juice with chocolate…

After 3 days of going back and forth a total of about 25 times to the immigration office to fill out various paperwork, I am finally finished at immigration and got my passport back and all of the necessary permits so I can fly to Jakarta as scheduled tomorrow morning. This turned out to be a minor miracle [I will now summarize a very long explanation from my original email explaining the exhausting process of obtaining permission to leave the country] -  I first visited the immigration office on a Monday morning, but I was told that I should have come earlier and they wouldn’t be able to finish processing the paperwork until maybe Thursday or Friday. It actually wasn’t possible for me to have come any earlier, but I was told at Immigration that I would have to change my plane tickets to fly to Jakarta and then onto the states. I explained that this was impossible, since I had to give a presentation for LIPI (the Indonesian Institutes of Sciences) in Jakarta and the next 4 days before my scheduled ticket to the US are Indonesian holidays (when no one works).  I was basically told too bad for me, but the Immigration officer said he didn’t care…but I told him that I would run around and get all of the letters they had newly requested I obtain and the 6 red-background photos in different sizes that the immigration officer wanted all in that same day, to give him time to change his mind. 

I was told that if I got everything done that day and before their 2pm closing time, he would think about it and maybe I would be allowed to leave on time. Thankfully my friend helped – we had to interrupt a very important meeting being held at the MAWAS office 4 times just to change various words of their sponsor letter each time that Immigration fussed about something and the trip to the office took about 20 minutes each time…the most memorable excuse was that my signature was too long because it was supposed to smoosh into an impossibly small space. But unlike most Indonesians, who use just one typically short name, I have a comparatively long Welsh/German name. I did get the Immigration officer to smile after he told me that the “passport size” red-background photos I had were a few centimeters too large and I would have to get new ones that same day. He seemed to think this was pretty funny and smiled. And it was made clear to me that had I not spoken in Indonesian this process would have taken at least a week. A good thing I speak Indonesian!

When I did eventually get to Jakarta, on my way to the airport to fly home to the US I first met a Bluebird (the best/most reliable of the Indonesian taxi companies) taxi driver named Suparman. I actually ended up in a cab with the same driver a few years later (you don’t forget a name like that). 

A few videos from the field that didn't belong elsewhere...

Having a little fun with one my assistants in the forest on one of my last days at my field site:
Sungai Lading liana swingers

Morning aerobics at an office in Palangkaraya:
Office Aerobics

Rumah Pantai - My cabin at Gunung Palung during a flood:
Rumah Pantai

Appeasing the Forest Spirits (Sungai Lading, 2005)

Excerpts from field journal July, 2005:

filming the ritual to officially start research at Sungai Lading

Pak Ihing's father, talking to the spirits in ancient Dayak

After moving to the newly constructed Sungai Lading base camp on July 6, on July 8 we held the official ritual to ask the spirits of the forest for permission to live and work in their presence. Several friends came from Tuanan to witness this all-day ritual. Ibu Haji (my cook)  had some help from some Katunjung friends to cook the 4 chickens (2 red, 1 white, 1 black) and the cakes that would later be put into the 4 ritual houses that Pak Haji made, along with sugarcane and cigarettes. Ihing (one of my first field assistants)’s father performed the ceremony. He came dressed for the occasion, wearing a nice batik shirt and his mandau (a traditional Dayak weapon associated with headhunting).

To start the ceremony, Pak Haji (my security man) tapped each of us on the forehead with a cup filled with uncooked rice. Then Ihing’s father talked to the spirits in an old dayak dialect that only he could understand for at least 4 hours and until after the sun had set. Once it was dark, a light was put out at the edge of the forest by the ritual houses, so the spirits could find their way in the dark. It was explained to me that there are good spirits and bad spirits (the bad spirits can take the shape of dogs), and at least some of these spirits belong to the old people who enter the forest after they die…

The guests had a feast of some of the food from the ritual houses, and the rest was left for the spirits to consume. When the ritual was finally over, Pak Haji sprinkled some more uncooked rice over our heads, this time to officially end the ceremony, which I was told was necessary in order to bring the orangutans in the area to us. I think I got food poisoning from one of the cakes, but otherwise the ritual evening went over very well with everyone.

