And where’s the wildlife, you may ask? Well, it was in that vase. I disturbed it and it fled out the sliding doors…

Yep, that pesky tree-shrew (neither shrew nor tree-dweller, remember) was at it again, building a nest in the vase. When I emptied the vase on the floor to check if it had babies in there yet, this pile of leaves was the result!

The vase is about 30cm (12″) high,  and the animal (see here) is — if you in include the tail — about 34 cm in length, so I am not sure how on earth it thinks it can use the vase as a nest.

Last week it was tearing around the front lawn pretend-fleeing its amorous mate. This week, it’s in my lounge room. Typical!

Warning: if you can’t tell the difference between a centipede an a millipede, don’t pick them up. Millipedes are relatively harmless — unless you want to eat one — have 2  pairs of legs per segment, and are vegetarians. Centipede bites are nasty, they are carnivores and have one pair of legs per segment.
**Please note the correction on the frog species as per the comments from Budak in Singapore

Pill millipede (can roll itself up into a tight ball)

Millipede — Narceus?

This is probably a unknown beetle instar (larval stage)5mm. Found on a fungus.

**Copper-cheeked frog Hydrophylax raniceps

Forest snails

The Three-striped Ground Squirrel getting into the rubbish bin…

Just recently I was up in the north, in the state of Perak, the only place where all of Malaysia’s ten species of hornbill can be reliably found, all species totally protected. Once, a couple of years back, my friends and I saw all ten in 24 hours, one of the most glorious days of my birding life; something I will remember till the day I die. Not sure if anyone else will ever be able to do that, because there are people who don’t like hornbills, or at least not live ones.

The northernmost part of the state is a state park, where – in theory – all wildlife is totally protected. Unfortunately, the army is also there, obstensibly to protect us from incursions by armed foreigners.

They were so proud of their success in this endeavour, that they snapped a few shots and put it up on facebook. Then wondered why people got upset. The page was taken down. However, as we all know, once you put a thing up on the internet, it has a habit of haunting you with an eternal life of its own.

I would be very worried if I was them. The fine under the new Wildlife Act, now in operation, for being in possession of a killed hornbill is now a MINIMUM of $RM 50,000 (about 10,000stg or $US 17,000), plus — if I remember correctly — a jail sentence of at least a year.

Here’s a second snapshot of the facebook page, where the commentary jokes about how wonderful it is to eat rare wildlife, and how the more difficult to obtain, the tastier it is to eat. They make no attempt to hide the fact that they ate this bird. It is a Great Hornbill, one of the most magnificent of our large avian species.

In the enlargement below, you can see that it has blood on its wing, indicating that it was probably wounded first, and then it was slaughtered in the Muslim way, by having its throat cut to drain the blood. This latter wound is a dead give away that it was going to be eaten.

To be quite honest, I feel a bit sorry for these very silly young men. They are so ignorant, they can’t see that they did anything wrong, as is obvious from posing for the photo, and then posting it.

They are so ignorant, they can’t see a value in wildlife, or in obeying the laws of their own country.

It is their officers I blame. The mature men with rank who don’t care to teach their soldiers the law, or their role in protecting their country. Or what love for one’s country entails. You can’t tell me that their immediate superiors didn’t know they were doing this — and that this kind of thing has been going on for a long, long time. I’ve been hearing about it for years! And this is not the only photo I’ve seen. See here for more:skinning monkeys if you’ve got the stomach for it, taken well over a year ago.

This hornbill incident with the photographic evidence has been reported to the authorities. We are waiting to see what action is being taken. As I have heard nothing so far, I am making this post just to make sure that the issue stays alive. Obviously it would be very, very easy for the army to give the names of these young men to the Wildlife Dept/law enforcement.

As you can see from the photo, the soldiers are obviously starving. They are obviously desperate to cook and eat this bird, so desperate that they stopped to take a photo. I’m not kidding; my source for this info is excellent; a senior army personnel said that these poor young men were starving because they missed a food drop while on rainforest patrol due to bad weather!! They therefore had to kill to survive.  (If you believe that, well I have a set of twin towers in Kuala Lumpur to sell…)
 
One good thing, I suppose. An army officer in Kuala Lumpur was obviously worried enough to lie.

