You got no choice on your packed lunchbox and your daily meals when you are staying in the forest and do some conservation fieldwork. Practicality is the key. People need to go to the forest as early as the sunrise to do the survey and go back to the camp feeling exhausted in the afternoon after walking in rugged terrain of tropical rainforest. With the limited cooking skill of field staff, we can only rely on simple omelet, fried noodle, fried rice, or some crackers. On the other side, the siamang group (Hylobates syndactylus) that we follow all day may stop at a fruiting ebony tree (Diospyros sp.), having a hearty meal of the day before moving on to another trees. What a day!

Oh yeah… My friends just got back from the deep rainforest of Bengkulu. The whole story was hike…hike…and hike which reminded me of the 3 hours hike to the forest of Lawele, right in the heart of Wallacean region three years ago, similar to other places in Buton Island in Southeast Sulawesi. My friends worked on enumerating carbon storage of the forest, made me think on our own culinary footprint. Sometimes you don’t have that many choices when you are working in remote places in Indonesia. Many of our conservation field sites located quite far from towns or villages and sometimes need a whole-day walking to reach those sites. In many small towns or villages, there is only weekly market which sells less diverse of vegetables. Meat is even rarer. So, when you are working in the field, the only source of protein only comes from eggs, canned tuna or corned beef. You also have to rely on canned mushroom, canned sweet corn, potatoes, carrots, or cabbages. That’s about it! Our culinary footprint is a balance product of efficiency, healthy but still good food!

Our porters. Taking a rest before having a 3-hrs hike

Yup, the latter is my own term to stay focus in the field in which I would spare sometime in the late afternoon cooking for dinner. Efficiency means fewer porters, less transportation costs, and less physical efforts to prepare those meals because fieldwork is our main job. Let’s see this comparison. Some Indonesian dishes use coconut milk. If you have permanent camp, it’s better to buy coconuts from nearby villages because they will be much cheaper. It becomes impractical if you only stay for one week or so in a temporary camp that needs at least 3 hours walk in the forest. In this situation, I’d rather used dehydrated coconut milk that comes in a sachet or even instant spices. Anyway, here’s our regular shopping list for one-week survey on a temporary camp.

Here are some tips for managing culinary footprint:

1. Prepare meal plan to avoid food waste or to avoid carrying too many things in the field (but add an extra meal day for emergency). My friend and I used to do this when we were in Buton. We planned our meals (that we want to cook ourselves) for one week survey, searched for recipes, and then went to local market to find the ingredients. Dishes that need fresh green vegetables should be cooked early of the week. Eggs are usually last up to one week
2. Take a trip at local markets and see what they offer. Some people in the villages usually plant herbs and spices such as Indonesian bay leaves (daun salam – Syzygium polyanthum), lemon grass, galangal, which can be used for many Indonesian dishes.
3. Buy less canned food or at least try to buy local canned products.
4. Harvesting other forest products should be sustainably done. Some of the palm leaves can be used as food wrapper and can make nice stuffed rice rolls.

A Pink-necked green pigeon is resting on a Bungur tree

Birdwatching in a city is definitely unpopular, particularly when you talked about Jakarta, one of the most populated cities in the world. Once I uploaded my story of my recent birdwatching activity in the center of Jakarta, I received a suggestion to visit another birdwatching site up in the mountains. Sigh….

To most birdwatchers, seeing a rare, endemic species is maybe like winning a prestigious prize. But, this was not my intention that day. More than 10 years ago, our small bird club carried out a bird survey in the city. Our question was simple. Can we still see wild birds in Jakarta? More than ten years ago, this city still held at least 105 species. Some of the buildings that retain a patch of tall trees in their garden might be a good place to see the noisy Red-breasted parakeet (Psittacula alexandri). Last Saturday right at the center of Jakarta, at the National Monument (Monas) park, I saw them again.

