Stories and silliness from the field
When the mist rolls in and all you can see are the silhouettes of ferns and tree trunks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re standing in an ancient forest. But once a gust of wind lifts the blanket of white, you start to notice things. The trees aren’t so […]
Another year, another species of orangutan, and another bunch of complete pillocks put in charge of biodiversity hotspots (pillock 1, pillock 2). Here are some of my favourite (and worst) moments of 2018, in no particular order. I supposed the biggest thing was graduating from Sheffield Uni with a Master’s […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]