The Malay Archipelago, 2009 (1 Viewer)

Excellent, entertaining report! This has been great reading and I am looking forward to more.

thank-you all. I should have known mickle would be a Scottish word. If anyone is interested, the definition of burgomaster is "the principal magistrate, comparable to a mayor, of a city or town in the Netherlands, Flanders, Austria, or Germany", but I'm still none the wiser on "ditf"!

SULAWESI, Tangkoko National Park, 8 - 11 July

I started off on the back foot a bit with Sulawesi. The initial plan had been to spend three weeks in the Lesser Sundas and five weeks in Sulawesi (the Indonesian visas lasting for eight weeks before you have to leave the country), but I spent longer in the former than intended meaning the numbers were reversed and I ended up spending five weeks in the Lesser Sundas, hence only three in Sulawesi. Three weeks probably sounds like a long time for those sort of people who go on organised tours with all their pre-arranged drivers and so forth, but if you're travelling on the fly where it can take two or three days just to get between sites then three weeks isn't very long at all. On my original Sulawesi schedule I would have spent a few days at Tangkoko in the far north; a full week at Bogani as well as a few days at Nantu, both in the not-so-far north; a week at Lore Lindu in the centre; a week at Morowali and a few days at Faruhumpenai, both in the east; and lastly a few days around Makassar in the deep south. However I had to sit down and re-write it, so ended up tossing out Faruhumpenai and Morowali altogether and cut the other places right down to just a couple of days each. It was annoying but there wasn't much I could do about it.

My plane from Bali to Manado in the north of Sulawesi went via Makassar in the south. I was told I would just stay on board because there was no change-over but in Makassar everyone had to get off, go to the transfer desk, get a new ticket and then reboard exactly the same plane with the same air-hostesses. It was very strange, I’ve never come across that particular way of doing it before. In Manado I stayed for the night at the Manado Bersehati Hotel because I arrived in town at about 11pm. It’s a nice hotel, quite cheap (95,000 rupiah), had a tv in the room so I could watch Indonesian soap-operas ("Kasih & Amara", best nonsensical soap ever!), an internet café, travel agent, Pelni booking office, etc. The chap at the desk offered to take me to the village of Batuputih which is where you stay for Tangkoko National Park, my first wildlife stop for the island, for 100,000 rupiah on his motorbike the next morning. I had been going to go by local bus which would only cost around 40,000 (before the usual “tourist taxes” as I like to call them) but involves several transfers and would take twice as long, probably around four hours, so I took him up on it.

First stop in Manado though was the fish market to see if there were any coelacanths there. The coelacanth’s a fairly famous fish, thought extinct for 60 million years or so then sensationally rediscovered at the Comoro Islands off Madagascar in 1938. A good while later (in the 1990s) further populations were found off Madagascar, South Africa, Mozambique and other nearby countries. That seemed to be that as far as the coelacanth was concerned but then quite unexpectedly an entirely new species of coelacanth was discovered off north Sulawesi of all places. In fact its quite possible that there are coelacanths all round the world in suitable deep-water localities but the local fishing techniques need to be very specific to catch them so they’ll generally remain unknown to anyone. That there would be a coelacanth at the fish market on the very day I visited was of course hovering somewhere close to zero, especially given that only two specimens of Indonesian coelacanths have ever made their way into museums (in 1998 and 2007, to Java and Japan respectively) but imagine how aggravating it would be to not bother checking it out and then finding out later that there had been a coelacanth at the market on that morning!! I had a wander round, seeing everything from parrotfish to barracuda, but no coelacanth. Much as I suspected.

Before getting to Tangkoko I had for some reason been expecting Batuputih to be in the hills but its actually a coastal village. The National Park is rather dry lowland forest but there are also a couple of sizeable volcanoes there (the main one of which is called Tangkoko). There are at least five homestays in the village and a surprising number of tourists coming and going (most usually on day-trips up from Manado) but it’s a relatively expensive place to be a birder. I could see Sulawesi as a whole costing me an arm and a leg because the format is pretty much the same in all the National Parks. You stay in a homestay (which at Mama Roos in Batuputih is 200,000 per night, which is a typical price), but then you are also required to have a guide whenever you are within the boundaries which for a whole day birding is 250,000. This is pretty much just a simple means of extracting even more money from the tourists because the locals obviously aren't required to have guides when in the forest, and its not like there's anything dangerous in there that you need protecting from! I was actually spending more in Sulawesi per day on average than I do when in Australia, which quite frankly is ridiculous! Further to that, at Tangkoko you also need to make a boat trip into the mangroves to see the endemic great-billed kingfisher, which is very expensive when by oneself, at a fixed-price 300,000 for the boat and 100,000 for the guide. Fortunately I did see the kingfisher (two of them in fact, and they were quite spectacular) otherwise I would have been pretty grim-faced on the return. Other birds seen in the mangroves that I hadn't seen before were silver-tipped imperial pigeons, slender-billed crows, grey-rumped tree-swifts and Sulawesi swiftlets, but the pair of Sulawesi masked owls (like really big barn owls) that live in the nearby cliffs and are almost always reliable to see, were roosting elsewhere that day. However a walk by the village that night did net me Sulawesi scops owl so that was something.

The guide I had during most of my stay was named Samuel, but I was also taken out by Antri as well. I do really dislike being led around and having birds pointed out to me but you don't have much of a choice here. All the guides are excellent birders and know the Latin names of all the birds (but usually not the English names, so brush up on your binomens before visiting!). There's even a birdwatcher club in the village, formed of and by the guides. The other guides I talked to were a bit disparaging about Samuel's abilities but I thought he was very good. The only annoying thing was on the morning I was leaving (literally minutes before leaving in fact) he started telling me about all these daytime roost sites of endemic owls he knows about! When in Indonesia you always need to ask about things you have no idea you should be asking about.