Monas was constructed around 1961 in 80 ha area just in front of Presidential Palace. For the last ten years, Monas has been through a lot of facelift particularly around the edges. More trees have been planted, from palms, Banaba tree or Bungur (Lagerstroemia speciosa), to Jamaican cherry tree (Muntingia calabura). The latter was my favorite childhood tree. The red berry fruits were the one that attract me to climb the tree, just as they attract the birds. Urban environment have been shown to favor birds that eat seeds and insects and thus helping to disperse the seeds and control the urban insect populations. The life of frugivores is much tougher as they really depend on available fruiting trees. But at least the Jamaican cherry tree in this park was able to satisfy the Pink-necked green pigeons (Treron vernans).

Pink-necked green pigeon, a city survivor

This was my bird of the day. Like many green pigeons, they are strong flyers and rarely come to the ground. Ten yeas ago, this bird was not in our list for this park. They tended to be found in old wooded areas, avoiding the crowded central parts of Jakarta.

At the end of the morning, our list grew to 18 bird species. Thanks to our young good guides, the new generation of bird enthusiast, we were able to see the small minivet (Pericrocotus cinnamomeus), the coppersmith barbet (Megalaima haemacephala), and the Asian glossy starling (Aplonis panayensis). Our citiwalk of the day was successful.

A shy small minivet

People are coming to this park for their weekend exercise, jogging, or picnic while the spotted dove (Streptophelia chinensis) or the Asian pied starling (Sturnus contra) occasionally come to the ground to feed on seeds. It feels good to see that a part of this city is still sustaining a small bird community. The art of urban birdwatching is finding the good sites, foraging for life supporting system of the city for birds and for us…..

PS: this posting has been listed in “I and the Bird“.  It’s a very YAY! except that they used he instead of she.  Here’s what they say,

“Noonanthome of “Wisdom of Wildlife” compares seeing a rare bird with winning a prestigious prize.  Well, he’d know as the newest recipient of the Most Pink-necked Pigeon Award.  How prestigious”

Aside from my attendance in International Conference on Alfred Russel Wallace and the Wallacea last week in Makassar, I forced myself to visit Fort Rotterdam during the drizzling rain of Friday afternoon.

Alfred Russel Wallace landed in Makassar in 1856. In this site, a prince from Java (Pangeran Diponegoro) was exiled by the Dutch colonial government in Fort Rotterdam. Pangeran Diponegoro was the great warrior during Java war. He was the son of Hamengku Buwono III, the Sultan of Mataram who refused to take the throne and chose to live as common peasant in Tegalrejo, in Central Java. Two of the renowned naturalists live in the Malay Archipelago during the Prince’s life. Thomas Stamford Raffles, a British lieutenant general of Java during 1811-1815 and also a naturalist had certainly responsible of the changing system of Mataram sultanate such as crowning the teenage brother of Diponegoro. When the Dutch colonialist took over, the 5-year “Diponegoro war” took place in Java. And later, Diponegoro was exiled in Manado in 1830 and then transferred to Makassar in 1834 where he passed away in 1855. The Prince has probably met two of renowned naturalists somewhere and sometime in his life, Wallace and Raffles. That was why I put a special interest in visiting the old fort of Ujung Pandang.

Ujung Pandang fort was first build by the King of Gowa, Imanrigau Daeng Bonto Karaeng Lakiung, in 1545. During colonization, the fort was taken over by the Dutch, reconstructed in 1667 and was named as Fort Rotterdam. Now, it is considered as the best preserved Dutch fort in Asia. Walking during the drizzling afternoon rain made me wonder of the past. Covering 21.253 km² area, my mind travelled to the past and thought of the Dutch colonial soldiers walking around this fort, thought of how Diponegoro was treated. I forced myself to see the dungeon where Diponegoro was imprisoned. A table with a Qur’an, a chair, a small bed, and a praying mat….

Wallace started his journey in the Malay Archipelago in 1854. He was able to survey and search the forest of Sulawesi, astonished by the beauty of butterfly wings, and discovered his theory of natural selection. He was offered full support by the Dutch governor of Makassar. His letter from Ternate to Charles Darwin in 1858 has stimulated Darwin to publish ‘the Origin of Species’. Wallace was nobody compared to Darwin at that time. But his passionate to keep on exploring the uniqueness of the Malay Archipelago had made him published several important papers later on natural selection, variations, and speciation. Around the same time, Pangeran Diponegore was already behind bars, was forced to stop his war and not able to follow up his vision on freedom. They both were here in Fort Rotterdam in such a different situation. But they both landed in this particular site as they both occupied the same place in my heart. Both were men with passion and spirit to capture the real beauty of the land of Malay Archipelago…..

