Sarawak: Rainforest and Town

Kimberly Sultze and Jon Hyde hail from one of the pleasantest towns I know, Burlington, Vermont. Besides being nice people, they are professors of digital media and related subjects at St. Michael's College, and enthusiastic and expert nature photographers. When I met them they were just finishing a sabbatical as Fulbright Scholars, teaching media studies at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak  Before leaving they wanted to get in as much of the local wildlife as they could.  On March 9, 2014, Vincent Wong led Kimberley, Jon and I on a morning trip that took in both the rainforest at Kubah National Park and some very different, urban habitat, along the waterfront in the town of Telaga Air.

Our first stop, of course, was the frog pond at Kubah. The pond is at its best by night, but even in daylight it is still possible to turn up the odd amphibian. This is a White-lipped Frog (Hylarana raniceps).

I seem to photograph this clump of fruit (or its regular replacements) every time I visit the frog pond.  I haven't, though, the faintest idea what it is.  Can anyone help me?

This little mammal was something new for me: a Three-striped Ground Squirrel (Lariscus insignis).  Unlike many of Borneo's squirrels, this is not an endemic; it ranges widely through Southeast Asia, from Thailand to Sumatra.  It was shy and fast-moving, and this partially-obscured shot was the best I could get.

Another subject I always find myself photographing at the frog pond: the stunning forest dragonfly Cratilla metallica.

I usually find Orthetrum glaucum, a dragonfly that prefers more sunny locales, back out on the main road.

The adult male and female of Orthetrum glaucum are strikingly different, thanks largely to the powdery coat of blue pruinescence that develops over the male's abdomen as he matures.

The Bright Red Velvet Bob (Koruthaialos sindu) is a common skipper along the forest edge, and one of the easier of its family to identify.  The species ranges from eastern India and China south and east to Sumatra and Borneo.

I couldn't resist showing this one in flight, even if it's not the best photograph.

More graceful in the air, at least as it swoops down to a flower, is the Tailed Jay (Graphium agamemnon).

The Tailed Jay is an active butterfly in more ways than one; in India it can produce 7-8 broods per year.  The authors of the Indian study noted that "Adults frequently visited flowers (12-35 flowers in a min) spending 1.0 to 3.2 seconds on a flower.... The proboscis received pollen in most of the floral species visited, thus satisfying one of the characteristics of butterfly pollination. Being a fast and strong flier it is treated as "high energy" pollinator promoting cross-pollination."

Less dramatic, but still attractive: a Rustic (Cupha erymanthis), showing somes signs of wing damage (a narrow escape from a bird, perhaps?).

I have written about processional termites (Hospitalotermes sp) before, in an earlier posting; they are interesting insects, and streams of them are a frequent sight on the forest floor (where most visitors, I suspect - including myself, when I first met them - mistake them for ants).

A few postings back, I put up some poor shots of an Indian Cuckoo (Cuculus micropterus) on the grounds that it was the first time that I had actually seen, rather than heard, this common, noisy, but notoriously hard-to-spot bird.  This time I not only saw one, but got some photos that I hope I don't have to apologize for.  For those who know its relative the Common Cuckoo (C. canorus) this is a smaller, slimmer and altogether more graceful bird.

I suspect one of the high spots for Kimberly and Jon was a chance to see the tiny tadpoles of the highly-local Matang Narrow-mouthed Frog (Microhyla nepenthicola) - the stars of an earlier posting here - swimming in their little personal aquaria, pitchers of Nepenthes ampullaria growing by the roadside below the frog pond.

From the forest to the town: Telaga Air, a pretty little town at the mouth of the Sungai Sibu west of Kuching (the Borneo Post describes it as "idyllic" and "a quaint and vibrant Malay fishing village").
 

We headed down to the waterfront, where local boats tie up between fishing trips out to the river delta.

Our interest, of course, was still nature: in this case, besides the river view, a few urban birds.  The pilings along the waterfront, besides providing anchorage for boats, supplied nesting an foraging grounds for a pair of Sunda Pygmy Woodpeckers (Picoides moluccensis)....

