So, the field season in Borneo is over and the numbers are in. We cut through nearly 25 km of logged forest, making a trail system which will be used over the next thirty-years to track whether removing vines can speed up forest recovery after logging. That’s a whole lot of macheting. Here are ten lessons picked up along the way.
- Sharpen your machete every morning.
A blunt machete might as well be made of marzipan for all the use it’ll do when you stumble across a tangle of bamboo.
2. Watch (and listen) out for the wasps.
They tend to be hidden within crusty tangles of dried leaves and when you slash through their nests, they sting in numbers. If I was Justin O’Shmidt (who has his own insect sting pain index) I’d say it’s a sort of lemony zing of a sting with motes of ouchiness, but I’m not so I’ll just say that it’s the bees that you really want to watch out for. Those aren’t so lemony.
3. Try to cut efficiently
So this one takes a bit of practice because the temptation when you get started is always to go all Rambo and start boshing through everything in reach. This doesn’t work. I started all Ramboesquely (If Rambo was a scrawny sausage with specs) but quickly got absolutely shattered and was cutting way more slowly than everyone else. The local guys are so efficient it’s unreal. They’ve got a knack for domino-macheting–finding the one thin branch that’s propping up a fat tangle of vegetation, lopping it, and taking the whole thing down in one. With a bit of practice, you start to get into a nice rhythm, though it must take years to get to their level.
4. Take it in turns
Two macheting is better than one. We would split into teams of two and have one person leading and the second person widening the trail behind them and graffiti marking trees along the way (sometimes with extra helpers too), so that the trail can be reopened in the same place in subsequent years. We’d swap out the leader every two hundred metres to avoid tiring out…although cutting to just a stones-throw away in some of the heavily degraded forests would still leave us wiped out. Which brings us nicely onto the next point.
5. You will learn to hate this sight…
Working in some of the most degraded forests in Borneo has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, because logging has been so intensive and widespread there, it means that understanding possible ways of accelerating forest regeneration could have major boons for wildlife and people across the island. On the other hand is the starker reality of working in degraded forests day in day out. Where almost all of the big trees have been chainsawed down, large patches of remaining forest are actually just seemingly endless thickets of bamboo, and rattan and deadwood, interspersed with the occasional tree. And that can take an age to hack through. Cresting a ridge or cutting away a branch to reveal a section of such trashy forest could mean several additional hours of macheting under the baking sun.
6. But it’s not all bad
The weirdest thing about logged forests is just how variable they are. Sure, some sections–usually where logging was most intense–are trashy. But where logging was less intense, or where seedlings survived to regenerate the midstorey and fill canopy gaps, save for the paucity of large trees, the forest can look virtually identical to an undisturbed forest. And when the understorey is relatively open, this meant we could whiz through, carving out our transects with only some minor trimming along the way.
7. Knowing when not to cut
Sometimes, taking thirty seconds to look around before ploughing into a particularly dense area can reveal ready-made routes through the forest. Nearby elephant trails, riverbeds or just a much more open section of forest could save you half an hour of cutting and be hidden just five metres to your left. Skid trails and logging roads—if they’re heading in the right direction—are especially welcome and are well worth marking on the GPS because they just might also provide a shortcut home! Also, never underestimate the vegetation-flattening capabilities of a good old-fashioned stamp.
8. Gloves. Worth it.
I was sceptical at first. Woolly gloves are the very last thing you’d think of wearing in the tropics. But after eight days of cutting, the rattan was leaving our hands and forearms shredded. Gloves solves that immediately (although my most ironic scar is from trying to force on a shrunken and sweaty glove, slipping over, and slicing open my right forearm on a chunky thorn). Added bonus, the gloves provide some extra grip which stops the machete handle from slipping out your hand. Which leads nicely onto the next point…
9. Don’t buy bad machetes (and modify good ones)
I’ve written before about how we managed to variously break and dent several poor quality blades before investing in the handmade machetes–made from old steel from chainsaw blades–which saw us through to the end of the field season. Two useful modifications for my machete were to add rubber stripping around the wooden handle to stop it slipping, and luminescent orange tape round the bottom of the blade in case I lost it in the undergrowth. For next year, I’m going to add a clip to the scabbard so that I can attach it to my belt.
10. But most of all…enjoy it
It’s physically challenging and exhausting, but that’s what makes it so rewarding. There’s nothing quite like walking back along a straightly cut 800 metre long transect at the end of a hard day’s cutting, particularly if it’s through forest so thick that you wouldn’t have even been able to walk through it before. Besides, when the cutting is finished, that’s when the real fun starts– the biodiversity sampling. And anyway, when you have a machete… it’s not hard to have some silly fun along the way.
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