Additional notes: A few months later I made the mistake of admitting to having had a dream about meeting an Indonesian woman in the forest, who asked why we were living there. When I told her, she said that we were welcome to stay. Pak Haji had a similar dream and so decided that we ought to have another ritual. Only this one was much smaller scale and just involved some hard boiled eggs and a small ritual structure just off the boardwalk. Several years later while visiting the Tuanan field station during my post-doc, I was told that the night of the big ritual at Sungai Lading, all of the Indonesians saw “Mata Merah” (“The Red Eye”) in the sky, just above my camp. They didn’t tell me or any of my European visitors since apparently they didn’t want to alarm us, but the Red Eye is a bad omen that one person can send to another. I was told that the eye was most likely on its way down to Tuanan and was just temporarily hovering over Sungai Lading, but either way, I suppose I am glad that I was not told about this at the time of the ritual, just as I was starting research at Sungai Lading! 

Several friends came from Tuanan to attend the ritual

There was one part of the Sungai Lading forest in the southeast that the assistants would not enter when searching for orangutans because they were convinced it was evil. Although I take all of this with a very fine grain of salt, I will say that the forest in this area always seemed to get suddenly very dark and felt ominous whenever I ventured into it. I also always seemed to end up stuck for hours in deep swamp in this area and found myself at times very disoriented. However, at the time one of the few DVDs I had to watch were Seasons 1 and 2 of LOST, so there is a good chance that images from the series was coloring my imagination! 

Selamat Datang: First Field Season in Indonesian Borneo (2003)

Below are some summaries and excerpts from a journal I kept when I first went to Tuanan, my graduate advisor’s wild orangutan field site in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. This was my first time in Indonesia, where I met up with my graduate advisor Carel and his wife Maria, and where I first met our Dutch colleagues Serge and Tine, Perry the Dutch photographer, and our Indonesian colleagues Suci and Tatang, as well as several Indonesian assistants, many of whom I worked closely with over the next several years.

I traveled from Washington, DC to Jakarta, via Taipei, flying on China Air, since this was by far the cheapest way to get to Indonesia (presumably due to China Air’s not-so-stellar crash record, though I have since flown on China Air many times without any incident, which is more I can say for other airlines, one of which covered up a near crash of a plane I was in flying from Washington, DC to Zürich, Switzerland involving one of the Swiss presidents—but that’s a story for another time). On this trip we were on a Social Budaya visa, which is no longer possible to use for research purposes. This visa allowed us to bypass the majority of office visits that would occupy days, weeks, and in the most extreme of situations months of my time in later years.

getting fingerprinted (many times) as
part of the permit process (this photo
was taken at the immigration office in
Pontianak (West Kalimantan) in 2008

Even on this visa, all researchers in Indonesia must provide finger prints of all 10 fingers (2x) and a plethora of red background photos of all different sizes. My favorite question asked during this process was (translated from Indonesian) "What color are your teeth?" I asked the officer what was meant by that question and he replied, "They are white". I was once asked to provide 12 different photos of myself (as always, on a red background) at a single office visit (the office visits in Jakarta alone typically took at least a week, but when they didn't we would have to request an extended stay in the city before immigrating to Palangkaraya, Pontianak, etc. At least this first field season I was on a type of visa where we didn't have to go through this complete process of obtaining permission from at least 5 different agencies in Jakarta before flying onto Kalimantan. I once stumbled upon a collage of photos of all researchers and visitors at a particular point – researchers on red background, researchers/visitors on a tourist visa on a regular passport background. Apparently the police offices throughout the province kept these photos in their offices, just in case…

I discovered this collage of several of us (long-term
researchers on red backgrounds, those staying briefly
on regular European passport backgrounds) handing
in the MAWAS office; apparently it was distributed to
police stations throughout the province, "just in case"

Our intention had been to fly to Palangkaraya, the provincial capital of Central Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo, within days of our arrival in Jakarta. But due to an official reading of the Koran that was happening in Palangkaraya and attracted people from all over the Muslim world, we couldn’t fly to Kalimantan for the next ten days. So we stayed with my advisor’s brother-in-law in Bogor (a city just outside of Jakarta). I got to see the famous Bogor Botanical Gardens and Carel wrote his book “Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture”. I woke up to the sound of Carel banging on a traditional Indonesian gong each morning and played a lot of Badminton.