The birds in Tangkoko are all amazing. I was surprised how few small ones there were though. In most forests there are flocks of white-eyes and babblers and all sorts flitting through the canopy and flycatchers sallying back and forth, but in Tangkoko with few exceptions (eg, the very common Sulawesi babbler) most of the birds were larger species. My first full day birding was fantastic, with rare and endemic birds literally falling out of the trees and into my pockets (well not “literally” but as good as). There were so many birds all around me that I totalled up the longest day-list of the trip yet. As well as a whole slew of other birds that I had seen elsewhere, I saw three red-backed thrushes, described in the field-guide as uncommon and difficult to see, the fabulous yellow-billed malkoha (one of my favourite bird groups, malkohas), lilac-cheeked and green-backed kingfishers, the extraordinary finch-billed or grosbeak starling, blue-backed parrot, silver-tipped and green imperial pigeons (the latter with a strange rufous nape unlike in the rest of its range), yellow-sided and grey-sided flowerpeckers, Stephan's dove, Tabon scrubfowl, blue-breasted pitta, golden-mantled racquet-tailed parrot, black-fronted white-eye, white-rumped cuckoo-shrike, excellent views of a pair of perched red-knobbed hornbills, and most surprisingly a pair of lesser sulphur-crested cockatoos. I had been disappointed not to be able to get to Komodo to see these and I really hadn’t been expecting to see them anywhere else, especially not in Sulawesi where they are so close to extinction. Apparently this pair's origins may be a bit dodgy but I don't care, on my list they went.

On the morning after, I went on the back of a motorbike about ten kilometres back up the road from the village to where there is a viewpoint over a forested valley. At first nothing much was happening here and I was thinking that it was going to be hopeless without a scope anyway, when a Sulawesi (large) hanging-parrot landed in the tree right above my head, and then a pair of the gorgeous yellow-breasted racquet-tailed parrots flew up and sat in full view on an exposed branch. Then we heard the curious call of the Sulawesi dwarf hornbill and eventually tracked down five of them in the trees right beside the road, the females all black and the males with stunning yellow faces. On the way back to Batuputih a Sulawesi black pigeon landed in a nearby tree, the sun showing off all its iridescent glory. The rest of the day was somewhat slow bird-wise with notable sightings only of several bay coucals, a purple-winged roller, black-headed munias, and ashy woodpeckers.

Now that I was out of the Lesser Sundas my mammal list had started to pick up a little. I didn't manage to find either the small cuscus or the bear cuscus at Tangkoko so I was hoping for them in some of the other places I would be going to, but I spotted two species of dwarf squirrels (Prosciurillus murinus and P. leucomus), the crested black macaque and the spectral tarsier. There are four intermingling troops of the macaques in the general area that most of the public visit, two or three of which mainly hang out around the Tangkoko Research Station funded by the Woodland Park Zoo of Seattle in 2002 but now to all appearances used as a fishing camp. There is a lot of rubbish strewn all over this area, even though the Park staff clean it regularly. Apparently the bulk of it is left by Indonesian tourists coming in to see the monkeys.

After the macaques, the other main attraction at Tangkoko for regular tourists, both local and international, are the spectral tarsiers. There is a strangler fig in the forest where three tarsiers live. I went along there on the second and third evenings to see them. It really is a circus. The first evening there were about 25 other people there. Their guides were walking back and forth in front of the cleft where the tarsiers hide, periodically shining their torches up inside to see if they were coming out, which seemed rather a counter-productive sort of behaviour when waiting for a nocturnal animal to emerge from its den. When one tarsier did come to the opening, immediately a barrage of camera-flashes went off in its face. It sat stoically in place, no doubt blinded, then edged round to another opening, followed naturally by all the cameras. It was really sad to watch. On the one hand you couldn’t help feeling sorry for the little creature but on the other hand this happened every evening and if it was too disturbing to them then they would go find somewhere else to live (like all the other more sensible tarsiers had done, apparently). And of course it did keep all the people at this one tree and away from all the other tarsier roost sites. It’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other really. I tried taking about ten photos without a flash with no result, so even though it makes me a massive hypocrite I took one photo with a flash. I’m not proud of it but it was a drop in the ocean amongst all the other flashes, and the way I see it when I die I’ll be judged by the Tarsier God and he will decide on whether I suffer eternal Damnation for my actions. The second night was better because there were only about five other tourists, they took their snapshots and left, and I stayed behind with two girls doing their university theses at the Park (on the macaques and the local bush-meat trade respectively) who were also doing a tarsier survey recording the numbers of people at the tree each night, the people’s behaviour, the effect on the tarsiers - such as how long it took them to come out, when they started vocalizing, etc. Just before dark the three tarsiers all came right out of their holes and bounded off through the trees like tiny spring-loaded arboreal kangaroos. It was really amazing to see. Before leaping they urinate on their hind feet and then rub them together to make the soles sticky for the landing, an action that results in a very amusing little bottom-wiggle. Tarsiers are my new favourite mammal that I’ve seen in the wild (the previous was the Kitti’s hog-nosed bat from Thailand).

I wasn’t long at Tangkoko, just one afternoon and two full days due to my restricted time in Sulawesi, but it’s a great place, fully deserving of a longer stay. The local villagers are all well aware of conservation issues and take care to protect their forest because it brings in the tourists and the guide fees go straight into the village, but disturbingly most of them still eat bush-meat regularly, including monkeys and cuscus (bush-meat is the meat of wild-caught animals). They don’t hunt in the National Park because that would be wrong, instead they buy the meat in the market at the nearby-ish town of Tomohon. There seems to be no connection in their minds between the two. You may wonder where the bulk of that meat in the Tomohon market comes from - that’s right, the National Parks. At Tangkoko the rangers are always finding snares in the less-visited regions, set for warty pigs, monkeys, birds, you name it and its on the menu.

Great info! I will have to remember to check out fish markets more often. Birding is a priority for me but I always wonder whats out there beneath the waves and what people are taking from oceans, lakes, and rivers.
Sorry to hear that Sulawesi has become so expensive- have always wanted to go there. The required guide sounds pretty annoying although a suppose a valid price to pay if it helps to preserve the forest. Hopefully a solution can be found for the bush-meat situation.

Nice Tangkoko report Chlid, even though you reminded me that we missed the Stephan's Dove . We also enjoyed having Samuel as the compulsory guide, as he tried really hard to find our hit list.

Hope you don't mind me adding that the expensive boat trip there for the Great-billed Kingfisher is not necessary if you plan to go looking for the recently discovered Togian White-eye on the Togians, as the kingfisher is commoner there. And the owl can be seen elsewhere too, eg when going for the Maleo.

keep it coming!

I did see the great-billed kingfisher elsewhere (Nantu Reserve) but at the time it seemed the best option to take the boat because the impression I had gained from trip reports was that the Tangkoko mangroves were the main site for them. I heard the Sulawesi masked owl at Bogani but never saw one (but owls hate me anyway). And don't even mention Stephan's doves, damn things I ended up having to kick them out of my way they were so common (sorry).