“It is impossible to convey the idea of the pleasure of sailing through this beautiful and unparalleled archipelago, in which every attraction of nature is combined”, Lady Sophia Raffles (during her field trip with Raffles in Bengkulu forest).

To most Indonesians, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles was only a lieutenant general of Java during a short period of British colonization in Indonesia (1811-1814), and later was governor general of Bengkulu (1818-1824). Having been under ages of colonization under the Dutch, his appearance had at least made some significant changes to the welfare of the Indonesian people. He abolished the slave trade and changed the forced-agricultural system of the Dutch which forced farmers to grow particular plants (coffee, tobacco) without being paid into land-tenure system.  The other side of Raffles was less known but more exciting….

Apart of his governmental job in Java, Raffles was also a keen naturalist. He enjoyed travel to different part of the country just to find a giant-parasitic flower in Sumatra in which later, named after his name as Rafflesia arnoldi. During this excursion in Bengkulu, Raffles and his companions (his wife, Lady Raffles, and Dr. Joseph Arnold) stayed in the forest under the watch of elephant herd at some distance. In “the Naturalist Library” by Jardine et al (1834), it said that Raffles described that a herd of elephants (Gaja bermakpong) was less ferocious than a single elephant (Gaja salunggal), which really fit to what I know from working in Sumatran rainforest. His contribution to natural history can be recalled from his plant and animal collections and later, several wildlife species particularly Sumatran mammals and birds were named by him and published in the Transactions of Linnaean Society. Those species were the Large treeshrew (Tupaia tana), Silvered leaf-monkey (Presbytis melalophos), Siamang (Hylobates syndactylus), Great-billed heron (Ardea sumatrana), the Giant pitta (Pitta caerulea), and the Milky stork (Mycteria cinerea). This interest on nature had him established the Royal Zoological Society of London.

Raffles was an acute observant and gifted with descriptive writing ability. Captured the Malay language quickly and preferred to stay in Buitenzorg (now Bogor Botanical Garden), Raffles made use of his time in Java to learn the culture and the people, and later wrote ‘the History of Java’, a very concise description of Java natural history and culture. Reading this book was like reading a book that just has been written recently and was far from my imagination of reading a boring history text book. Raffles was a statesman and a naturalist, a combination that is hardly found nowadays………..

Measuring tree diameter is probably the easiest field work. You just need to bring the DBH meter and follow the standard operation procedure for measuring tree diameter and somebody else need to record the measurement. But it’s not as simple as that.

For the last 12 years, a team is observing and following the growth of trees in one of the last remained intact lowland forest in Sumatra. Each year, we tried to keep at least two or three same persons in the team. The growth of trees in this dynamic world is becoming an important issue particularly when related to climate change. During drought years, you will get an average 0.1 – 1 cm decrease from previous year measurement and we’re talking about 2500 trees! It seems an easy work but the sources of error are high. A fully conscientious person is needed for the job.

Working with trees in area that has been burned 12 years ago can give a mixed feeling. The open area caused by forest fire has not been recovered yet. Most of the area is still covered by ginger plants mixed with pioneer plants such as the Siam weed (Chromolaena odorata). Trees grow faster in this area which can be relieving but hold your breath….. Many Cananga trees (Cananga odorata) can grow more than 1 cm per year. The overall patterns showed that the distribution of wood density was shifted towards these fast-growing trees such as this Cananga. The fast-growing trees are usually trees with lesser wood density and therefore sequestered carbon less than the high wood density trees.

Every year we measure, watch, and wonder whether this forest can survive another decade or can still participate in carbon sequestration. Can it be? Over the years, we watch the slightly rising temperature which increase the respiration but decrease the photosynthetic rate. The cool weather years increased the growth rate of trees but this rising temperature trend is keeping us alert as it gives the overall decreasing growth rate patterns of this particular forest.

There is a joke among us that this team will still measure those trees for another two decades along with their old white hairs and crutches. I actually wonder who survive better, the trees or us……