Am out of the jungle!

11 or so days felt like a lifetime whilst simultaneously feeling like 5 seconds. Difficult to condense 11 days into 1 entry but I'll try...

The trip was basically in two halves. The first half were the activity days where we went into the jungle for a day with each of the four tutors. I had postgrad batman Dave for the first day, when we used bat traps to sample the low flying bat populations at Danum. I managed to get a leach in my... private area... but as luck would have it, it appears that bizarre incident protected me from any future insect related mishaps.

We then had a day with Andy, one of the most senior tutors and a Community Ecologist. We went off to one of his tree plots, part of his long term experiment looking at growth patterns of different tree species. There we measured the heights of different trees but then major drama occurred on the way back. - Andy and two of the other students got stung by an aggressive hornet.

The third day was a more relaxed affair looking around the butterfly traps. I managed to waste £1 of Oxford money by using the expensive Czech pins to pin my butterfly samples when I should have only used 1... The final day was Sonya's, an Evolutionary Ecologist and we had a lot of fun looking through camera traps and bird trapping.

It's been a very dry week with only one rain shower the entire time. Consequently it's been very humid, though the last two days (the rain was on friday evening) were cooler and mistier. The food and conversation did get a bit repetitive, and a there was a tad too much musical theatre. But overall, it was a fun group of people, as Biologists always are.

We had a couple strange days in the middle that were 'rest days'. These were mainly driving or hiking but we didn't see an awful lot. The second half of the trip were the project days. We were forced to do an experiment into dipterocarp seeds to take advantage of the 1 in 13 year dipterocarp seeding event taking place. Dipterocarps being the main type of rainforest tree in this region.

We placed 5/6 large and small seeds at 8 sites along 2 transects, 1 transect for Dipterocarps and the other for a bunch of non-dipterocarp seeds that a friendly scientist gave us. Our results were...dubious to say the least, our significant result for large seeds being eaten more than small seeds is to be taken with a significant grain of salt. However, we did have camera traps recording Malay Civets, Piglets, Bats and Mouse Deer.

As for wildlife sightings we did miss out on Orang Utans. But, on our night drives we did spot Colugo - an extremely evolutionarily distinct flying mammal. We also saw Gibbons! And many slow lorises, sleeping birds and Rhinoceros Hornbills. Oh, and a bloody scary Centipede.

For sleeping we had 2 sets of 4 bunk beds in a 48 bed dorm for the boys (the girls were in another dorm), with me Chris Harry and Noah in a set. It worked pretty well, although a large school group from Lahad Datu did much to disrupt our sleep. Meals, although repetitive when taking into account the location, were pretty impressive.

It all ended with a jungle rave and a BBQ up in the main lecture theatre. It was sad and bizarre leaving Danum Valley but at the same time, I was very looking forward to getting to new places and seeing some new faces.

Ciao!