This is part 2 of a 3 part blog series telling the story of our recent recce into the heart of Danum Valley Conservation area. Read Part 1 here.
I’ve become pretty accustomed to working in degraded rainforest. Over the past few years, a lot of the time I’ve spent in Borneo has been in heavily logged jungle—and a fair chunk of that in ecosystems that have been interrupted by chainsaws not once, but twice.
When I was in the Colombian Andes, the cloud forests we were inside had only been resprouting on abandoned cattle pastures for 15-40 years, and still didn’t quite resemble an old-growth in structure. And in Madagascar too, the rosewoods were long gone and tree stumps—a symbol of past degradation—were a fairly common sight.
I’m a huge fan of getting across the resilience and surprising wilderness value of degraded, human-impacted forests. They often host so much more wildlife than they ought to and getting that message across loud and clear is not only a cause for hope amidst a seemingly endless tide of deforestation stories. It’s also critical for their conservation going forwards.
With all that said though, there really is something very special about venturing deep into virgin forests. I guess it’s the realisation that there aren’t all that many places like this left on our planet. Places where you can be days walk from the next nearest person. Places that have escaped human exploitation and still look pretty much exactly like they must have done a hundred million years ago.
Certainly, in Northern Borneo, where four-fifths of forests have had their largest trees chopped down for timber, such places are rare. So, as we meander along a steep ridge flanked by trunks so gargantuan, they’d have had an Ancient Greek pillar-maker crying to his mother, I feel like I’ve been shrunken down to Lego size.
I know it’s a tired comparison to say something is the size of a family car. It’s like expressing deforestation in football pitches, or areas the size of Wales. But when I look up into the crown of a particularly giant dipterocarp, I kid you not, there’s a birdnest fern the size of a Ford focus hanging from one of the branches.
A couple of hundred metres away stands what I am told is the third tallest tree in the tropics—over 95 metres in height. It used to be considered the tallest and indeed a rotting wooden sign nearby still advertises it as so. But then it was ousted from its spot, most recently by a newly discovered 101 metre big mama also discovered in Danum.
Still, 95 metres ain’t so bad.
A really rather large tree is not something that gets old quickly. For the rest of the day, as we wade with occasional turtles through the knee-high crystal-clear waters of the Ulu Sungai Sabran river, deeper and deeper into the forest, every next ancient beast makes me marvel.
As I write this now, we have pushed nearly twenty kilometres into the heart of Danum Valley Conservation Area, home to many of the hundred tallest tropical trees in the world. In many ways, Danum Valley is for trees what the pacific islands are for rugby players. Here, mammoths grow.
Tomorrow we will climb to the summit of Mount Danum. The topography will mean that the trees there don’t reach anywhere near the height of some of today’s behemoths. But I’m still so excited that my feet are tingling in the hammock.
I only properly got planning for this reccy of mount Danum after a bit of an annoying day’s fieldwork measuring the diameter of trees in nearby logged forests. I’d gone to wrap a tape measure around a trunk and accidentally hugged a wasp nest. I was stung some twenty-five times, had a funny reaction, and stayed back at camp the next with a swollen throat and face, poring over maps and field guides and feeling sorry for myself. That’s when I start pining after Gunung Danum.
And yet now with a Buffy fish owl screeching in time with the bellow of a male orangutan, the campfire burning into embers and a mountain summit less than three hours away, just waiting to be climbed, boy am I happy I hugged that tree.
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