The Togian islands are on my to-do list....maybe next year.....

SULAWESI, Bogani Nani Wartabone, 12 - 14 July

My second Sulawesi destination was the Bogani Nani Wartabone national park, formerly known by the more-easily remembered name of Dumoga-Bone. Nani Wartabone was a local hero who was an anti-Dutch guerilla; there's a statute of him in Kotamabagu dressed for some reason as a boyscout. I'd read on the almighty internet that instead of staying at Kotamabagu as birders usually did, one could now stay at a guesthouse in Toraut about an hour further on from Kotamabagu (itself about three hours south from Manado) and right on the boundaries of the park so much more convenient. At Tangkoko Antri had told me that the guesthouse in Toraut was called Tantemin and he would ring them for me and arrange the stay. I had also met another guide called Bobby from one of Tangkoko’s other guesthouses, Tangkoko Lodge, who was taking a Belgian client to Nantu Reserve for babirusa-spotting and he said he would see about whether I could join in (thereby making it affordable for me to reach that expensive destination). He also knew of Tantemin and said he’d ring me there once he got the yay or nay from his client.

So I set off for Bogani with high hopes of as good a wildlife experience as at Tangkoko. Travelling in Sulawesi really is a breeze, especially compared to some of the other places in Indonesia. I took a motorbike from the Manado Bersehati Hotel to the bus terminal, which turned out to be not so much buses as 4-wheel drive Toyotas that fit about 8 or 9 people. The real buses are probably even cheaper but a seat in the taxis is only 45,000 rupiah (about NZ$8) and much more comfortable. Once in Kotamabagu several hours later the driver pulled over a bemo. As far as I could make out from the exchange, the bemo would take me to another place from where I could get a motorbike to Toraut. I really couldn’t follow the conversation properly but I got in the bemo and set off without a clue where I was, where I was going, or where my bag of cameras and binoculars had gone (it had disappeared up the front somewhere while I ended up wedged in the back rear corner, but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it). My pack was put on the floor as an extra seat for other passengers. It’s a strange sort of feeling being on a bus not knowing where you’ll end up but really the worst that can happen is that you’ll have to spend the night in some random town and get to your true destination the next day.

After an hour we pulled into a town and all the passengers left on the bemo got off. I said that I now needed to go to Toraut, to which the response was did I want to go somewhere that sounded like “wallis”, which I didn’t understand. I said I was going to Tantemin, which they didn’t understand. After a few tries at pronouncing it, I wrote it down and they’re all immediately like “Oh! Tantemin!”, pronouncing it to my ears in exactly the same way I had been pronouncing it. I get on a motorbike and head off again, not for a long trip as I thought, but just up the road and round the corner. So there was the Tantemin guesthouse, where they were actually expecting me although it wasn’t Antri that had booked me in but Bobby. Nice guy. So far so good but I was still puzzled by certain things. By the end of the day I had discovered that the town I was in wasn’t Toraut at all but Dolodua. When Antri and Bobby had said Tantemin was in Toraut I think they must have been meaning just that that’s where they stayed when visiting the forest at Toraut....which also explained how the internet report had said there were several species of forest owls around the guesthouse at night whereas Tantemin was in the middle of a village. Another thing that had initially been puzzling me was that in Manado I had been warned off staying in Toraut because it was too dangerous (its an illegal-gold-mining town and apparently the miners regularly get drunk and kill one another!) - yet I’d been thinking how friendly everyone in this drunken miner town was! And of course it also explained all the confused reactions I got when saying I was going to Toraut but then said I was going to Tantemin. (To wrap it all up, the guesthouse at Toraut is actually run by the national park people and is called Wallacea, hence the “wallis” questions). If I was doing the trip again, I would stay at Wallacea rather than Tantemin because it is a bit cheaper (95,000 as opposed to about 150,000 per night) and more importantly is right at the forest so more convenient, but you would need to take your own food and water as they currently have no restaurant facilities for guests. The guide fees at Bogani were even higher than at Tangkoko: 150,000 for a half-day and 350,000 for a full day, plus 40,000 for a required but completely-unnecessary second guide (!!), plus the cost of the motorbike rides to the sites (between 10,000 and 50,000). Ridiculous!

The next day came another instance of mild confusion over destination. Every birder that visits Bogani goes to a place called Tambun to see the nesting grounds of the maleo, a big megapode that buries its eggs in volcanically-heated soil for incubation. They are now very rare over most of Sulawesi due to the usual scenario of over-hunting and, in this case, over-collection of the eggs. After their visits those birders write reports on the internet for the benefit of us other birders (because we are of course an agreeable sort of bunch) but they always just write something along the lines of “went to Tambun in the morning to see the maleo”, which is all well and good but doesn’t actually help in letting you know where it is or how to get there. I had thought I had got it sorted while still in Manado when someone there told me that Tambun was the name of a nearby village and easily reached by motorbike, and I envisioned a small coastal village with a black-sand beach beside it where the maleo congregated to breed. The owner of Tantemin had, I thought, arranged a motorbike for the next morning at 5am to take me to Tambun and she also said that I didn’t need a guide to visit, both of which were wrong. In the morning she said I had to walk to the terminal and get a motorbike from there, so I set off down the road thinking that this was pretty stupid because it was still dark, but there was one bike sitting there. He said I needed a guide at Tambun, I said I didn’t, he no doubt said the Indonesian equivalent of the sarcastic “um, OK then buddy”, but he took me anyway. Riding on the back of a motorbike in the dark in the tropics isn’t very pleasant because instead of little weeny insects like in the daytime you are constantly getting hit with huge katydids and beetles and owls. There are few things more painful than having a rhinoceros beetle hit you in the eye at 50kph. Tambun turned out to be not a village at all but the name of a site within the national park where the only building is the guard post and where I discovered that I did in fact need both a guide and a permit. After a lengthy wait a guide named Max was rustled up and we entered the nesting grounds, which are completely enclosed with a padlocked mesh fence to keep out pigs and dogs and poachers (the maleo can fly over the fence of course). Rather than the black-sand beaches where maleo are normally photographed and filmed, Tambun is inside a geothermal area of forest, complete with boiling-water streams. There were nest holes everywhere but, as misfortune would have it, I was outside the main breeding season. In fact my visit coincided exactly with the very absolute lowest point of maleo activity in the area! In high season you can easily see five or six pairs at once as soon as you arrive, but now all I saw were two distant birds scuttling rapidly off into the lantana thickets. The view wasn’t good enough for me to be able to say I’d “seen” them - I wanted to get a good look at them for that - so it was disappointing but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

