For anyone who has come to this page looking for a brief "went here, saw this" report, you've come to the wrong place! However just such a version of this trip report will be up on cloudbirders.com soon, and I will provide a link to it in part 2 of this post.
Before I begin, I'll give you a quick introduction to the major players in this piece:
Brandon Hewitt - a Bundaberg birder a few months older than me, quiet, reserved, generally stealthy and my travel companion for this trip. Check out his birding blog HERE:
Josh Bergmark - A Sydney young birder, who provided me with invaluable help setting up this whole trip, as well as advice and support over the course of our journey. Check out the birding blog he shares with Max Breckenridge HERE
If ,after reading this (and the following) posts, you have any questions about birds we saw, places we visited or just generally about birding in Sabah, feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to get back to you ASAP :)
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January 25th (Monday)
Brandon arrived at our house in Canberra last night from his home in Bundaberg, so this morning we drafted mum into taking us birding. We got up at 5, left at 5:20, and were in Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve by 6, only to discover the road only opens at 7:30 - great. We hung about for an hour (hearing, but not seeing, Diamond Firetail) before being let in by the ranger at about 7:10. We made our way down to the Lyrebird trail and did the 2km walk, finding Pilotbird (a nice and long-overdue lifer, and a decent ACT tick), and a couple of other new birds for Brandon like Crescent Honeyeater. The trail’s namesake, though audibly present, elected not to show for us.
We moved on to Black Flats because mum wanted to look for Platypus, and quickly picked up a feeding pair of Crested Shrike-tits, a very welcome addition to both ACT and year list. I’d only ever seen them twice before, both times in Victoria - once in July 2012, when Huib Ottow and I found one in Sherbrooke State Forest, and once in November 2013 when one briefly fed in the trees outside my accommodation in “the bush hut” at Healesville Sanctuary.
Walking further on to the dams, we did actually manage great views of a single Platypus, feeding in a dam, unconcerned by our presence and popping up regularly to the surface for air.
During the afternoon we did the rounds of town, picking up last minute additions to the packing list as well as essentials like malaria tablets and Malaysian currency (I love having inches of money). This evening was mostly spent packing. Big day ahead, tomorrow!
A flattering image of me, chasing Pilotbirds in Tidbinbilla - Photo courtesy of Brandon Hewitt
January 26th (Tuesday)
Got up, showered, ate, and spent the rest of the morning finishing my packing, pretty much right up to 12:15 when we had to leave for the Murrays bus to Sydney. An arduous bus ride as always, but somewhat shorter than normal thanks to disembarking at Sydney International Airport rather than continuing through to Central Station.
Brandon (left) and myself on the bus to Sydney
Once inside the airport, we checked our bags and got our boarding passes - the woman on the check-in desk finalised our seats with us, and got us into a spot where there were just two seats together, which was excellent on an aircraft where the seats were normally in threes. Not that we need have worried really, the flight turned out to be rather sparsely populated. The perks of flying on Australia Day.
We hung around in the departure lounge, Brandon taking time lapses with his GoPro, until at last we boarded and took off around 7:10pm.
Singapore Airlines is damn good. I’ll definitely be looking at them first if I’m back up this way anytime soon. Fairly roomy (for economy) seats, excellent passenger service, free food and soft drinks/juice (food left a bit to be desired, but hey, it’s an aircraft), entertainment system, the works. Pillows and blankets, even.
Pure luxury!
The flight was a long one. I got about 3/4 of the way through Captain America 1 before being interrupted by food, then spent a while trying to sleep (mostly unsuccessfully). It was very annoying, usually I’m able to sleep just about anywhere, but for some reason today I just wasn’t drifting off. Still, just laying around (the part of the cabin we were in had several unoccupied rows, which we appropriated for snoozing) with my eyes closed has hopefully given me a bit of a boost from resting my brain.
After seven hours we began our descent into Singapore. We arrived in Changi airport and walked all the way down to the end of terminal 3, because the sign said the SkyTrain between terminals was inoperative between 11:30pm and 5am. When we got to the end, we realised this wasn’t actually the case, and at roughly midnight we caught the SkyTrain across to terminal 2. We did a lap of the terminal (which is enormous, as expected) before finding a reasonably quiet corner to bunker down for the next 7 hours before our connecting flight to Kota Kinabalu.
