Binturong sighting!

Today was a great day in the forest. Though it started off slow, M made themselves difficult to find so we trekked all over one half of their territory only to find them on the other side of the river. I didn't really mind this so much, because the M territory is great. The forest is very open and clear, so you aren't hacking your way through, it reminds me a little bit of a Michigan forest. It also isn't too hilly, but it is very muddy in some places, mostly where elephants have come through and stirred things up leaving big footprints that fill with water the day after it rains (such as today). Anyway, eventually we stopped at the river at a place where M could cross and scanned around for them. We waited a while in case they sang or came to cross. No one was singing this morning, and neither did M, but while we waited I spotted a tiny lizard in the water (we deduced it was a baby Chinese water dragon due to its similarity to the adult one we found before). So we got a few pictures of him and got to see him scamper/swim away from us. After several minutes with no sign of M we moved on to a place downstream where they also like to cross. This time we spotted them. Again, we waited for them to come closer (the river was much too high to cross after last night's rain, even with our over-the-knee rubber sock/boot things). Again, I spotted something! I guess I was on my A-game today. This time it was a terrific find: a binturong! This is a very rare animal to see, so we were incredibly lucky. Julie had been dying to see at least one while here. We watched him from across the river as he trotted along the bank and then carefully ascended a tree and used it to cross the river. After crossing he found a comfy spot on a branch and lay down and stare at us while we snapped photos.

So that was the highlight of the day, now enjoy some photos!

 My friendly sambar deer neighbor. Just read on Wikipedia that pregnant and lactating females and adult males have the hairless, oozing patch you can see on her neck. It is some sort of gland apparently. There are always flies on it and it makes me feel bad for her.

 What much of M territory looks like

 Baby Chinese water dragon!

 Binturong!

 He was moving too quickly to get good photos at first. I have a great video from Julie, but it is too large to upload.

peeking at us

 "Oh, hello there!"

"What are you looking at?"

Just relaxing.

sad news.

Well, if you haven't realized it by reading this blog, I will tell you; our research is going painfully slow. We keep running into obstacles; mostly rain and lack of rangers for playbacks, and of course the uncooperative gibbons! If only we could tell them where to go and how to behave so that we could do our experiments in a timely fashion. I can say though, if there is one thing I will take away from this field experience, is that you cannot EVER predict ANYTHING; not the weather, not the gibbons' behavior, and certainly not the ranger's "busy" schedule.

So, what I am trying to say, is that Julie, after 8 months stuck here (5 without an assistant because of delays in my arrival) with minimal success, is fed up, and understandably so. She decided, considering the rain is just going to become more frequent in August, that it is best to just pack it in, have a serious talk with her advisor about the projects logistics, and to try again next year. This means we will only be at the park until the end of the month! So I only have about two weeks left with the gibbons. This realization hit me hard, especially today while we followed the M group, whom we had not yet done an experiment with and I had only seen for a few minutes once before. I realized this group would probably have become my favorite (W claims that title now, probably because of the many HOURS spent following them). The M group uses a lot of low trees in their territory, and their territory is relatively clear and easy to hike in. So you can see the gibbons easily and don't have to hack through spiny palm plants every few minutes! Not to mention the juveniles are awesome! The older one comes down really low and is very curious. The young one is just now spending all its time off mom, so he/she is very active and playful, but still tiny and cute. Anyway, it is sad to know I won't be able to get to know them much better.

This also means I will be starting my vacation 2 weeks early. Though I decided I will spend some of this time cooped up in a hotel room with free wifi working on grad school and GRE stuff. This is sort of a bummer because it means I'll have to spend more money that I had hoped. On the bright side I will get to explore Thailand even more, and maybe work on getting a tan finally!

Here are some photos from this week!

 elephant footprint!

 N female (Hima) with her black infant peeking at us

part of N group: Nithat (main male) grooms Hima with infant

 A tree growing on a rock!

 hornbill!
After some research we figured out we've seen three types of hornbill in the park. This is the oriental pied hornbill (the one we've seen most often), we saw great hornbills this day, and this day we saw plain-pouched hornbills.

a male deer visited my window this time!

found a porcupine den in the forest!

there were two of them sleeping in this hole under a tree

I think I see a different AWESOME kind of fungi every day

sunset

W baby following Sari (mom)

SO TINY!

W infant again

Sari and infant both looking surprised.

I love this infant!

Heo Suwat and other adventures this week

Well, I've been a slacker. Literally on my to do list every day this week has been "write in blog" and every day I have failed. I'm going to blame some of it on the exceptionally slow internet we've had the last few days, today has been much better. I also get to blame some of it on more productive activities (which feels better than saying I napped or read instead). This week I was busy preparing an application for another field position that would start in November. I am still waiting for a reply from a professor about an academic reference, but I am ready to turn in the application as soon as she responds! I just hope that I am one of the first to turn in my stuff, because applications are being reviewed on a rolling basis. I have also been busy doing my best to stay on track with my "apply to graduate school" timeline. I told myself emails need to be sent out to professors in July, so that its what I am starting to work on. It is very scary and intimidating to think about making a first contact with someone you idolize and someone whose first impression of you could change your life for the next several years...so this is how I feel about that.

