FLORES, 25 - 28 June: Tiny parrots and giant rats, part I
I guess I should start this entry by contradicting what I wrote in the last entry, about Labuanbajo being an unfriendly town. After spending a number of days there the locals became used to me walking back and forth around the streets looking for food and water, and soon they were smiling and saying hello and asking how I was. So I decided that its not an unfriendly town but rather a town full of unfriendly tourists. That may sound weird, me being a tourist myself, but I’ve watched the way most of them interact with the locals and they are just downright rude. Not all of them of course but a good percentage. If I was a local I’d be a bit sick of it all too.
Its so flaming hot in Labuanbajo that you can’t do anything for most of the day. Even just walking down the road to get food or internet leaves you as drenched as if you’ve fallen in a swimming pool. Basically I went out early in the morning if I could muster the gumption, look for birds for a couple of hours until the heat started building up (at say 8 or 9am), then I went and lay down somewhere in a congealing pool of sweat and dirt until evening. How the British and Dutch managed to survive in Indonesia without electricity for fans is beyond me.
The two days after the Rinca visit were a complete bust as far as finding wildlife was concerned. There were two birdy spots I wanted to visit, Potawangka Road and Puarlolo, both fairly close to Labuanbajo and both technically easy to reach. The problem was that it is impossible to get anywhere very early by using the local buses, and hiring someone to take me places would cost more than I was willing to pay (I guess I’m just not a very dedicated birder!). I tried going to Puarlolo first, which is where the endemic Flores monarch flycatcher lives. I had been told I could just wait at the crossroads at the end of town and hitch a lift but the only people who stopped wanted exhorbitant amounts in the region of 300,000 rupiah (about NZ$50). So I went back to the hotel and discovered that by then there were a whole row of buses waiting about ten metres from the door. Every bus that goes from Labuanbajo to Ruteng passes Puarlolo because there’s only one road. The first bus I tried was bound for Ruteng and it was all good until I said I was only going as far as Puarlolo, then suddenly the bus was full. The second was also fine to start with but then the driver tried to tell me they actually don’t go past Puarlolo after all, which got some indignant responses from some of the other passengers, so he changed tack and said it would actually cost 100,000 rupiah to Puarlolo not 20,000. They obviously didn’t want someone on the bus taking up room that could be used for someone paying to go all the way to Ruteng, and at this point I got fed up and went back to the hotel for breakfast, and then went to Potawangka Road by motorbike instead. By this point it was already late morning and I wasn’t even sure at what point on the road I should be in order to find the main target birds (Wallace’s hanging parrot and Flores crow) so I got off at the first patch of forest and then walked for several hours without really finding anything at all. The second day I dutifully went out of the hotel to try to get a bus to Puarlolo for the second time - and there were no buses! Eventually one drove past, I flagged it down, and then we proceeded to drive in circles round town trying to pick up non-existent passengers. I think there must be some mysterious Friday void where nobody uses the buses in Flores. Anyway, I didn’t get to Puarlolo till 10am and again the birds were all at siesta and I got nowhere with my searches.
Puarlolo is about 36km out of Labuanbajo, and there’s a big sign-board on the side of the road with endemic Floresian birds on it so you can't miss it. You just walk up the access road from the highway for about 100metres to the Telkom Station and to the right of the gate you’ll find a rough track leading into the forest. The forest here is quite low but so damn thick I don’t know how anybody finds the Flores monarch without tapes. I certainly had no luck! There are also Flores hawk-eagles in the sky above the tower, except when I was there. Walking back towards Labuanbajo along the highway for about 300 metres there’s a big trail on the left that goes through really good forest. Birds I saw here included russet-capped tesia, flame-breasted sunbird, black-fronted and golden-rumped flowerpeckers, crested dark-eye, emerald dove, golden whistler – definitely would be even more better stuff in early morning.
Rather than consider those two days as miserable failures I instead decided to call them reconnoiters for later visits, although in the event I never got back to Puarlolo after all.