At Tambun all the eggs are collected every afternoon and buried inside hatchery cages to protect them from predation by monitor lizards. In the high season they collect 50 or 60 a month on average; in the low season only a handful. There were two chicks ready for release that very morning. They were a day old and about the size of guinea-pigs! I got to hold one to release (you know, doing my bit for conservation) and it flew like a pigeon off into the scrub. The eggs of megapodes are so big and take so long to hatch that the chicks are fully-developed upon hatching. I did know they could fly as soon as they had dug their way out of their nest-holes, but it was still pretty amazing seeing it in action with my own eyes. I was tempted to count that chick as me having seen a maleo (after all, it was wild as soon as it left my hands) but I decided that would be cheating. There were of course other birds in and around the forest, such as Sulawesi triller, cicadabird and hawk-cuckoo (apparently the last was a very good bird to see), and Max also took me on his bike to a nearby wetland where we found some more common species like cinnamon bittern, white-breasted waterhen, Javan pond heron, purple heron, wandering whistling duck, etc.

There are three sites you have to visit at Bogani as a birder. As well as Tambun there is also Toraut which is primary forest, and Tapakulintang (trying saying that three times fast) where you just walk along the main road through the forest looking for birds in the trees either side - but, apparently, still need a guide!. I went to both of the latter and in both the birding was very very poor. I’m sure that’s not always the case but it certainly was when I was there. The guide at Toraut, Ijon, was one of those chump birders who has to find all his birds by playing tapes which really annoyed me because I like finding my birds the honest way, and he just wouldn't stop. At Toraut I was happy nevertheless to see ornate lorikeet, Sulawesi serpent-eagle and white-necked mynah, none as a result of taping, and we stayed out till after dark to look for owls with no luck at all (despite Ijon never turning his tapes off). Owl-hunting really is a fool’s game. Ijon was all like “normally there’s owls all over the place here!”, but the closest we got was hearing one single solitary lonely individual Sulawesi masked owl. I did find an individual of the Wagler's pit viper complex, coiled up in a palm frond about eight metres off the ground. I’d seen six snakes on the trip so far and all of them had been dead on the roads, starting with a metre-long baby reticulated python in Bali, so this was the first live one. One of the guides cut a big long stick and headed for the tree. Either he thought I would want a closer look at it - and having an extremely-venomous and agitated snake landing at my feet in the dark isn’t my idea of fun - or more likely he was going to knock it down and kill it, which I would have liked even less. I told him to put the stick down.

I only had a short stay at Bogani (two days) due to time limitations (ie visa expiry date approaching), so I used the last afternoon to have a final go at the maleo. We hung around the nest sites for a while but when we heard a male maleo calling up in the forest we went in after him. For the next several hours we scrambled about in the jungled hills, once even coming close enough to hear a maleo dashing off into the undergrowth. Tracking down another calling bird we found only its scratchings in the dirt and a solitary white feather (which went into my hat-band). So I’d seen the nest holes, seen two distant un-tickable birds, seen an egg, released two chicks, heard maleo calling, heard maleo running, found their scratchings, found a feather - surely that must all add up to the same as one good bird? There wasn’t much daylight left so we had to give up. As we trudged wearily back to the road we suddenly, almost literally at the last minute, spotted a maleo perched in the top of a tree about ten metres above us preparing to roost for the night. Through the binoculars it was as clear as day, the sun’s final rays illuminating its unusual rosy-pink belly as if it had perched there specifically for that very reason. Then its mate flew in to join it and together they strutted about on the branches, snaking their ridiculously small heads about as they called back and forth. Seeing a maleo on the nesting ground on the first try would have been good, but these two birds were so much better because of all the effort we’d had to put in to see them. Was the maleo the best bird of the trip to date? Yes it was.

Maleo doing the biz - sounds like one of those magical moments that will stay with you forever!

Mike

Wow you did well to see Sulawesi Hawk-Cuckoo Chlid. From what I remember, it was that species that Bram told us was pretty much impossible to see, and he didn't know anyone who'd seen one. You were also lucky to get Max as a guide. Max was busy when we were there, and we had an amusingly dodderry but pretty ineffective old chap to show us around the Maleo site. Oh to be in wonderful Sulawesi!

the hawk-cuckoo just appeared in a nearby tree while we were in the forest on the hills by the nesting area, and Max told me it was very rare to see one. He was pretty excited for me. I guess I was due for seeing something good!

I read through your Sulawesi posts the other day, and the account of the old guy had me literally laughing out loud. He is probably the same guy I had as the secondary guide. It is a pity you didn't get Max as well because he was very good. Here's a photo of the two of them with the maleo chicks

Birdingcraft said:

Sorry to hear that Sulawesi has become so expensive- have always wanted to go there. The required guide sounds pretty annoying although a suppose a valid price to pay if it helps to preserve the forest. Hopefully a solution can be found for the bush-meat situation.

Click to expand...

the guide requirement is veryannoying when you are travelling on a budget and prefer being independent. In some cases, like Tangkoko, the money apparently goes directly to the village which is good, but in other places I suspect it goes straight into the government coffers and is of no conservation benefit. The Lesser Sundas were great because apart for Lewa (on Sumba) guides weren't obligatory. In all of Sulawesi's national parks they apparently are. On Java and Sumatra you are supposed to have guides in some parks but not others. Really you have no idea what the actual deal is anywhere and you have to rely on the officials telling you the truth about whether guides are required or not (which in Indonesia is by no means guaranteed!).

I fear the bush-meat trade will only come to a halt when there is no more bush-meat to be hunted.