Finally we were able to fly not directly to Palangkaraya, but to Palangkaraya via Banjarmasin, the provincial capital of South Kalimantan. It was during this car ride that I first heard the full story of the tragic events that happened at Carel’s Sumatran orangutan field site shortly before I started my graduate studies. We took a day while in Palangkaraya to visit colleagues at Nyaru Menteng, an orangutan rehab facility (the one where Animal Planet’s “Orangutan Island” was filmed). It is amazing and distressing to see so many orphaned infant orangutans every time I visit a rehab center, the vast majority of whom have lost their mothers at the hands of humans…

orangutan orphans at Nyaru Menteng eating durian fruit

The Tuanan project mess (no. 7, Jl. Cenderawasih) is quite nice and off the beaten path. We could take the B buses from the mess into town, where the most interesting thing to do in Palangkaraya was have dinner at the karaoke restaurant Café Boy or hang out eating grilled corn at the Bundarun (roundabout) -- this was the case both before and after the big opening of the PALMA mall near the BNI bank, where I once went with some friends from the Sabangau research site in an attempt to see a movie at the new theater in the mall, but we opted not to watch a movie called “Toilet 105”). I did, however, have a very entertaining time once while in town (I typically made the journey from the forest to Palangkaraya once every 1-3 months, less often in the first few years) on Indonesian Independence Day, playing an arcade game with Susan from Sabangau, in which the goal was to shoot at a giant mosquito (“nyamuk” in Indonesian) before it filled with blood and gave you malaria.

floating across a road on canoes in the rainy season

Back in 2003 and until only a few years ago, the method of getting to the Tuanan field site (a long drive from Palangkaraya to Kuala Kapuas, follwed by a public speed boat to Mantangai, where we arranged to be picked up by the Tuanan kelotok—basically a motorized canoe) involved a very long boat ride and floating a car (often filled with many people—my record was 14 people in a single car) on two canoes pushed by people across the flooded street in the rainy season. Since then the public speed boats have stopped operating and the bridge over the area that always flood was finally completed, but the longer road trip often requires hours of pushing the car through mud when it gets stuck.

Tuanan Field Station (photo taken in 2005)

My general first impression of Tuanan back in the summer of 2003 was that the area is generally unproductive, especially compared to the primary forest I was used to in Thailand (and compared to the Gunung Palung forest where I later spent two years during my post-doc). Canals (“tatas”) have been made in the forest for the purpose of carrying logs out, which drains the swamp out into the Kapuas River. There is a also an old railroad made of logs on Transect L that can be seen clearly in satellite images of the field site.

Odom with fruit samples during a week-long
survey at Sungai Tunggul, where I first tried
to set up a site before politics got in the way

I followed my first wild orangutans (and adult female named Jinak and her son Jerry) almost immediately – Jinak and Jerry and a female named Juni (who is likely Jinak’s older offspring) were the first orangutans discovered at Tuanan, just days before our arrival. During my first few focal follows I saw Jinak build a nest incorporating a fixed roof and leaf blanket. And I heard my first nest smack, a vocalization given by orangutans at Tuanan (but not, 

making a plan while searching for orangutans at Tuanan

interestingly, at most other wild orangutan sites, including my site at Sungai Lading) at the very last stages of nest building just before laying down (“golek”) on the night nest. It is as if they are saying to us “selamat malam” (= good night). Jerry cries a lot, which Carel reminded me is consistent with the expectation according to Trivers’ parental investment hypothesis (fragile sons) that males cry more often than females. Most of my initial follows were with some combination of Indonesian assistants (at this time I didn’t yet speak Indonesian and the assistants didn’t speak any English, so I literally started learning the language word by word using a dictionary and hand gestures), Odom (an Indonesian friend of mine who worked for BOS MAWAS and later helped me conduct my big nest count to determine orangutan density at Sungai Lading; Carel has referred to Odom as the world’s best orangutan nest counter and he is also Birute Galdikas’s nephew), Carel, Maria, Serge, Tine, and Perry.