January 27th (Wednesday)
Those 7 hours dragged on forever.
We eventually moved downstairs to the lower part of the terminal - about 3:30am, I think - and pretty much just wandered around for a while before settling in next to our gate (which had finally been allocated). It was a lot warmer down there, and I actually slept comfortably for around an hour and a half. After what seemed like an eternity (but was actually the half-hour between 7:30 and 8am) the gate finally opened and we went inside, going through the usual security checks (first time I’ve needed to take my boots off going through the scanners). It didn’t take long before they started to call us for boarding, and after having our passports examined and boarding passes scribbled on, we were all crammed into a bus and taken out onto the runway to meet the plane - a small Airbus A320 - that would take us on the final leg of the journey to the start point of our trip: Kota Kinabalu, on the west coast of Sabah.
We sat aboard the plane for a short while, noting Cattle Egrets and (probably) Pacific Swallows on the runway, before taking off.
The flight from Singapore to KK was about 2.5 hours, most of which I spent between watching the second Captain America movie (having finished the first one in Changi Airport) and doing some final reading of my field guide in prep for landing.
We eventually moved downstairs to the lower part of the terminal - about 3:30am, I think - and pretty much just wandered around for a while before settling in next to our gate (which had finally been allocated). It was a lot warmer down there, and I actually slept comfortably for around an hour and a half. After what seemed like an eternity (but was actually the half-hour between 7:30 and 8am) the gate finally opened and we went inside, going through the usual security checks (first time I’ve needed to take my boots off going through the scanners). It didn’t take long before they started to call us for boarding, and after having our passports examined and boarding passes scribbled on, we were all crammed into a bus and taken out onto the runway to meet the plane - a small Airbus A320 - that would take us on the final leg of the journey to the start point of our trip: Kota Kinabalu, on the west coast of Sabah.
We sat aboard the plane for a short while, noting Cattle Egrets and (probably) Pacific Swallows on the runway, before taking off.
The flight from Singapore to KK was about 2.5 hours, most of which I spent between watching the second Captain America movie (having finished the first one in Changi Airport) and doing some final reading of my field guide in prep for landing.
Boning up on ID points in preparation for landing
We disembarked the plane and were ushered into the terminal, straight into the arms of the customs and immigration officers. Something was strange about the terminal though - it took me a while to put my finger on it, but once I realised, it was obvious. It was nearly silent. Other than the murmurs of the passengers of our plane, there was almost nobody in that part of the terminal, and no announcements over the PA. I’ve never been in an airport so quiet. We reclaimed our luggage without issue, and after a quick mid-terminal repacking session to make my loads a bit easier to handle, we walked out into the entrance hall of the airport. Here, conveniently, there were stalls for both Digi and another (I forget the name of the network) cell carriers, where we could buy sim cards for our phones. We went with Digi as I’d done some research before coming and the map of coverage seemed decent. Fingers crossed it holds up. We managed to get 3gb of data, lasting a month, for RM40.
We went to get a taxi to our backpackers, and soon found that to catch a taxi from KK airport you first have to visit the desk inside and buy a little voucher thing. That covers the cost of the ride, and you give it to the driver instead of cash. I think the understanding is they then go and redeem the voucher later to get paid. A nice little system I thought, to stop unscrupulous taxi drivers from ripping off new arrivals.
We arrived at our base for the next two nights, Borneo Backpackers, and checked in for the first night, before heading off for a bit of a scout-about to pin down some of KK’s common city birds. We started by walking to the city waterfront (stopping for the first time, of many to come I’m certain, at a multi-bake - a popular chain of bakeries). Arriving by the waterside we had Great Egrets flying past, Zebra Doves and Asian Glossy Starlings in the trees above us, and a dark-morph Pacific Reef-Egret (a bogey for me back home) casually fishing off the rocks a few meters away.
We sat there and ate our lunch, with the obligatory side of malaria prophylaxis, before zig-zagging back to the other side of town (not a long walk as this area of KK is long and thin) to check out Signal Hill. A set of stairs leading up into the forest looked promising, so up we went, spending quite a while on the hillside waiting for birds to appear.