SULAWESI, Nantu Reserve, 17 - 20 July

One of the more unusual animals in Sulawesi is the babirusa, which is a type of big hairless pig with four big tusks in the males. The lower pair of tusks grow out from the sides of the mouth like a regular pig but the upper pair grow straight upwards through the snout itself before curving back towards the eyes like horns, hence the name babirusa (babi pig, rusa deer). Because babirusa are quite large creatures and tasty to eat they are now critically endangered over the entire island. In fact the only place where they can still be seen with any regularity is at a place called Nantu Reserve near Gorontalo, which is where I headed after Bogani Nani Wartabone national park. The only reason the babirusa are still found in any numbers there is because of a constant police presence to protect them. There are always three guards in the reserve, ostensibly patrolling to stop poachers. The ones there during my visit all looked about eighteen years old, and seemed to spend the entire time sitting around the camp playing with their AK47s, having ping-pong matches, and listening to an interesting selection of Bryan Adams and Whitesnake songs. Nantu is a very expensive place to get to; this place is where tourist-wallet-stripping really goes into overdrive. Just as an example of the costs, the three-hour motorised canoe trip up the river to the reserve's camp was at the time 500,000 rupiah each way. I was told that because there are no fixed prices the costs go randomly up or down according to the whims of the local people involved. Apart for the cost of the boat, there are also the hefty permit fees from the forestry department and the police, the fees for the required national park guide, the additional local guide, etc etc etc. The rooms at the camp there cost 200,000 per night, the price of a homestay elsewhere, but at Nantu getting you a mattress on the floor (if you're lucky). You have to take your own food and pay the cook to prepare it, although as everyone was eating the same food at the same time I'm sure there's an unnecessary step in there somewhere! There is no toilet -- and I don't mean there was no toilet in the room, I mean there was physically no toilet. The river is the toilet, and also the bathing area. I'm not too sure that using the river as a toilet is really very environmentally-sound so during my stay I did my best to avoid polluting the local water sources!

As previously mentioned, at Tangkoko I had met a chap named Bobby who was taking a Belgian guy to Nantu to see the babirusa, and I managed to wrangle my way into the visit. It cost me the equivalent of three weeks of my budget for just four days and they were some of the more uncomfortable days I've spent in a long time but it was totally worth it (although I may have had to change my mind about that at the end of my trip when there would be the potential for running out of money and having to sell my kidneys). I could probably have done it a bit cheaper on my own but realistically I don't think I would have even made it because the whole journey there turned into a complete shambles. First stop from Gorontalo was the forestry department to get the permits there and then the police in Limboto about twenty minutes drive away to get more permits. Although Bobby had already arranged the visit for his client weeks in advance it still took two full hours to get these sorted out. If you don't speak Indonesian (or aren't travelling with an Indonesian) it would take considerably longer! Bobby warned me to say I was just a regular tourist because if they suspected me of being a professional filmographer then the fee would shoot upwards! (Fortunately I was just a regular tourist so I didn't have to lie). Then it turned out that the river was too low for the boat to even make it to the reserve; or rather it could have made it if we spent half the trip pushing it over the rocks. Bobby was not exactly happy with this as he had been in touch with the national park guide every day for the last few weeks and it had never been mentioned. There is a road to Nantu but it was so bad that the car Bobby had brought from Manado couldn't make it (he having assumed that we would only be driving as far as Mohiolo on good roads to get the boat). We did our best but eventually had to ditch the car at a little cluster of huts and try to find some motorbikes. Normally its not hard to find a motorbike in Indonesia but, as it turns out, it is when there are five of you! This was about where we were thinking we were going to be ending up back at Gorontalo with no Nantu. Eventually we did manage to round up five bikes for I have no idea how much money, and we took off for an hour's ride over what could have been an extreme motorcross track. The river was low because it hadn't rained in months but you wouldn't know it from the road we were on. Some stretches were just broken rocks but mostly it was kilometre after kilometre of quagmire. No joke, at one point we passed a truck abandoned in the road up to the top of its tyres in the mud. Then inexplicably for the last ten minutes the road turned to perfect seal, but by that stage of course we all looked like Swamp Creatures. Then there was a raft across the river, half an hour over another very bad road in what had in a former life been a Landrover, another half hour of walking through rice paddies and corn fields, a wade through another river, and finally we reached the Nantu Reserve just after dark, after ten hours of travelling.

The babirusa site is just fifteen minutes walk from the camp. Its a big clearing in the forest overlooked by two hides, one at ground level and one about tree-top height. The two essential guides proved themselves to be entirely superfluous - they walk you to the hide (one walking in front of you, one behind) and then they go back to the camp to do nothing all day, while dreaming what they will do with all the money they are getting. A little stream runs through the clearing and the babirusa come here through-out the day to drink and wallow in the mud. At some points there were fifteen or twenty babirusa in the clearing at a time. We only had two full days at Nantu, so for the first day I took the top hide and for the second the lower, alternating with the Belgian. The upper hide was, shall we say, none too comfortable. The roof was about four feet high and the viewing hole was at a perfect height if you were a squatting Indonesian. They can squat all day long because they've been doing it all their lives but for westerners it gets very painful after a short period. Worst were the tree ants though. They were living in the palm-frond thatch, and as soon as I climbed inside the hide they swarmed all over me in their thousands with stings like burning needles. For an hour they kept up the assault until either I'd killed them all or they had suffered such heavy casualties they'd decided a strategic withdrawal was the best strategy. When I returned to the hide after lunch they launched another offensive, obviously not realising I was the same formidable opponent as in the morning. I was wondering how the Belgian was getting on in the other hide, because he wasn't really a jungle type of person, but the next day when I had the lower hide I realised he'd been in comparative luxury. The roof was over six foot high, there were no ants, and there was even a seat at a perfect height to see out the window.

There were LOTS of babirusa at the site, and they were in a remarkable array of colours: dark grey, pale grey, pale grey with pinky legs and bellies, wholly pinky-brown, blotchy in pink and grey, and even some that were almost chestnut. They're hardly the most attractive of animals. From a distance they somewhat resemble hippos with their skinny legs and fat bodies. Otherwise they're rather like a cross between a tapir and a mangy dog. Very odd creatures. There were also Heck's macaques at the site. These have grey bellies and lower legs, and look very different to the black crested macaques of Tangkoko. The black cresteds reminded me of small gorillas (and the males even develop silverbacks), but the initial impression of the Heck's macaques is that they resemble chimpanzees. Very occasionally people see anoa from the hides at Nantu. Anoa are a type of dwarf buffalo endemic to Sulawesi. Like the babirusa they are very rare due to hunting and I wasn't expecting to be lucky enough to see one, so you could have knocked me down with a maleo feather when an anoa stepped out of the jungle, looked around, had a bit of a wander and then disappeared again. I got some photos to prove I saw it but frustratingly they were all shockingly out of focus. Around the camp there were also Sulawesi warty pigs which were much smaller than I had been expecting. For some reason the young ones kept reminding me of super-sized elephant shrews but I'm not sure why. I went wandering for a bit as well trying unsuccessfully to find a bear cuscus, but did see a Sulawesi red-bellied squirrel which was quite fantastic.

