Guess it is about time for an update from Java! I have been here for a week already and it has been flying by. I can’t believe it is only one more week left until I head north to the land of cherry blossoms!
I am currently about 40 minutes away from the “City of Rain” – Bogor, in a small village (or near…not quite sure) called Ciapus. So needless to say, hujan lagi, more rain.
Flying back to Jakarta went seamlessly, and Richard was there at the airport to greet me and it was so wonderful that he had come in a car so we didn’t have to take public transportation back. Especially because the just over 2 hour journey ended up taking us about 4 because of heavy traffic. So we didn’t get to his site until after dark.
I was going to go up the mountain (Gunung Selak) with Richard the following night, as they have slow lorises that they are in the process of releasing. But true to the name of the area, it rained. And rained and rained. However, I am finding the rain here much more enjoyable than in La bundo bundo. Maybe that is because I don’t actually have to go out in the rain if I don’t want, but I think it is also because of the amazing lightning and thunderstorms that come along with the rain. That first night the thunder was so loud that all the dogs at the guest house except one (so 6!) ran into rich’s room and were hiding under the bed and desk and us.
The following night we made it out, after just a short storm. Basically the way it is set up is that there is a cage that has been put up in the forest on the mountain that just surrounds a bunch of trees and vegetation. They put the lorises that they think are suitable to be released in this enclosure (called the habituation cage), as kind of a half way house between their captive life and being back in the wild. They leave them there for however long until the lorises look as though they are ready to be released (not stressed, foraging and moving around naturally). This time, luckily for me, the cage was set up only about 30 minutes up the mountain, instead of the 4-5 hour walk it has been in the past! We got up to the camp around 9pm, had a cup of ABC Mocca (yum!) and then headed for the cage, which was another 10-15 minutes up. We stayed up there from 11pm to about 530am (although I have to admit I brought my sleeping bag and slept the last 2 hours next to the cage!). It was a full moon that night so it was so bright in the forest (well, relatively), but it was cold!
After leaving the mountain in the morning, I went almost straight out to Jakarta, to help give a presentation at an International School. We had been invited by a Grade 1 class who have had International Animal Rescue (IAR) come give talks in the past. They joined classes, so there were 40 grade 1 students which were full of comments! I did a talk on what Animal Welfare is and Animal Trade. They actually seemed quite interested in it, but I think it was mostly the cute pictures of cats and dogs and lorises that got them. Indri, who was the girl I was helping, who is the education officer at IAR, then showed a few videos of slow lorises and also on taking care of your pets at home (dogs and cats). The kids had so many questions and many more comments, and turns out that a couple of them had monkeys as pets before (one got rid of it because it peed on his head), or fathers had bought live croc’s (which I don’t really get). So basically we were just trying to get in their heads why they shouldn’t buy wild animals as pets and what to do if they saw one at the market.
I also helped out one afternoon when the vet and keepers were giving medication to all the lorises at the center (there are about 100 now – 16 new ones just arrived this last week). Rich is needing pictures of all the lorises to look at their facial patterns (and I don’t know what else), so I was his scribe for the photos he was taking. Not a very big help I was, but it gave me a chance to get really close looks of this funny little critters. Lorises are such strange animals, much different than I was expecting. They have tiny little finger nails on all fingers except one, on their feet, where there is a large claw. When they are a little scared, they clasp their hands together and put them over their face, which I thought looked like hiding from fear, but it might actually be (I’ve been told) that they are getting their poison ready – lorises are poisonous! I love it! They have little glands around their inner upper arms that they lick and when it mixes with their saliva it become a toxin. They hiss and strike like snakes, and they have this black stripe on their back that makes them look like snakes when they are moving. I also had a loris grab onto my finger with his foot – and then his other, and ended up hanging onto my arm with his feet while the loris keeper was trying to get it back into where it was supposed to be going – and what a grip it has!!!! Their hands seem to be structured differently that makes them serious grabbers.
Since then I have mostly been helping Richard with his data – since he is out on the mountain (especially now that they release one of the lorises that was up in the cage when I went out) from about 6pm until 5am, he needs to sleep during the day. He is giving a talk at the big conference in Kyoto in 2 weeks, so I am helping as much as I can with making sure he has all his stuff ready for that. I have also been working on my poster presentation for Kyoto and next step is finally get the article I have been trying to write for the last 6 months out and off my plate! And I’m going to get out and help with the enrichment for the macaques and hopefully lorises for the last week!
No comments:
Post a Comment