A minuscule Sunbird of some description (probably a female Olive-backed, but we aren’t sure) put in an appearance, followed by Pink-necked Green Pigeon. I only got the bum-view as it sat very high in a tree, so I probably won’t tick that yet. I should get it tomorrow. Ashy Tailorbirds and a Grey-streaked Flycatcher (which Brandon picked up but I missed, again nothing to stress about) were working the forest edge higher up, and a variety of swifts were hawking above the canopy - we picked out Asian Palm and House Swifts, along with tiny, sparkling Glossy Swiftlets.
Panorama from the Signal Hill lookout
We reached the lookout and cafe and stopped for a while to catch our breath and ponder our movements for the next day or two. I wasn’t overly charmed by our day in KK, and thus am pretty keen to head for Mount Kinabalu as soon as possible. After some discussion, we decided to play tomorrow by ear - we’ll bird some sites in KK in the morning (Tanjung Aru beach and the KK Wetland Centre), and if we can make it back by around 12, we’ll head down to Padang Merdeka and from there catch the bus up to Mount K. If it looks like we’re not going to make it back in time, we’ll not stress and continue to the mountain the day after tomorrow as originally planned.
The view of the city skyline (complete with close fly-bys from Glossy Swiftlets) was rather nice, but lack of sleep was making me irritable so we headed back down to relax at the backpackers for a while. On the way down I stopped to investigate a chirping in the low, scrubby bushes. Brandon didn’t, and I think he now regrets it, for a flash of bright scarlet heralded the almost simultaneous arrival and disappearance of a male Eastern Crimson Sunbird. I managed to get my bins on him just as he appeared, so I was briefly able to admire his glowing plumage, decked out with fine blue moustachial stripes before he was off. We hung around for a while, but he didn’t reappear, so we left Signal Hill.
We chilled out in our dorm at the backpackers for perhaps an hour (I was relishing the fact that the bed I had chosen happened to be the closest to the air-con unit), just relaxing and dozing. Sufficiently relaxed, and dusk approaching, we set off on another foray into town in search of dinner. Josh (a birding friend who did a Sabah trip in 2014 which formed the basis for our route) had sent me a message saying “check out the markets on the waterfront” so we started there. All manner of piscine ex-life-forms were lined up on display, flies buzzing around those whose stall-owners hadn’t the foresight to station someone with a switch to flick them off. Fish, plain and colourful (I’m bad with fish but I recognised a few species of Parrot-fish), gawked at us (either raw or char-grilled whole), along with huge shrimp and a dazzling variety of ever-spikier crustaceans.
The biggest fish of all
Though interesting from a biological standpoint, my stomach wasn’t really rising to the thought of a whole grilled fish. So we moved on, walking through the streets and checking out the KK Plaza (which didn’t have anything food-related other than supermarkets). By this time it was getting dark and we needed to find food, so we bowed to western pressure and went to the fast-food place across the street from where we happened to be. We’ll try more interesting food when we have the time to explore properly. Honest.
January 28th (Thursday)
I awoke this morning feeling generally less annoyed, tired, hot and sweaty. Surprising, since I woke at about 6am - the pros of going to sleep before 10pm right there.
Loathe though I was to leave the sanctuary of my air-conditioned bunk, I dragged myself up so that we could head out for some early-morning birding. Our first destination was the little supermarket we stopped at yesterday so that I could buy some water (I’d finished the 1.5L bottle I bought yesterday afternoon). Unfortunately the market was closed, as was pretty much everything else in the vicinity. I figured that, as Tanjung Aru is where all the rich people go to stay at the expensive Sutera Harbour lodge, I’d be able to get some water somewhere down there. So we caught a taxi down.
The driver dropped us right on the beach and we got down to business - a Striated Heron was fishing a few meters away, right out in the open on a little salt-water inlet. I got down to try and get some photos, as it was sitting in nice light, but it saw me coming from miles off and retreated to the safety of a nearby tree. Not to worry, other birds were there to be seen: Common Ioras were feeding in a casuarina above where we were standing. We sauntered down the beachfront, basically kicking Tree Sparrows and Spotted Doves out of the way, before a big movement and a flash of black and white caught my attention in a casuarina further down.