Sumi and her daughter Susi at the edge of the Tuanan forest
(photo credits: Tine Geurts, Tuanan Orangutan Project)

We all took turns searching for and following various orangutans. Carel was amazed at how quickly orangutans at Tuanan (compared to Suaq and other sites) make their nests at Tuanan (most extreme in the dry season). Yet even at Tuanan we regularly see orangutans adding roofs and leaf blankets, mattresses, and most often pillows to their night nests. Interesting since at Sungai Lading they most often made leafy mattresses—blankets and pillows were made much less often. This first field season was very exciting, since we found so many animals for the first time. Whoever first discovers an orangutan gets to name it, as long as the name isn’t also the name of a living person who might someday visit the site (to avoid data referring to orangutan activities that might get confusing or embarrassing if referencing a familiar person’s name). This first field season I found in a team with Serge, Tine, and our field assistants Nadi and Linandi, Sumi and her daughter Susi (in 2006 Sumi was killed by a clouded leopard and after we took Susi to the Nyaru Menteng rehab center where she thrived for several months, she eventually died of a Strongyloides parasite – she was an amazing animal, one of my favorite) and a big male named Rambo.

The first orangutans I found by myself and named were Niko (the first male found at Tuanan, who ended up being the most dominant male – I named him after my orange tabby Niko and our field assistant Nadi later named his 8^th child after the orangutan Niko), Kerry (I like the name Carrie, but we couldn’t spell Kerry with a C because Cerry, or Carrie as I would have spelled it, would be pronounced in Indonesian the same as “Jerry”, and we already had a Jerry), and her daughter Kondor (who I named after one of my favorite Robert Redford movies, “Three Days of the Condor”, though we spelled it with a K because the daughter of Kerry had to start with the same letter of the alphabet).

Niko (Tuanan Orangutan Project)

I was bird watching alone on a day off the day I found Niko, Kerry, and Kondor. In my journal from that day I wrote: “To the forest alone again today at 04:45, determined to find the source of the long calls to the North.  First gibbon heard calling faintly @ 04:41…I finally saw one of those mini grey squirrels with a mustache…Then suddenly, while sitting on my log looking at the squirrels and geckos, at 07:07 I counted a 6-pulse long call…” To summarize, I followed the long call, saw some tree sways in the distance, and eventually found and adult female (Kerry), her very large but still dependent offspring (Kondor) and a big male (Niko). It is interesting that at Tuanan there are so many flanged males (they have developed cheekpads). It appears that unlike in Sumatra and in some other sites in Borneo, Tuanan males cannot afford to be reproductively suppressed…

on a swampy transect at Tuanan

The big male Niko threw several branches and a dead tree in my direction and came down within about a meter of me while displaying in the trees. While he was doing this, Kerry and Kondor disappeared and then Niko came down to the ground and ran quickly away from me…interesting since orangutans in Sumatra rarely come to the ground (presumably because of the greater number of ground predators there). I learned my lesson this day to never again leave camp without my machete, since getting through some of the vegetation without one while trying not to lose Niko was challenging (and painful) to say the least. I lost him for a bit but then found him again by following his long call. He greeted me with a big snag crash (threw a dead tree down in my direction). Eventually Niko went much farther north than the boundaries of the site to the north (at least farther than the site perimeter at the time), but we found him in the area the next morning.

Niko turned out to be the most dominant big male in all of Tuanan. For a while he was running after some of the Masters students and assistants when they were running away from him. One of the most important lessons of orangutan fieldwork is not to run away and to act submissive, especially with the big males. One time my friend Livia was trying to find her gibbon study group in the Tuanan forest when Niko suddenly came out of nowhere and built a day nest right over her head. She ended up having to lay down just under the nest with Niko staring down at her for the next three hours until Niko finally decided to move away!  


Carel held his first short course with our counterpart Indonesian professors and their students at Tuanan in 2003, several of which I have worked with in more recent years. During the course the students learned about triangulation methods for estimating gibbon densities and about various methods of conducting nest count surveys to estimate orangutan densities. 

Tuanan short course, 2003

When Leeches Attack: Gibbons in Thailand (Khao Yai, 2002)

These are mostly excerpts from a field journal I kept while working on a German project on white-handed gibbons (Hylobates lar) called “Genetic Structure of Thai Gibbon Groups at Mo Singto, Khao Yai National Park, Thailand”:

Tommaso –nice guy. Belgian mother, Italian father. Looks stereotypically European. Says ‘spam!’ a lot and talks about people getting smashed by cars.