Anyway, last Wednesday was a good day because we were able to do the duet playback with W. Yay! Unfortunately that is where our luck ran out. The ranger didn't show up Thursday (because Yun is our only reliable ranger and he was busy). I wasn't too mad about this though, because we hadn't had a day off in a week, and it was the 4th of July! So I got my American holiday. We went to Tesco Lotus to celebrate, which meant I got to eat yummy, fresh food for dinner that night. Friday unfortunately we didn't have a ranger again, which I wasn't so pleased about. However, we made the best of it and decided to head out to see one of the park's waterfalls and to look for some pileated gibbons. Pileated gibbons are a different type of gibbon that live in a different area of the park, they have a drastically different duet, and a different coat pattern. They are also sexually dimorphic in coat color, so males are always black and females are always white. Something interesting is that there is a hybrid zone between the pileated and white-handed gibbons ranges, and the hybrid females apparently have a really weird sounding great call. It is also interesting that sometimes hybrid groups have multiple adult females, which never happens in normal groups, so they think it may be because they females do not recognize each other as competitors when their calls are so different from one another. Just some fun facts for you.

Before going to the waterfall we drove up a scary, pot-hole ridden road to a really high point in the park (>1100 m), and took some pictures from the view. The water fall, Heo Suwat, was pretty awesome in my opinion. Apparently it can be even bigger, later in the rainy season. We took pictures at the top, then I hiked down over 100 steps to the bottom to take some more photos before trudging back up. After that we took a little hike upstream from the falls in search of pileated gibbons or crocodiles. We found neither. We were lucky enough to find a big iguana, an huge monitor lizard, a troop of macaques crossing the river, and a TON of butterflies. So it was a successful day.

Some sort of weird display in the middle of the forest, that is a rack of clothes on the right, and the huge tree is wrapped in fabric. Probably something religious...

It was SO difficult to get butterfly pictures. Thank goodness for the "burst" setting that let me take 3 quick shots in a row (although this compromised quality).

 Heo Suwat

 upstream from the waterfall

Chinese water dragon

 big spider!

 upside down sign

 no crocodile sightings for us :(

Saturday we tested the barking deer alarm call recording we had on the W group. Unfortunately the recording had a log of background noise, The gibbons just stared in the direction of the speaker like "what the heck?" but didn't sing a predator song in response. there have been a lot of instances of them singing after hearing a barking deer alarm though, so we really want to test this with a playback. We are just going to have to get a better recording. Sunday, since we wouldn't have a ranger anyway, and the barking deer experiment wasn't ready yet, we decided to sleep in. This was fabulous because it had been over a week since we'd slept in, because even if we didn't go out some of those days, we still woke up at 5 only to find the ranger hadn't come.

Today we attempted a playback with R again, but we have come to the conclusion that the rainy season is a bad time for a playback with them. Evidently there are fruit trees on the other side of the river now, a part of their territory they barely used when I first arrived here. Now they cross every time we try to follow them, so we are going to work on a different group instead.

bats, birds and elephants

Well, despite some frustrations in the forest, including barking deer alarm calls stimulating predator songs from multiple groups and gibbons crossing deep, impassable rivers and leaving us behind, the last two days have still been a bit exciting. Monday morning Yun, our ranger assistant, told us that the night before there had been 30 elephants in the big field near the R territory. Monday night Julie asked if I wanted to join her on a drive to see if the newly repaired brakes on the truck were still burning (luckily they were not). I thought about it, it was 5:45, I wanted to run soon, but I also knew at dusk there are always opportunities to see interesting things, so I ran to get my camera and off we went. Sure enough, driving up the road we passed some of the rangers from the search and rescue unit along with the "elephant man" (what I call this guy who follows the elephants, Julie pointed out this isn't the most flattering nickname...). If you want to find elephants, you are usually in the right place if the elephant man is nearby. So we pulled over and looked, we saw two elephants but they were already making their way back into the forest and just looked like two giant, moving boulders. So we drove on. We stopped at the lookout point before turning back because we had never stopped there before, so I could get a picture of the view. Once again we were lucky, soon bats started coming out for the evening, in huge groups. One group after another flew by in every direction, it was really awesome. There were hundreds if not thousands. We were also lucky enough to see several groups of hornbills flying together to their sleeping trees. Seeing one hornbill flying is cool enough, they are so huge their wings make a loud swishing noise when they fly by. So needless to say seeing groups of up to eight of them was awesome.

We eventually got back in the car and drove back down towards home. Everywhere there was evidence of this group of 30 elephants we had heard about. Branches and poop were strewn across the road. Sure enough, after a few minutes we found ourselves in a long line of traffic. The elephants were back on the road. It was starting to get dark, and we were not very close to the front of the line, so I only got a few pictures, but it was amazing how many there were! They took their sweet time on the road, and we were stuck behind them for over an hour and a half. When the finally did move off the road and we drove by, they were still very near the edges of the road. It was awesome to be driving along, window down, and to suddenly see out of the corner of my eye and enormous bull elephant standing in some brush at the side of the road, probably 6 feet from me in the car. Before heading back home we drove further to a field that was very dark so we could see the stars. it was absolutely beautiful, but it didn't last long. Soon the lightning from the distance brought storm clouds and covered everything up. We finally got home at about 8:30, so I missed my run for the day, but I guess it was worth it.

Today was less exciting, but the elephants were still around. I ran in the direction we'd seen them last night because I was sick of my usual route. I got just over a half mile out and had to stop because apparently they were still nearby in the forest and the rangers suggested I turn around.

 Unfortunately it was really hazy, so the view isn't great

 BATS!

 BIRDS!

 ELEPHANTS!