Overseas Travel - A Primate Safari - Borneo

By James Fair - BBC Wildlife Magazine

Hey, it’s the monkeys...

The proboscis monkey has a big nose, an even bigger belly and a huge survival problem. James Fair travels to the world’s third largest island to find out whether primates could help to conserve its precious forests.

Most people have played that game where they fantasise about what animal they would like to be reincarnated as. Ooh, a dolphin, perhaps, splishing and splashing around in a coral atoll somewhere in the Caribbean; or a tiger – grrr! – sleeping all day and padding through a gilded forest as evening falls.
Well, having recently returned from Sabah, the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo, I can definitely cross one species off my list of future bodies to inhabit – the proboscis monkey.
Everything is stacked against it. First, nobody would call the proboscis monkey a beautiful animal. The male’s nose resembles a pair of testicles, and while the females are nasally compact in comparison, I knew as soon as I saw one that she reminded me of something, but I wasn’t sure what. On the third day, I twigged – it was the childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And the term ‘pot-bellied’ does not do justice to the size of their stomachs.
I’m sure proboscis monkeys are beautiful to each other, but it’s still something to consider when assessing your options, and anyway, there’s more. Their diet consists of nothing but leaves. Occasionally, they’re allowed a piece of fruit, but it must be an unripe, unsweet, tasteless piece of fruit. The odd seed is OK, but give a proboscis too many carbs and it swells up like an erupting volcano, overheats and dies.
Still, proboscis monkeys don’t know what they are missing, fruit-wise, so maybe this isn’t such a big deal either. No – the absolute clincher was something I read while relaxing in the library of the Kinabatangan Riverside Lodge one evening. In Proboscis Monkeys of Borneo, Elizabeth Bennett explains that the species lives in social groups, normally comprising females, their babies and juveniles, and one male. The
male stays at the centre of his harem, follows the females wherever they go and has sex with any that are receptive. Simple enough, you’d think. But no...
“The young proboscis monkeys frequently pull hard on the male’s upper leg, screaming all the while,” Bennett writes, “but a more successful tactic is to lean over the amorous couple from the front and try to tweak the male’s nose.” It is when I read stuff like this that I begin to doubt the theory of evolution. Just how interfering in the adults’ sex lives contributes to the survival of the species is beyond me.
That said, there’s something far more worrying about coming back as a proboscis monkey than the prospect of eating nothing but leaves and having your oversized hooter yanked every time you indulge in a bit of rumpy-pumpy, and that’s having no forest left in which to live. The island of Borneo, the species’ only home, is one of the powerhouses of the palm oil revolution, and its rainforest is being logged as fast as tubs of margarine, bars of soap and bottles of shampoo disappear off supermarket shelves.

KINABATANGAN JOURNEY
My journey through Sabah started when I left Sepilok Nature Reserve and its orangutan rehabilitation centre (not my thing, but go there if you have to see orangutans) for Sim Sim Water Village, a collection of dwellings and businesses built on a pier on the outskirts of Sandakan. From here, I travelled by boat along the coast and up the Kinabatangan (‘kin-a-bat-ang-an’) River on the way to the heart of the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary.
Much of the forest flanking the river has been logged at some point. Tall, spindly trees, signs of secondary growth, predominate, and from time to time I could see that behind the green wall there was nothing but grassy scrubland. At one point, I even passed a palm oil plantation. Two people I met who’d taken the road from Sandakan told me that what they’d seen was worse – just miles and miles of uninterrupted palm trees. I like to think that tourism could slow down the rate of conversion, but it’s far from proven.
Despite this gloomy prognosis, I can report that the wildlife around the Kinabatangan River merits your eco-dollars. Travelling upriver, I saw five orangutans, several groups of proboscis monkeys and some pygmy Asian elephants. One large male orangutan, 50 foot up a tree and with the look of a teenager contemplating the prospect of an evening in with his parents, let me gawp at him for 10 minutes before climbing halfway down the trunk and escaping into the tangled forest interior. I’d assumed I wouldn’t see any wild orangutans, so that was a real bonus.
The wildlife was even more prolific around the Kinabatangan Riverside Lodge. I saw no more orangutans, but there were proboscis monkeys almost everywhere I went, plus plenty of long-tailed macaques, several groups of silvered leaf monkeys and a palm civet. I even witnessed a fight between two large water monitors, dribbling as they grappled in the undergrowth.