There are lots of birds around the place as well, but there's no point wasting your time on them when you've paid so much to get there to see babirusa! New species for me were Sunda teal and blue-eared kingfisher on the river and Sulawesi pied cuckoo-shrike in the forest. Non-new species included collared kingfisher, great-billed kingfisher (could have saved myself the cost of the boat trip in the Tangkoko mangroves!), red-knobbed and dwarf hornbills, bay coucal, ashy woodpecker, Stephan's dove, brown cuckoo-dove, Sulawesi black pigeon, black-naped fruit dove, green and silver-tipped imperial pigeons, yellow-billed malkoha, slender-billed crow, hair-crested drongo, blue-backed parrot, ornate lorikeet, black-naped oriole and cattle egret. A few of these were seen from the hide (eg, the brown cuckoo-doves and Sulawesi black pigeons, along with mangrove monitors) but most were easily spotted in the trees along the river, especially first thing in the morning.

So, excellent couple of days. Well worth the expense, especially (at the risk of sounding like a wildlife-spotting snob) as seeing babirusa isn't an everyday experience like the Komodo dragons on Rinca where every man and his dog can go. Hopefully the area remains protected but as they are currently building a bridge and fixing up the roads I fear it won't be too many years before poachers have gained easy access and come in and wiped the babirusa and anoa out here as well.

hopefully these pictures will attach all right. Just a few relating to previous posts: olive-headed lorikeet from West Timor (this one was being kept as a village pet); Komodo dragon on Rinca; spectral tarsier at Tangkoko; maleo chick at Tambun

and two from Nantu Reserve, the anoa and a male babirusa

wow...Babirusa has to be one of my top most wanted mammals in the world. And you managed an Anoa too! Now I am super jealous and not just jealous of your trip!

Pretty darn impressive mammals but holy smokes- what an awful and expensive ordeal to see them! I thought that park entrance fees in Costa Rica were kind of steep ($10 per day for non residentsn, no guide nor permits required) and I wonder where the money goes but the situation is apparently nothing compared to that of Indonesia.

Thanks for all of this info- although it puts a damper on my dreams of doing an easy trip there at least I have an idea of what to expect!

Mysticete said:

wow...Babirusa has to be one of my top most wanted mammals in the world. And you managed an Anoa too! Now I am super jealous and not just jealous of your trip!

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the anoa was a super-duper bonus. Its one of those ones where you know people have seen them there and you think wow that would be awesome, but you know its just so unlikely that there will be one at the site on the day you're there....and then it steps out of the jungle and smacks you in the face! That's why the photos all turned out crap. I took hundreds of the babirusa because they were always there, but I was so concerned about not getting good ones of the anoa in the few minutes it was out that I completely stuffed them up. Still, I always think of the photos as being secondary to the experience anyway.

Birdingcraft said:

Thanks for all of this info- although it puts a damper on my dreams of doing an easy trip there at least I have an idea of what to expect!

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it is a trying place to travel, but its all worth it. When you get home, you forget all the hardships and just remember the good bits, then want to go right back there and do it all over again!

SULAWESI, Lore Lindu National Park, 22 - 25 July

The late Douglas Adams, when journeying to Komodo, wrote something along the lines of "Everything we were told in Indonesia turned out to be not true, sometimes almost immediately." He didn't mean it literally of course, but its pretty damn close.

After returning to Gorontalo from Nantu I had time to grab a shower because I smelled like a babirusa, then it was off to catch the night-bus to Palu in central Sulawesi. It takes about 14 hours to get from Gorontalo to Palu and while there is a day-bus its basically a waste of a day. The night-bus would save me that time, and also the money for the hotel that I'd be paying otherwise, and I'd be able to get to Lore Lindu National Park a day earlier. Lore Lindu is one of the most important protected areas in Sulawesi, home to almost all the species of mammals and birds on the island, but because of my restricted time in Sulawesi I was only getting two full days there instead of the seven in my original plan, so any extra days I could get I needed to take. The bus left at 5pm. It was actually going to Makassar right down the bottom of Sulawesi, so I'd be getting off at Toboli and then taking another bus from there for two hours to Palu. I was told we would be arriving in Toboli at 7am the next morning, which seemed about right. As I soon found out, the night-buses on Sulawesi are not like the night-buses elsewhere in Indonesia where they take on their load of passengers and then travel non-stop through the night to their ultimate destination. Instead they are just like the regular day-buses except in the dark. They are like old school buses past their use-by date, and there is no sleep to be had because all the way along the route they are stopping to pick people up and fill up with cargo. The position you are in is the position you stay in for the next ten or twenty hours because you are packed in amongst sacks and boxes and other passengers. Its like a mobile Tetrus game with people. Doubly-unfortunate was that my seat was right next to the permanently-open door so I had to use my feet to wedge myself against the frame to stop myself flying out into the night on the corners. And just in case anyone does try to sneak in a few winks, there is deafening Indonesian dance music played constantly. Some stupid woman had brought her two kids onto the bus who were infected with chicken-pox or small-pox or something and they spent the entire trip scratching furiously and rubbing against everything and everybody they could. I couldn't remember if I'd had chicken-pox before or not, but I fortunately suffered no consequences.

At 7am the bus was passing through a town called Tomini and I had one of those moments where you wonder "did I somehow mis-hear Tomini as Toboli, and I'm supposed to get off here?". At 8am we pulled into a petrol station and I asked the driver how far to Toboli. Two hours he says. At 11am I had pretty much given up any hope of getting to Lore Lindu that day. At 1pm the bus finally came into Toboli, after a full twenty hours on the road!! I was in Palu by 3pm but it was too late to do anything about Lore Lindu except go to the central office and get the permits sorted out. The night bus had saved me almost no time at all. I had the address for the National Parks office - I think I'd got it from Lonely Planet or somewhere like that - the only problem being that it was wrong, so I basically drove all round town in a bemo with a random person who thought it would be fun to help until we found it (but I forgot to write down the actual address at the time so I'm still none the wiser). I sorted out the permits for visiting the park and also sight-unseen (as I had no frame of reference for who would be a good guide) arranged a guide called Idris who lived in the village of Wuasa where I would be based. From reading trip reports, it seems that most people stay in the village of Kamarora but its much further away from the Anaso track (about 2 hours apparently) than either Wuasa or Sedoa (45 and 15 minutes away respectively). In Wuasa there are several places to stay, namely the Sendy Inn, Mona Lisa, and a National Park guesthouse, all apparently about the same price. I stayed at Sendy which was 150,000 per night. At the Palu office they also told me there was a “cottage” in Sedoa where you can stay too. After sorting out all the permits and such, I went back to the Hotel Dely for the night. I hadn't been back there long however when there was a knock on my door and I found the guide Idris standing out there, which was mildly surprising! I never did find out why he was already in Palu but he organised with me that he would be back the next morning to travel to Wuasa on the bus with me. The "bus" was actually a big car (called a "public car" because they function as buses) and the trip cost 80,000 rupiah. Later I discovered that the price was 40,000 and I had paid the fare for Idris as well, which I was slightly annoyed about.