Potawangka Road is much closer to Labuanbajo, only about 10km out of town, so its readily accessible by motorbike. I decided to try my luck there a second time, but at a proper birding hour (6am), and as I stepped out of the hotel a bus to Ruteng passed by - right after I’d finished complaining that you can’t get anywhere early on the local buses! I stuck to the plan however and went to Potawangka Road. I got the driver to stop at what seemed like a good distance into the forest, and as I was paying him a hill mynah landed in a nearby tree, a bird I’ve wanted to see in the wild for years. So it was a good start. It took about two hours to walk back to the main road (it was downhill) and I saw quite a few good birds including orange-footed scrubfowl, Gould's bronze-cuckoo, yellow-spectacled white-eye, Wallacean drongo, flame-breasted sunbird, pale-shouldered cuckoo-shrike, and two more of the birds that were on my most-wanted list, the red-cheeked parrot (like the hill mynah, a bird I’ve wanted to see for many years) and the Flores crow. Seeing a crow may not sound very exciting but this particular crow is only found in one region of Flores and nowhere else on the planet. Also its not all brash and in-your-face like other crows, its very shy and wary although I did see five of them that morning. They don’t exactly slink away when they realise you’ve seen them but its as good as.
A bird I didn’t find that morning was the Wallace’s hanging parrot, a little wee thing about the size of a sparrow. When I was a boy I read about this bird in Joseph Forshaw's brilliant encyclopaedic book "Parrots Of The World" and decided that one day I would go to Flores and see them. The bird itself isn't overly exciting to look at, mostly green with a bit of red, much like any of the other species of hanging parrots actually, but it wasn't the appearance of the bird that intrigued me it was the text in the book. The copy I have now, published in 1989, has a text column of only about ten centimetres that basically consists of a description based on the one known museum specimen, a note about some eggs that probably belonged to another species entirely, and just three sentences on its life history that starts off with stating that its "a mysterious bird, about which almost nothing seems to be known, and the type is the only specimen that I could locate." Since then of course Flores has become more accessible and birders go there reasonably often so I'm a bit late to the party, but that's all right because I never liked parties anyway. With all that in mind, for a third morning I returned to Potawangka Road and for a third time I failed to see a hanging parrot. Actually that third time I didn’t see the crows or hill mynahs either although there were lots of other birds in evidence.
Apart for the hanging parrot, the other main animal I wanted to see on the island was the Flores giant rat. By this time however I had stuck that into the too-hard basket. There’s almost no information available on the internet or in books about it beyond its size and colour; even its habits and where it lives on the island seem to be unknown or at best educated guesswork. Absolutely nobody I spoke to about it in Ruteng or Labuanbajo had any clue what I was talking about. My searches in the forest were equally unrevealing. In the natural history museum at Bogor (in Java) there is a stuffed specimen (according to Lonely Planet) and it seemed like that would be the closest I would come to seeing a Flores giant rat with my own eyes [except when I got there I discovered there wasn't a stuffed Flores giant rat there at all dammit].
The rat wasn’t the only thing I was having trouble with. I just couldn't get to Komodo Island!! I'd seen the dragons on Rinca already but I did want to see them on Komodo as well because apparently they are a different colour, secondly there is some select bird-life there such as the lesser sulphur-crested cockatoo, and thirdly you just can't be in the area and not go to Komodo because that would be stupid! I could have hired a boat just for myself but that would have set me back somewhere in the region of NZ$200 and I couldn’t justify that. I was basically sitting around waiting for some more tourists going to Komodo so I could join in and we all distribute the cost to everybody’s advantage. But nobody was going to Komodo, they were all going to Rinca because its closer and cheaper to reach. It was very frustrating! Some people said to me one morning that they were going to Rinca because everybody goes to Komodo and therefore Rinca is more select and quiet. What rubbish! They read that in some guidebook and the reality is the exact opposite. I honestly never found a single person actually going to Komodo.
Finally I have to mention when I was in the restaurant at the hotel waiting to be given food, and a medium-sized (about 20cm) tokay gecko fell from the ceiling to the floor and sat there looking a bit stunned. After a couple of seconds he recovered his composure and scuttled straight up my leg, round onto my back and then up onto my shoulder where he sat for the rest of the evening, either being under the impression that I was a tree or that he was actually invisible. I named him Mr. Tokay Gecko. He did little to keep the mosquitoes at bay.