{"id":17177,"date":"2024-11-25T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T10:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=17177"},"modified":"2024-11-25T10:23:12","modified_gmt":"2024-11-25T10:23:12","slug":"great-apes-and-tiny-bears-chasing-wild-thrills-in-borneo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=17177","title":{"rendered":"Great Apes and Tiny Bears: Chasing Wild Thrills in Borneo"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We lurched along an unpaved road in the night, walls of trees and knotted vines on either side. In the darkness lurked some of the world\u2019s most unusual mammals, and I had come to Borneo to fulfill a lifelong dream to see them: catlike civets<\/a>, scaled anteaters called pangolins<\/a> and big-eyed colugos<\/a> that spread their body flat as they glide from trunk to trunk.<\/p>\n

In the open back of a pickup truck, two wildlife spotters stood in front of me, whirling their flashlights. To my right stood my father, whose lifelong obsession with wildlife had inspired my own. Clothes damp from the humidity, we plunged deeper into the moonlit jungle.<\/p>\n

My father and I had long wanted to travel to Borneo together, inspired by an online community of people called mammal watchers, who shared tantalizing stories about their sightings on the island on the website mammalwatching.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mammal watching is superficially similar to bird-watching: trying to see as many different wild species as possible. It is hard \u2014 mammals can be elusive \u2014 but rewarding, as the most interesting mammals dwell in the earth\u2019s wildest and most vulnerable places. Searching for these creatures is both an adventure and an exercise in supporting conservation, particularly in Borneo, where palm oil plantations have replaced large areas of rainforest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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So much of my interaction with mammal watching had been virtual that, on a warm June night, as we rumbled through the 140,000-acre Deramakot Forest Reserve<\/a> in the Malaysian state of Sabah, I could hardly believe what I was seeing.<\/p>\n

A flashlight caught a gleam on a branch to the left. We trained our flashlights about 50 feet up a fig tree to see a binturong<\/a>, a blackish gray, shaggy, whiskered creature also known as a bearcat.<\/p>\n

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We lurched along an unpaved road in the night, walls of trees and knotted vines on either side. In the darkness lurked some of the world\u2019s most unusual mammals, and I had come to Borneo to fulfill a lifelong dream to see them: catlike civets, scaled anteaters called pangolins and big-eyed colugos that spread their body flat as they glide from trunk to trunk.In the open back of a pickup truck, two wildlife spotters stood in front of me, whirling their flashlights. To my right stood my father, whose lifelong obsession with wildlife had inspired my own. Clothes damp from the humidity, we plunged deeper into the moonlit jungle.My father and I had long wanted to travel to Borneo together, inspired by an online community of people called mammal watchers, who shared tantalizing stories about their sightings on the island on the website mammalwatching.com.Mammal watching is superficially similar to bird-watching: trying to see as many different wild species as possible. It is hard \u2014 mammals can be elusive \u2014 but rewarding, as the most interesting mammals dwell in the earth\u2019s wildest and most vulnerable places. Searching for these creatures is both an adventure and an exercise in supporting conservation, particularly in Borneo, where palm oil plantations have replaced large areas of rainforest.So much of my interaction with mammal watching had been virtual that, on a warm June night, as we rumbled through the 140,000-acre Deramakot Forest Reserve in the Malaysian state of Sabah, I could hardly believe what I was seeing.A flashlight caught a gleam on a branch to the left. We trained our flashlights about 50 feet up a fig tree to see a binturong, a blackish gray, shaggy, whiskered creature also known as a bearcat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17179,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17180,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions\/17180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}