There are monks everywhere. Monks eat only the food they are given during their morning rounds with basket in hand, once a day, although I have since seen monks sipping drinkable yogurt around 8pm here at Kao Yai…There are all sorts of rules associated with monks and nuns. Men cannot sit next to nuns and women cannot sit next to monks on buses, boats, etc…

First day in the forest of Khao Yai. Now I understand why the tourists (who we are not allowed to associate with) so often get lost and end up even more hopelessly lost when they stumble upon our gibbon trails…this is not going to be easy at all! First I must get used to the leeches, which are everywhere…and within the first minute of meeting Luca, he told me about his encounters with Malaysian sun bears – "…they attack when they see you and then that’s it, you’re dead." Tonight we watched the World Cup with a group of Thai men, who served us crickets—quite tasty, but I forgot to pull off the legs—at least the head was already off! 

Pak Chong—so this is where I’ll spend my time outside of Khao Yai—not incredibly exciting, but its true that you can find most things here if you know where to go. It’s hard to remember not to cross my legs in a way that my feet bottoms don’t face anybody!

See Group N—first day working with Adt, a Thai assistant. Group N’s home range is flatter than C’s –this is good, but of course the leeches are much worse here, especially up in the northern part of the range…Adt’s wife is pregnant (‘enormous’, as Tommaso likes to say)…Oh, how could I have forgotten to write about the biting ants? This night they invade my room…ants in my bed and all over the floor biting…Italians here have no sympathy because apparently the biting ants are sometimes even worse in Italy—I don’t believe it!

The gibbons generally stay very high in the canopy, so its tricky deciding when to and when not to wear my glasses. If its raining or damp (which is most of the time, although the worst of the rainy season is yet to come), they fog up…the electricity here goes off just about every night there is a rainstorm (which is just about every night), so now I write this by candle light…As a field assistant there is only so much information I am allowed to know about the project. I know some things, but will wait until I am in a different mood to reflect more intellectually on my experience here at Khao Yai. As for the gibbon groups there are six main study groups (A, B, C, N, R & T), as well as several neighboring groups that often have encounters with the study groups—some are known and habituated more than others…I don’t care what anyone else says, it is really very hard to clearly get a look at these gibbons’ genitals, which we have to do very closely each day to estimate the phase of swelling for the females.

…just heard several people sing (scream, really) ‘happy birthday’ in Thai and then a large gecko just snatched up a big moth – yey for geckos, which are everywhere – very noisy along with the toads that sleep in our shoes at night…I get hit in the head a lot (by falling fruits, discarded fruit shells, falling trees…) – its treacherous out there! Chution and others at WCS are studying the decline of the tiger population in Khao Yai by using as a proxy the increasing numbers and overall density of their prey species –hey, John Terborgh was right about the importance of and destructive consequences of the loss of top-down regulation! …while I would love to see a tiger or other large predator species at least from a safe distance, it is much more likely that I will be seriously injured one of these days by something falling too hard on my head or being stabbed too many times by one of those horrible trees that look like ferns with thorns on the underside…there are many nasty plants, though only 3-4 species to keep an eye out for…Barking deer really do bark. Loudly and all of the time. They are absolutely everywhere and many are tame, as are the much larger sambar deer (bigger than regular deer, while barking deer are a bit smaller and of course the mouse deer is even smaller—really small).

Today when we got back from the forest, Luca and Claudia and I drove over to the big waterfall (Haew Suwat) where ‘The Beach’ was filmed. Luca tells me that in Italy people banned the movie because it destroyed an island somewhere near here…apparently all of the forest scenes were filmed here at Khao Yai. I’ve seen several film crew here, usually shooting shampoo commercials by the Mo Singto Reservoir.

Lots of elephant ticks – they are BIG! Got one lodged in my abdomen, but definitely not as bad as deer ticks. Then here during the dry season the leeches disappear and the tiny ticks you can barely see come – make leeches sound wonderful! Ok, maybe not so wonderful after all. Today leeches were sucking blood from my head. They get all bloated and fill up with blood before falling off…this morning I ended up getting lost and ended up in this ‘very shitty area’ as Tommaso refers to it –is an area with a sun bear family and (tree) poachers living in it and is basically a big swamp filled with deep mud and many, so many spiny rattan and various other horrible spiny bushes that grab you and stab you (I was stabbed once through the head a few days ago). It turns out I had missed the sharp little UNMARKED turnoff that would have taken me to the appropriate night tree on trail NL. Instead I kept walking, not because I thought I was walking in the right direction or was anywhere near the male’s night tree, but because all I could think about was getting out of wherever I was…at this point I realized that several leeches (of which there were absolutely HUNDREDS in the crappy area, all of which were extra attracted to me since my boots and leech socks were still relatively new to the forest) had crawled to my neck, down my shirt, and at least two down my pants, not to mention the ones on my head, which I tried to ignore…

