In defence of wallowing on the past…
Tag: Borneo
Trekking through the land of giants
There-s a very special place in the world where the tallest tropical trees grow. This is our journey into the heart of that place.
Into the heart of Danum Valley
Into the Heart of Danum Valley
What I’ll miss most about living in Borneo’s rainforests
One week ago, I landed back in surprisingly sunny England after a month and half spent in the rainforests of Northern Borneo. We were continuing our previous work looking at how macheting vines could be used as a strategy for speeding up the recovery of heavily logged forests. For me, […]
Fieldwork flops: from collapsed bridges to cloud forest cults
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And when fieldwork throws up problems, write a blog post about it. I’m a big fan of people that talk about failures. It’s probably a British thing. Truth is, fieldwork has so many moving parts, so many things that can go slightly awry—or […]
Wildlife blogger of the year: behind the story
This is a re-post of an interview I did with Terra Inconita after winning wildlife blogger of the year. On 31 December 2018, Gianluca Cerullo’s story The rare jungle cat that thrives in degraded rainforests, featuring a bag of his own poo-for-research, won the 2018 Wildlife Blogger of the Year competition […]
The rare jungle cat that thrives in degraded forest
My nostrils has already been assaulted by months of trekking through the Bornean rainforest with an Aldi bag-for-life full of my own poo. Such is the price of conducting research on dung beetles. The one bonus? I thought I had become immunised to bad smells. But the putrid stench of […]
Borneo: Life After Logging
Once upon time, the island of Borneo was blanketed by dense and pristine rainforests. Ancient dipterocarp trees pierced the canopy, towering over a sea of treetops like parasols. These noble giants were the first to go when the chainsawing started. When industrial logging came to Borneo, it struck with an […]
Machetes and seedlings: the key to saving Borneo’s logged rainforests, or the next phase in their degradation?
It’s 1998, and as Borneo’s rainforests are being ravaged by some of the most unsustainable logging the world has ever known, one timber company is bucking the trend and investing in its future. Twenty years later, the results of Sari Bumi Kasuma’s (SBK) foresight are clear to see. Elsewhere across […]