April Update - Malaysia Tropical Forest Project
Added to website: 01 April 2005
Project Brief
Aim
The Malaysia Tropical Forest Conservation Project is a collaborative project between Coral Cay Conservation and the Department of Wildlife and National Parks. The aim of the project is to conduct rapid biodiversity assessments of different habitats within Setiu Wetlands, in order to compile a detailed species list and highlight the species distributions within this area.
Location
The project moved from the Perhentian Islands to Kampung Betang Lintang, Terengganu, on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia in October.
CCC Partners
CCC is working in partnership with the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (Peninsular Malaysia) and Wild Asia.
Terrestrial Science Programme
Baseline Surveys
Towards the start of the month we returned to the peat forest and found the animals there a bit confused. We caught a mammal in the herpetile pitfall traps, saw mammals on the herpetile walk and caught birds in the bat mist nets after dark! The White-rumped Shama we discovered last time honoured us with another visit, this time it was a female we caught in our mist net. Another attractive bird sighting was a tiny Crimson Sunbird, very handsome with its bright crimson head and mantle, iridescent green forehead and violet tail. We had a regal time butterfly netting with The Arch Duke (Lexias perdalis airteana) and the Knight (Lebadea martha malayana) in our nets. The Rustic (Cupha erymanthis lotis) brought everyone back down to earth though.
We all enjoyed a break from the hard work of surveying over Easter, snorkelling and sunbathing on the nearby island paradise of Perhentian Kecil.
Our new recruits got right into the survey on their first camp in the casuarina forest. We took a boat trip down to this beautiful spit of land again and spotted lots of birds along the way, including a Brahminy Kite, a Common Koel and lots of pretty Chesnut-headed Bee-eaters. The casuarina forest along the lagoon is very rich in bird life and we had lots of success with the mist netting again catching six different species including the beautiful, iridescent blue Collared and White-throated Kingfishers.
Our second camp was spent in a lovely area of Casaurina forest (which almost resembled a Polish alpine forest!) on a very narrow spit of land near Penarick, between the sea and the lagoon - in places this was only tens of metres wide! This unique and ever changing area of land (due to constant erosion resulting from its exposed position on the coast) supported a very interesting fauna, particularly with respects to the birds. Mist netting was thus quite successful here, and included the capture of a very beautiful (but not very impressed!) Black-capped Kingfisher.
Two exciting new sites were recceed in preparation for camps in the near future - firstly Bintang Hill, a large hill covered in some nice lowland tropical forest; secondly Tasik Borumbak, another wetland site comprising of mangrove, forest and lake habitats, so hopefully the faunal diversity here will reflect this.
Interesting / Unusual Sightings
We caught our first shrew at the peat forest in a pitfall trap meant for reptiles and amphibians! We think it could be a Black Shrew-Suncus ater.
We were treated to another sighting of a Common Palm Civet and two large Water Monitor Lizards again in the casuarina forest. At first Becky thought she had spotted a huge firefly, but then realised that there was a second very close to it and it wasn’t a luminous invertebrate after all but bright eye shine. The civet was very obliging and sat scratching in the tree looking cute for us to get a great view.
On the boat trip down to the casuarina camp two of the vols were thrilled when a splash in the water turned out to be a turtle (green turtle according to our local guide).
Environmental Awareness
Capacity Building/Training of Local Counterparts
We have been getting the school kids to think about different habitat types in their area and what animals they are home to. They really enjoyed colouring and cutting out fabulous creatures from the forest, river and sea to make colourful habitat mobiles to hang up at home. As ever it is a challenge to avoid chaos in a class of 35 nine year old children especially when the teacher disappears for half an hour, but they are starting to learn the English for “bottoms on chairs, hands in the air”.