...while a Pied Triller (Lalage nigra) sat on its nest in  tree above the road.  These are, admittedly, birds I can see in the little park behind our Kuching apartment - but nature lovers, from Sarawak or Vermont, can rejoice in city wildlife too.

Sarawak: Among the Mangroves

On February 28, 2014, my friend Hans Breuer invited me to join him on a morning stroll through the coastal forest near Kampung Bako, the village best known as the jumping-off point for visits to Bako National Park. Getting to the park requires both a boat and more time than we had at our disposal. Instead we followed a narrow trail into a nearby forest of mangrove and palm, including the towering brushes of vertical leaves rising from the underground stems of Nipa Palm (Nypa fruticans).

Ditches along the trailside were, in effect, fingers of the sea penetrating the forest, home to mudskippers and other animals of  ocean mudflats. The upper photo shows two species, the abundant Blue-spotted (Boleophthalmus boddarti) and much larger Giant (Periophthalmodon schlosseri) Mudskipper; below is a closer look at the Blue-spotted.

The contrast between forest and shore, each with its own set of living things, became a theme of our walk. 

Plants in the forest understory added dashes of colour, whether from a spray of red berries...

... or the equally-red blossoms of a ginger (Etlingera sp) arising, like the leaves of Nipa Palm, from an underground stem.

Also arising from the forest floor, or at least from rotting, fallen wood: the delicate, ear-shaped fruiting body of a fungus.

A more animated bit of colour: the common and tiny, but always spectacular, Branded Imperial (Eooxylides tharis).

Caterpillars in the forest ranged from the fairly conspicuous (the long hairs on this one suggest that toucching it muight not be a good idea)...

...to the astonishingly well-camouflaged (though this one would have been better off sitting on some nicely-mottled bark than on a green stem).

Other invertebrates on the trail included this rather bandy-legged spider...

... and a tractor millipede (Barydesmus sp) scuttling over the forest floor. 

The slick mud of the ditch was crawling with mud creepers (Family Batilariidae), marine snails related to ceriths.   They are detritus feeders, and swarm on coastal mudflats.

The mud had its splashes of colour, too, provided not by flowers and butterflies but by an assortment of fiddler and sesarmine crabs. 

I believe this is one of the sesarmine crabs, a group rather like fiddlers but lacking the great "fiddle" claws of their males. 

These are unmistakably fiddler crabs - notice the enormous claw in the upper photograph. There is a large assortment of fiddler crab species in Sarawak, and I am not sure that I can identify these from photographs alone. 

These are (I believe) Blue Fiddler Crabs (Uca tetragonon), a widespread species of the Indian Ocean and the tropical West Pacific and one of the more identifiable of the lot (I think). There were plenty of them skittering over the mud. 

This one is keeping close to its burrow, ready to dart into it at any sign of danger.

The burrow might also be handy for escaping the advances of an amorous male. 

A careful female keeps her retreat handy as she considers the male's blandishments. 

Meanwhile, Blue-spotted mudskippers (Boleophthalmus boddarti) dart back and forth along the shallow channels, their protruding eyes surveying the scene above the water line. 

Though mudskippers can spend considerable amounts of time out of the water, they do not have lungs.  Nonetheless, they require air to breathe; they will drown if they cannot get it.  They can certainly take up oxygen from water with their gills (and, their skins - though to varying degrees among the different mudskipper species -which they constantly moisten in whatever water is available), but their gills are reduced in size and surface area.  Instead, the lining of the pharynx (essentially, their throat lining) is thin and loaded with blood vessels, and as long as this is kept moist it can take up oxygen from the air.

That is why mudskippers look so puffy-cheeked as they hop around over the mudflats.  Before leaving the water they take up a huge mouthful of water and air, and keep it sealed within their gill chambers as they hop about on land.  Their bubbled-out cheeks act a sort of reversed scuba tank that supplies them with air and keeps their gills and their pharyngeal linings moist enough to take up oxygen.  This Blue-spotted Mudskipper, obviously, is ready to go exploring.

We, though, are just about done - so before ending this post, here's a look back into the forest, and one of its more spectacular birds, the Asian Fairy Bluebird (Irena puella).  This is a female, far duller than the glossy blue-and-back male, but the contrast between the deep red of its irises and the muted blue of its plumage is handsome enough.