The main site at Lore Lindu for birders is the Anaso track which goes straight up a mountain. As I said in relation to Tangkoko National Park there is a stunning paucity of small passerines in Sulawesi's lowland forests, but up in the montane forests there are loads of them. Its a very striking contrast, and its the reason the Anaso track is so important for people looking for as many of the island's birds as possible. With only two days in the park I decided to spend the entire time on this track. Idris appeared at first to be a good guide for a birder but after a few bad ID calls (eg, he identified streak-headed dark-eyes as Sulawesi leaf-warblers, and a female black-naped monarch as a mangrove blue flycatcher), a lazy attitude which really wasn't on when you're paying someone good money for their presence, and some other stuff which I'll talk about a bit later (and some stuff I won't talk about!), by the end of my stay I was well and truly fed up with him and more than a couple of times came close to thumping him one. But, the birds were great. The Anaso track is really a rough dirt road that used to be a four-wheel drive track. Now its completely impassable to even motorbikes due to slips. One part in particular is now just a narrow ridge between two great chasms where the track has literally disappeared down the mountain-side. Some of the trees in the chasm still had green leaves on them they had been toppled so recently. I really wouldn't be surprised if that part of the track is gone entirely within the next year and nobody can get up to the top. It would be a very long list if I recounted all the species I saw here, but some of the best were the fantastically-beautiful purple-bearded bee-eater, the Sulawesi pigmy woodpecker, red-eared fruit dove, fiery-browed mynah, greater and lesser Sulawesi honeyeaters, mountain tailorbird, island verditer flycatcher, sombre pigeon, grey-headed imperial pigeon, rusty-breasted fantail, Sulawesi leaf-warbler, streak-headed dark-eye, golden-mantled racquet-tail, caerulean and pigmy cuckoo-shrikes, blue-fronted flycatcher, yellow-vented whistler, Sulawesi drongo, and a wierd thing called the malia which is always described as being "babbler-like" so I was surprised how large it was. Best bird of all though is the one I was most hoping to see, the fearsomely-named satanic nightjar. Its also called the diabolical nightjar and, somewhat less-dramatically, Heinrich's nightjar. It was only discovered in 1931 when one specimen was collected in north Sulawesi and then it wasn't seen again until one was spotted by a birder in Lore Lindu in 1993 and then a few more times in 1996. Now that people know where to find it every birder that comes to Lore Lindu sees them. They sleep by day on the ground and fly at night after moths. I've seen a few species of nightjars now but always in flight at night (identified by their distinctive calls) so I wasn't prepared for how awesome they are when you see them in daylight. Really nice birds, now my favourite bird of the trip (move over maleo!).

At the top of the Anaso track is another small trail that leads to the top of Mount Rore Katimbo. Visiting Rore Katimbo had been a dream of mine for as far back as I could remember -- well, 20th November 2008 anyway, because that was when I found out about the existance of the pigmy tarsier which is only the size of a mouse. The first specimen found was collected on Mount Rano Rano in 1916 and the second on Mount Rantemario in the south in 1930, and then it vanished into the depths of scientific obscurity until 2000 when a third one was caught on Rore Katimbo. More were trapped accidentally by rat-researchers on Rore Katimbo in 2008 and the news made it to my ears, coincidentally just when I was preparing my trip itinerary. So onto the schedule went Rore Katimbo. I didn't know if I'd have any chance of success but it was worth a shot. There are actually three different species of tarsiers in Lore Lindu. The Lariang tarsier is found in the west of the park so was out of my reach, but the Dian's tarsier is found commonly throughout the lowlands and the pigmy tarsier up on the tops of the mountains. I had wanted to try for both the Dian's and the pigmy but with such limited time as I had I decided to just concentrate on the pigmy. I had also found out shortly before leaving New Zealand that the pigmy tarsiers were also found on the upper reaches of the Anaso track itself -- some birder was complaining on the internet that tarsier researchers had disturbed the habitat of the geomalia so he couldn't find it, boo-hoo. [I didn't see a geomalia either, due to Idris' extremely irritating habit of rushing up the path ahead of me then coming back after scaring the birds away saying, "oh I just saw a such-and-such up there"]. I had been talking non-stop about the pigmy tarsier since meeting Idris for the first time, and he said he'd actually seen them himself on Rore Katimbo, so we set a plan to go up Anaso on the first morning for birds then do the detour to Rore Katimbo in the afternoon to stay until night for tarsiers.

So, on that first afternoon when we reached the start of the Rore Katimbo trail I asked Idris how far it was from there to the top of Rore Katimbo.
"1.3km" he says. "Do you want to go there tomorrow?"
"No, today," I say
"Oh, OK," he says with a note of surprise as if this is the first he's heard of it.
So we set off up the Rore Katimbo track into thick dripping cloud forest. Great wads of moss covered every surface; it was surprisingly close in appearance to the mountain beech forests in New Zealand.
"Did you bring a torch?" I ask him
"No."
"Ah. Well I've got mine." I would have thought he would have brought one too if we were up there at night. It was a bit strange so I ask, "You do remember I said we were staying up here till after dark to look for the pigmy tarsiers?"
"On Rore Katimbo?"
"Yes, here."
"No, there are none here."
"Yes there are. You even said yourself you've seen them."
"Me? No."
"You said you've seen them before!"
Blank stare.
"Have you seen pigmy tarsier?" I pressed
"Yes."
"Here?"
"No, on Anaso." (This despite him having specifically said "some person" had seen them on the Anaso track but he himself had only seen them on Rore Katimbo).

