I have a long-standing interest in how we can improve the management and conservation value of heavily logged forests in Northern Borneo. Since 2015, I have spent most of my summers in Borneo, particularly around Danum Valley Conservation Area. Working inside these forests I have had some of the happiest and most formative experiences of my life. As part of my own research, I have investigated ways to speed up the recovery of logged forests by macheting vine tangles and replanting seedlings in the understorey. As part of this, I helped setup an experimental restoration project in a tract of heavily logged forest in 2018 and 2019. I have also led or been a part of projects exploring the impacts of logging on dung beetles and birds
Towards the start of our Borneo fieldwork, I bumped into Nathan Trowbridge walking through the forest. We would eventually record a pretty funny podcast, the highlight of which was Nathan’s story of his pet lungfish with an anal prolapse. But for starters, Nathan wanted to know what our project was […]
This is how Redmond O’Hanlan starts his fantastic book Into the Heart of Borneo: As a former academic and natural history book reviewer I was astonished to discover, on being threatened with a two-month exile to the primary jungles of Borneo, just how fast a man can read. Powerful as […]
Picture this if you dare. I’m less than halfway through a morning of traipsing through the rainforest collecting dung beetle traps when the sudden urge to empty my bowels hits. To many a tropical ecologist this is not a problem. Simply drop your sweaty trousers, pick a suitably unprickly leaf […]
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 […]
There’s something exhilarating about a tropical storm. Blown across from China, this particular storm slammed into camp with no warning. One second it was dry. The next second it was pouring. Then the trees started creaking in the wind. And It wasn’t long before they started cracking. The buildings at […]
So after being hospitalised with food poisoning, several collapsed bridges, a series of broken machetes and nearly two months of waiting, we’re finally in Malua. We actually arrived almost two weeks ago but it’s been a pretty hectic time trying to cram three months of fieldwork into forty days. I’m […]
We were two kilometres away from camp and several hundred metres into the rainforest when we heard the howling. At first, I thought it was gibbons but it sounded nothing their distinctive calls, nor like anything else I’d ever heard in the forest. Redly, one of the local guys leading […]
Are you on the wrong continent for your graduation and worried that you will forever be upstaged on your mum’s living room shelf by a glowing photo of your preferred sibling, who graduated from Warwick University with dual honours in French with Italian? Then this could well be the blog […]
Ten days ago my machete snapped clean in half trying to cut through a fallen tree trunk on a jungle trail. The week before, Paddy broke two others. He bent the blade of the first one chopping through some branches on the logging track which were blocking the car. He […]
Exactly one month into a three-month long expedition in Borneo and we’ve still not started our fieldwork. And it’s all down to a collapsed bridge and an abandoned road. The moment we landed into Lahad Datu town, our final stopover before reaching the world-famous jungles of Danum Valley, our local […]