I have the best office on earth. Lush green rainforest, filled with life – no grey walls, no cubicles, no artifical white lights. The only downside of working here is ironically one of its best attributes – the sheer size of it. I can imagine it takes most people no more than 5 minutes to get from one side of their office to the other. For me, it can take over 8 hours! (Harapan is about two thirds the size of Greater London.)
Last month, my research team and I headed out on an extended visit to the very southwest corner of Harapan, which is the most remote and inaccessible part of the forest. To get there you need to travel for about 8 hours outside Harapan and then come back in again at the southwest boundary. The task at hand was to put out more camera traps and collecting the memory cards from cameras that we already have out there.
A trip like this isn’t one we can do all that often so we’re always hopeful that we may find something we’ve never seen before, especially since this area has some of the best forest in the whole of Harapan. The most we hoped for was a glimpse of something new courtesy of one of the memory cards, so when we spotted something on the track ahead of us I thought it was just a durian skin. (Durians are the famously spiny (and smelly!) fruits of the forest.) On closer inspection it turned out to be this little chap – a spiny turtle! None of the team had ever seen one before, especially not one alive in the wild, so I can’t begin to describe how excited we were when we spotted this little creature in the flesh! The wildlife in the forest is often shy and tricky to see, so spotting this spiny turtle walking across the track in front of us was worth the 8 hour commute.