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 intensity unmatched anywhere else in the tropics. By the 1980s and 1990s alone, the world’s third largest island had exported more timber than Latin America and Africa combined.

Today, of the forests that have escaped both fires and conversion to farmland, most have been logged. Forests’ biggest and most commercially valuable trees have been cut down for timber. Their interiors have been opened up by a honeycomb of logging roads.

In some places, the legacy of logging will probably scar the landscape forever.

But mostly, logged forests look nothing like this. Unlike, the clear-cut logging of North America and Europe, logging in the tropics is usually selective. The valuable trees are taken, but a forest is still left behind. And over the past decade or so, scientists and conservationists have shown something amazing about the remaining forests.

Borneo’s logged forests, even those ones that have undergone multiple rounds of logging, are still heartlands of biodiversity.

Last year, as bit of a side-project to my fieldwork in Borneo, and with absolutely zero experience with any kind of camera , I tried to go out and capture a bit of this diversity on film. What follows are three quite short and bordering on embarrassingly shoddy videos that show just how much wildlife resides even in an intensively logged forest.

From mammals…

To birds…

To (my unbiased favourites) dung beetles.

We understandably have a bit of an obsession with the pristine, the untouched wilderness. But human-impacted forests are important too. If we focus only on what has been lost we forget just how much is left behind.

Logged forests on Borneo are a story of hope. Despite being degraded, they continue to support a magnificent array of wildlife.

And that’s something that could help with their conservation into the future.

A big thanks to Cindy Cosset, Peter Williams and Nathan Trowbridge for mist netting, camera trap and dung beetle footage, and also Alex Moore for help editing!

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