Again in the forest in an area with lots of leeches. Some are better than others—groups N and R live in the VERY leechy areas…I’ve decided that I don’t like leeches in my pants or in my eye (they drop in there from leaves when I am looking at gibbons) or in my ears (where they frequently crawl). I much prefer the big toads that live in our boots at night while we sleep. Leeches in the pants is definitely the worst and the way that you sometimes end up with leeches farther down your leg or even on your feet if the leech socks aren’t tied very tight around your other socks and pants leg. This generally happens if you either forget to tuck in your shirt or because you go to the bathroom in the forest and the leeches crawl onto your skin or pants leg.

Tommaso re-taught me how to drive a stick shift and how to drive a truck in Thailand. It wasn’t so difficult getting used to driving on the left side of the road, but here you must drive basically in the middle of the road, sort of straddling both sides of the line, which is fine until another car comes speeding by you from the other direction or comes from behind you to pass. Tommaso tells me that although you are supposed to pass some sort of a test to get a driver’s license in Thailand, all you really need to do is pay 500 baht and then you have it.

In the little book I keep with a few sentences to remind me of what I did each day, since I can’t possibly keep up with this journal on schedule, all I wrote for today was "ITCHY!”

At night the karaoke singers next door were loud as always. Almost every night this house next to ours is filled with Thai who sing karaoke. When they aren’t doing this they are singing this traditional Thai song that is one of the most monotonous things I have ever heard. Some evenings this tune will be played and/or sung over and over again all night, often past midnight and into the morning. Some mornings after karaoke  either at this place or at the tourist police, we will see people laying out on the grass, still a bit drunk from the night before…at the karaoke parties everyone drinks a lot of whiskey…Even though I ate crickets with him my first night here in Khao Yai, I made the accidental mistake of trying to shake Sombat’s hand when I introduced myself to him that night (not realizing that it is NOT ok for a woman to shake hands with a man)…he sort of leaped back in fright, and since that point we have had problems…at this point I hoped he wouldn’t try to kill me with a machete like Somlong tried to do when he left his wife, then girlfriend, for dead in he room where I slept (a whole other story).

Today in the forest I encountered the nasty little black hair splinter things that come shooting out at you from one of the various climber species like a magnet – I suddenly had about a hundred of these hairs on the palm/back side of my right hand. The worst part was that in addition to being very small and hard to remove (like cactus), these hairs carry the same poison that those really painful caterpillars carry, so its very painful…there is also some sort of a worm that stings a bit and often ends up crawling down my shirt…

Wondering if maybe I have some sort of intestinal parasite – how else can I explain the amount of food I eat every day?!...I do eat a lot of meat here – mostly pak priowan gai lat khao sai tung (‘sweet and sour chicken on rice in a bag to go’) since most people insist on adding meat of some sort to every dish. I’ve even eaten a bit of seafood/sweet and sour fish here and there, as well as a few crickets and cockroaches…Tommaso eats a lot of durian, fermented fish, and cockroaches.

Most men in Thailand become monks, at least for 24 hours to bring honor to their family when someone in the family dies or there is some other tragedy. There are also nuns—they also shave their heads, but walk around in white robes and aren’t as common as monks. One time Tommaso was trying to hitchhike to Pak Chong so he could get to a meeting in Bangkok and ended up taking a ride from a truckload of monks, who insisted on taking him to their temple. Finally he talked his way out of going to the temple, but not until he had been kidnapped by the monks for several hours. There are also many ex-criminals who become monks to avoid going to prison.

Tommaso is still gone in Bangkok...at this point I am having major problems with all three of the Thai assistants...later we discover that the main reason is that they see me as equal or below them because I am also just a field assistant (they don't know/care that I am working on a PhD just like Tommaso and I am female and younger than them)...things did get much better eventually...today I noticed that I definitely had some sort of tropical fungus between my toes...Last night Tommaso came back from Bangkok...turns out one of Tiang's problems was that I didn't realize that by 'you, stop!', he meant that he needed to go to the bathroom in the forest. Now he just rubs his tummy as a signal to indicate that this is what he wants to do!

Today on my way down a very steep slope I came face to face with one of those pit vipers Luca had warned me about. They stay just about at calf height, but I was moving down this mountain in the Group B territory, so I was literally face to face with the snake. It was bright green and luckily was totally asleep – and smiling!