In any event the track up Rore Katimbo was not the sort of track you'd want to be coming down at night by torchlight and Idris was adamant that he wasn't going to be leaving his motorbike down on the main road at night, so the tarsier search that night was a bust. But at least I had stood at the rubbish-strewn top of Rore Katimbo and seen the tarsier's habitat. The next day we returned to Anaso in the morning for birds and this time I had made sure we were staying put for nightfall, although I had decided in the interests of safety that we would look around the top of the Anaso track rather than the top of Rore Katimbo. According to Idris this was where he'd seen them, and also apparently people regularly saw them around the camping site there which sounded a bit suspicious but it could well be the case. You can't have cloud forest without fog, and the fog there is amazing. One minute you'll be standing looking at the view, then you turn your head for a few minutes and when you turn back all there is in front of you is a white wall of mist. You also can't have cloud forest without rain, and boy did it rain! I think I've only once in my life seen rain heavier than on the top of the Anaso track and that was at Khao Yai National Park in Thailand. With rain that heavy there's no point looking for birds so we just stood on the top of the mountain waiting for dark. Idris kept complaining that he was cold and wanted to go but I ignored that. Some people when they want to see some wildlife go to Africa and look at lions and elephants from the comfort of a safari jeep. Not me, I have to be a dumbass and go looking for obscure things like giant rats and pigmy tarsiers that really don't want to be found, in obscure places where the only comfort is that you're not dead.

"So where-abouts did you see the pigmy tarsiers?" I asked
Blank stare.
"The pigmy tarsiers -- where did you see them?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"When you've seen pigmy tarsiers, where exactly have you seen them?"
Blank stare.
"Have you seen pigmy tarsiers?" I asked in exasperation.
"Here?"
"Yes here!"
"Yes."
"Where exactly?"
"Oh, over there," he says with a vague wave of his hand towards the forest. Then, perhaps sensing my annoyance, adds "It was in 2001. We were mist-netting for the pigmy tarsiers. We did not catch any but I saw one. We put nets there, there and there. But now, I don't know if there are any here."

This didn't mesh with the dates I had found out before my trip but what do I know? On the other hand it sounded remarkably like he was making up stories. Because of the rain I decided we would head twenty minutes back down the track (now transformed into a series of mini waterfalls) to an anoa poachers' lean-to shelter and see if the rain abated. With the heaviness of it, looking for tarsiers in it would have been futile, and the shelter was near to the tracks the tarsier researchers had been cutting the previous year (although whether they had actually caught or seen any tarsiers on those tracks I did not know). In the shelter I asked if the anoa poachers got fines or jail time when caught by the rangers. Idris just laughed and said the rangers eat the anoa too. I decided it would be better for my state of mind if I refrained from asking if he ate anoa. In the shelter Idris was physically shaking with cold despite wearing four layers of clothing (but only jandals on his feet!). I felt a bit sorry for him but he knew what the deal was and this is what I was paying him for. And he still hadn't brought a torch with him!! I was only wearing a shirt and rain poncho and felt perfectly comfortable because in spite of the rain it was still about twenty degrees. After dark and with much moaning from Idris that he was cold and wanted to go, I went off the track and into the forest. Idris refused and stayed on the track. There were no pigmy tarsiers to be found. I am fail.

The night wasn't a complete loss though. All the way back to the main road the track was littered with fallen branches and trees brought down by the rain (it was that heavy!). At one point a particularly large leafy mass was blocking the way and as I approached it a big black shape suddenly lurched up from almost at my feet into my torchbeam and lumbered off into the forest while I said words to the effect of "Holy Mackerel that's big!". It was a bear cuscus which is a type of possum, but not just any possum. The bear cuscus is far bigger than a possum has any right to be. Its like a wombat with a tail! Normally they are right up in the very tops of trees and I had been looking unsuccessfully for one for the last couple of weeks. I can only assume this one was on the ground because it had fallen with the branch. So I may not have seen the world's smallest tarsier but I finally saw the world's largest possum. I think it may well eclipse the spectral tarsier as my favourite mammal ever!

The next day I had to return to Palu for a flight to Makassar at the bottom of Sulawesi, but I had the morning free and I wanted to spend it looking for Tonkean macaques. Idris said they were common in the plantations and he knew right where to find them. They weren't there. A local farmer came past and said the macaques were only in the plantations very very early in the morning and in the late afternoon (basically when there weren't any people around to shoot them); during the day they were off in the forest. So we set off for the forest. What Idris didn't tell me was that there were no trails through the forest around Wuasa village where I was staying. We headed straight up a hill, the sort of hill where when someone is standing in front of you their feet are at your eye-level, hacking through vines and bamboo and spiny palms. Once at the top we headed straight down the equally steep other side. It did cross my mind that Idris was getting back at me for keeping him on the mountain after dark the night before. There was no way we were going to see anything with the amount of noise it took cutting a path through the jungle, so the macaque hunt was a waste of time. On the downhill side we came across six snares, four set to catch macaques and two for ground birds. I destroyed them all, which Idris found immensely amusing which I suppose it was because doing away with six traps isn't going to make much of a difference but it had to be done. By the end I had a pocket-full of nylon rope and fishing line. On the way back to the Sendy Inn where I was staying we stopped off at a house where they had a pet Tonkean macaque chained to a tree so I could at least see one and get some photos. It was a poor sad creature, eating despondently from a bowl of rice, leading a miserable existance. I asked where the people had got it from, knowing full well the answer but wondering what they would say with Idris the park ranger standing there. They said they had got it as a baby from the forest after shooting the mother for food.

Back at the Sendy Inn I had to settle my bill, and that's when I found out that all the food that Idris had been eating there was going on my tab, despite him actually living in his own house in this village. Somehow he had managed to plough through a couple of hundred dollars worth of food in just two days. To say I was furious would be an understatement. I paid the total on the Sendy Inn's bill, but then deducted the amount he had eaten from what I was paying him. He was not happy. To cap it all off, I much later discovered (via Larry Wheatland's thread, post #808!!) that despite what I had been explicitly told in the Palu office, the Anaso trail is apparently not even inside the national park and you don't need permits or a guide there at all!!! Once again, this was a case of never really knowing where you stand in Indonesia, and by the time you find out the truth its just too late to do anything about it. Its a great country, but oh so frustrating!

I think I would end up in jail for GBH - the birds and mammals would have to be very good indeed to put up with anything like the nonsense you've had to deal with!

Cheers
Mike