INTO THE HEART OF BORNEO
In the late afternoons, the proboscis monkeys gathered near the water’s edge, having a last feed (yum, leaves again) before settling down for the night. Different groups sleep close to each other so that the females can size up other males – well, their noses at least – just in case they’re missing out on some top-class genes.
This, for me, was the best time of all – golden sunlight illuminating the lush green vegetation and the gingery-orange coats of the monkeys. In a reverie, I began to daydream that living among these peaceful animals wouldn’t be such a bad way to end up. I’d hoped to see one swimming – proboscis monkeys are good swimmers, I’d read, and have semi-webbed feet – and they sometimes paddle across the narrow rainforest tributaries rather than leap over them. Disappointingly, these monkeys didn’t even dip a toe in the water.
From Sukau, I travelled back down the Kinabatangan, flew to Kinabalu and then drove for about three hours to Borneo Proboscis River Lodge in the Klias Wetlands, a swampland of tannin-rich rivers, mangroves and palm trees.

Proboscis monkeys, long-tailed macaques and silvered leaf monkeys were just as numerous, but there were no orangutans.
By now, I’d had three days of watching primates, and my waking hours were starting to assume a routine that involved being out on the water from sunrise until 10 or 11am, and then again in the late afternoon. I could predict roughly how the proboscis monkeys would react when I saw them, too, and I knew that at least half of the time, the group would make a rapid exit into the forest interior the minute our boat turned up.
So, I had to be quick, either with binoculars or my camera. Following the monkeys’ progress through the canopy was hard enough, but getting decent shots was next to impossible – they were agile animals, moving around high above me in low light levels. Only when they had to jump from one tree to another did they come out into the open, and then they would make spectacular leaps, hurling themselves at nothing in particular from at least 20 metres above the ground.
In trouble again
My guide, Chris, was determined that I should get photographs of leaping monkeys, so while I kept my eye stuck to the viewfinder, he let me know where the group had got to and when an individual was preparing to jump.
“OK, James, he’s going, going, going,” he cried, as I swung the lens round to the area where I thought the monkey might be. “Jump! Jump! Jump!” Chris yelled as I pressed despairingly on the shutter. Occasionally, very occasionally, I captured a blurry arm or leg or a headless torso, but mostly, it was just empty space. “Don’t give up the day job,” I thought, as another leaping monkey action shot went begging.
There was one occasion when I had five minutes to prepare as a youngster hesitated over a leap that the rest of his group had already made. Four or five times, he rocked back and forth at the end of the branch before retreating to the safety of the main trunk, no doubt cursing the day he’d been born a proboscis monkey. It reminded me of the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where the two heroes are contemplating a leap into a deep river canyon. Perturbed, Sundance suddenly confesses that he can’t swim. “Swim?” exclaims Butch, “The fall will probably kill you!” Eventually, my own Sundance took the plunge, I missed it and Chris looked at me as if to say, “You didn’t fail again, did you?”
I spent the best part of a week watching monkeys – and mostly proboscis monkeys at that – but I never tired of it. My enduring memory is of the male sitting in the middle of his harem, shoulders hunched, peering from the depths of his green, green world with a mixture of fear and curiosity, silencing the chatter of excitable youngsters with a deep, growly bark that bore a passing resemblance to a didgeridoo.
Each night, I stayed out on the river until darkness fell, then returned to the lodge, enjoying the flickering, yellow-green lights of fireflies as the boat sped through the cooling night air. And I wondered, as I could not help wondering, just whether the proboscis monkeys of Borneo will still have a home when it’s my turn to be reborn with the world’s most remarkable nose.





Getting there
 My trip was organised by World Primate Safaris, which also organises tours to see mountain and lowland gorillas in Africa and lemurs in Madagascar. For further information % 0870 8509 092; www.worldprimatesafaris.com

 My return flight from Heathrow to Sandakan in Sabah, via Singapore, was with Malaysian Airways (www.malaysiaairlines.com). This journey emitted a gargantuan 8,800kg of carbon dioxide, more than eight times the annual emissions of the average Indian. It therefore cost a mammoth €177 to offset with atmosfair. www.atmosfair.de

Conservation
 WWF is active in Sabah, and partly due to its efforts, in 2005 the state government gazetted the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary – 26,000 hectares of riverine forest and floodplain.

 Sadly, being a fertile area, this is also an ideal location for palm oil plantations. You can find more information at www.wwf.org.my (click on ‘Forests’, then ‘Kinabatangan – Corridor of Life’).

What to take
 If you plan on taking photographs of primates, you will need at least a 300mm lens and a tripod. You will also need to shoot on a high ISO rating because of the low light levels.

 I made sure I had these things wherever I went: a water bottle (it’s hot and you get thirsty quickly), a sunhat and suncream and a dry bag for all my camera gear in case of a sudden downpour.

 If you’re bothered by tiny wildlife that bites, take plenty of insect repellent, but I didn’t find mosquitoes a big problem.

Read on
 I enjoyed A Naturalist in Borneo by Robert W C Shelford, a book published posthumously at the beginning of the 20th century (Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195826345). Expensive to buy out in Borneo, it’s available on Amazon for as little as £10.

 Wild Borneo by Nick Garbutt and Cede Prudente (New Holland, ISBN 1845373782, £29.99) is also an interesting read.