Group N = LEECH HELL…leeches are much better today, but this morning in the dark I was stung by one of those very PAINFUL fuzzy caterpillars. My whole thumb went numb with pain…

RAIN. Lots of it. Lose Group N without finding the night tree. Today, though, there was some excitement as first 700 and later several hundred more pangolin (like big armadillos) were released at the Mo Singto Reservoir and further up the grassland…

Today I was surrounded by a pack of wild dog, quite frightening…I managed to find the female night tree on my own, which was rather exciting…First day off in eight days…the fungus between my toes continues…

taken of my kiwi friend josie in Indonesia,
not in Thailand, but my favorite leech photo!

Blue-green scorpions everywhere, especially on a trail and one just at the NG x DC crossing. In the forest alone again today – I actually find working this way much more productive, as I must rely entirely on myself…finish Group B on schedule – a miracle. Day off tomorrow, then will start Group N block #2. Termite invasion. As Tommaso says, “Here there is nothing much you can do – you have them, you keep them, you just piss them off a bit.”

Really getting tired of leeches on my head. Have a huge headache and two very infected leech bites on my left leg. Hope I can walk tomorrow!

...the next day I had to uit early and hobble off the mountain and drive back to the project house using my good leg. The "special doctor" at the pharmacy we went to in Pak Chong seemed to want to cut off my leg at one point, but he ended up just cutting the leg open with a knife and some needles to get out some of the infection. He was afraid that the wound had already abscessed past the skin and may have reached bone, so I was given a painful injection of antibiotics and several oral antibiotics and pain killers. I had to beg a lot, but eventually the doctors at the hospital gave us a week's worth of sterile equipment and bandages so we could open my leg to release the infection each day from the forest. I couldn't walk for over a week...one of my journal entries during this time reads, "Foot still bloated (3x normal size), but I can now walk..." The clinic doctor agreed that I could go back to the forest, but was afraid that the infection could fluctuate and so prescribed another round of oral antibiotics.

To make a long story short, after following gibbons for another week, I returned to the US, finished the second round of antibiotics, and the staph infection came back in my leg. I ended up in the Duke emergency room (only after putting up quite a fight in the emergency room and being forced to get a CT scan by a neurology resident) getting studied by the Duke infectious disease team, had an MRI and learned that nearly all of the soft tissue in my left leg was gone (so doctors were worried about osteomyelitis and were again discussing the possibility of amputation), became resistant to penicillin, and eventually improved. A year later the infection came back as a golf ball-sized lump in the back of my head. My very good friend and roommate agreed to open the lump with a sterile needle to relieve the infection, which was causing me a horrendous headache the night before my prelim exams in grad school. After passing the exam the next day, I went to the emergency room and went on another round of antibiotics. This  time they must have worked, since it has been eight years since I have had any signs of the infection. A few years ago I told this story to an American doctor in Western Borneo who said she is certain that I actually had necrotizing fasciitis and that the proper first response would have been amputation. All I know is whether near osteomyelitis or necrotizing fasciitis, I am happy to still have my left leg with no more than a single scar at one of the two sites where a very bloated leech had a long meal of my blood before eventually falling off and letting some really nasty bacteria enter the leg.

Back to my journal:

Last full day of following Group N. Tonight Tommaso tells me all about the fascinating Italian and Belgian version of the Boy/Girl Scouts. In Italy the boys and girls are mixed in camps where, as Tommaso says, a lot of ‘ticky tacky’ goes on…the Belgians are a whole different story—the boys and girls separate and there are attacks on other camps…when the boy groups attack other boy groups, someone usually ends up a flagpole and sometimes it can become violent. When boys attack girls they try to steal the prettiest girl and also underwear…they start everything by knocking down a tent and throwing some dishes…

And to summarize final story that only made it into my journal as an after thought: one day I went to the post office in Pak Chong to send some letters back to the US. All of the stamps have an image of the king on them and I didn’t know that you are supposed to use a wet sponge to moisten the back of the stamp before sticking it on the envelope rather than lick the back of the stamp, which is seen as a serious offense, since it is defiling the image of the king. I found this out the hard way when several armed men came towards me. A woman who spoke some English explained to me what was going on and said that the men were very angry and wanted to arrest me. Luckily I was able to talk myself out of the situation, but just barely!