Ask the native peoples who live within the park boundaries about reporting poaching and they will shrug and say sarcastically, ‘Who do we tell when people poach here? The army?’

Pagar makan padi. In Malaysia, the fence eats the rice.

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This is a pic from my garden looking at the neighbour’s house. And that dot in the sky is…

this:

 It’s an Orb spider, some times called a bird-eating spider (and yes, they do.) With it’s legs outstretched it would cover my open hand, easily. And they are no big deal for humans, so he can stay there as long as he likes. You can read more about it here.

Still haven’t managed to catch sight of that cuckoo in the garden, but am still thinking it sounds like a Banded Bay, and that would make sense as we have the brood host, the Common Iora, and there is a fairly wooded area at the back of our house, bordering the golf course.

Trouble is, I’m not quite sure what the drama was about, but it certainly was heartfelt. I was writing in my study when I became aware of the kerfuffle unfolding – birds in a panic. Not just one, but dozens. Alarm calls among passerines (those small garden birds) are pretty well universally recognised between the species. There’s an obvious advantage to this.

The interesting thing about birds is that an alarm call often brings birds in, rather than scares them off. Especially the males they want to see what’s happening. And often, if the danger is one common to them all, they will cooperate to get rid of it. If you’ve ever seen a cat cowering in a tree under a united attack, you’ll know what I mean.

So, being a sticky beak – even if my mouth parts don’t fit the metaphor – I went to see what was happening. Unfortunately for my curiosity, it was all taking place high in the foliage and I’ve no idea what was there that was so alarming.

The oddest thing was that the state of complete consternation went on for about an hour, which is far longer than, say, the sight of a snake or a cat usually elicits. There were three female Asian Koels at the top of the avocado tree obviously fascinated by what was going on (casing the joint a nest?), so I did wonder if it was them. They are related to the cuckoos and lay their eggs in crow nests, so it was possible that other birds recognise the generic cuckoo and take offence. But then, none the alarmed birds were in the avocado or made any attempt to chase them off.

There were at least four Black-naped Orioles too, flying in an out to take a look. They are predators of eggs and young, but once again, the other birds ignored them.

Perhaps it was my resident Common Palm Civets that were the cause of the alarm, although I couldn’t see them.

The birds making the most noise were male and female Oriental Magpie-Robins – ten or more of them! – and a similar number of Yellow-vented Bulbuls. They were joined from time to time by Common Ioras, Ashy Tailorbirds and Olive-backed Sunbirds.

There may have been other species as well, as birds were fluttering in and out all the time.

I guess it will have to remain a mystery.

More adventures start for me tomorrow…but more about that later.
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 I suppose to out the words “pygmy” and “elephant” together (see my last post) is a bit ridiculous. But the Bornean elephant is small, hence the name. Smaller than its cousin found in Peninsular Malaysia, the Asian Elephant.

But here are some photos of something that really does deserve to be called “pygmy” : the Plain Pygmy Squirrel. Photographed on the canopy walkway of Danum Valley Rainforest Lodge, this little fella is fully 4″ (10cm) long from nose to tail tip. Which makes its body barely 2″. And boy, is he fast…

Find the Squirrel…

 

 

After that there was a scatter of Bearded Pigs, a full grown Sambar Deer, another lot of panicked pigs, and finally we were there, just as the granddad of all tropical downpours decided to pour down.

This is one of the Solitary Wasps – not to be confused with the Social Wasps, which are the scary ones, and which I have been stung by – 30+ stings in a single attack – and one species of which I have developed an allergic reaction to (fortunately not the aforementioned that swarmed in fury when their nest was accidentally disturbed by someone else. An attack that resulted in my losing a shoe in mangrove mud and having to bathe in an irrigation/drainage ditch…but that’s another story.)

I suspect this is a  Eumenidae, some of which are called potter wasps because of their gorgeous pot-shaped nets. We have those around the house too. This one here though is possibly Eustenogaster calyptodoma. Any wasp folk out there can confirm?

She now has two upstairs rooms built on the three downstairs. The third downstairs room addition has an outlook on to the floral landscape. I love the tail of greenery for the backroom.

And I finally managed a quick and fuzzy snapshot of the designer-builder. She is over 3cms long, black with yellow abdomen stripes and a very big butt…