“Hornbill!!!!!”
Two Oriental Pied Hornbills were jumping about the tree, an adult and a juvenile judging by the much-diminished casque on one of them. They moved through the tree in great leaps, not bothering to flap but opening their wings presumably for stability. They moved out into the open to eye us warily, before leaping off deeper into the tree and out of sight.
Loathe though I was to leave the sanctuary of my air-conditioned bunk, I dragged myself up so that we could head out for some early-morning birding. Our first destination was the little supermarket we stopped at yesterday so that I could buy some water (I’d finished the 1.5L bottle I bought yesterday afternoon). Unfortunately the market was closed, as was pretty much everything else in the vicinity. I figured that, as Tanjung Aru is where all the rich people go to stay at the expensive Sutera Harbour lodge, I’d be able to get some water somewhere down there. So we caught a taxi down.
The driver dropped us right on the beach and we got down to business - a Striated Heron was fishing a few meters away, right out in the open on a little salt-water inlet. I got down to try and get some photos, as it was sitting in nice light, but it saw me coming from miles off and retreated to the safety of a nearby tree. Not to worry, other birds were there to be seen: Common Ioras were feeding in a casuarina above where we were standing. We sauntered down the beachfront, basically kicking Tree Sparrows and Spotted Doves out of the way, before a big movement and a flash of black and white caught my attention in a casuarina further down.
“Hornbill!!!!!”
Two Oriental Pied Hornbills were jumping about the tree, an adult and a juvenile judging by the much-diminished casque on one of them. They moved through the tree in great leaps, not bothering to flap but opening their wings presumably for stability. They moved out into the open to eye us warily, before leaping off deeper into the tree and out of sight.
Oriental Pied Hornbills
We continued down the beach, stopping to pick up a Common Sandpiper feeding in a drain, and arrived in a small park. Stopping to check the Egrets strolling around for Chinese (No luck - all Cattle and Intermediate), we realised that sitting down for a while would probably be worthwhile, as there was quite a lot of activity in the surrounding casuarinas and pandanus vegetation. Yellow-vented Bulbuls, Asian Glossy Starlings and more Common Ioras put in appearances, as did a number of minuscule Sunbirds, which refused to come down out of the canopy for identification. None appeared to be males, so making a life-ticking call on a 9cm brown bird moving quickly around the top of a big tree wasn’t really an option.
I finally got a look - a great look, actually - at a pair of Pink-necked Green Pigeons, sitting on some bare branches high up in a tree. The male was putting a lot of effort into his display, and was being received, as with all pigeon species, with a vacant-eyed stare of general disinterest. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female pigeon look impressed by anything. Being a male pigeon must be so disheartening.
We moved still further up the beach, heading towards a group of Terns roosting out on a sandspit. As we walked up, we unintentionally flushed a small flock of Plovers - most annoying as we had been planning to check any groups of plovers we came across for our target species, Malaysian. We managed to get a look at the birds in flight, and are fairly confident all were either Greater or Lesser Sand-plovers. Malaysian will have to wait for another day. We have sites for it further south in KK (Lok Kawi Beach) and also in Singapore, a beach next to Changi Airport, which we might be able to visit during our 10-hour stopover on the way home.
We stopped to look at the Terns (most or all Greater Crested, not even a year tick) but by this time the sun was edging higher into the sky, and the salty waterfall that was my face was beginning to flow freely. I made my way over towards the beautifully shady looking grass on the waterfront, but as I got there realised that it was part of the Sutera Harbour resort and going and sitting in there would probably be trespassing (later confirmed by the security guards wandering around). I made do with a patch of shady concrete.
Brandon joined me, and after picking out a pair of Grey Imperial-pigeons sitting way up in a tree, we set off to find some water.
Panorama of Tanjung Aru beach
It was quite a long walk to the nearest shop - I had made the fatal miscalculation of thinking there would be shops near the rich people, when in fact the rich people get all their food at the hotel - and by the time we reached the 7-11 I was just about ready to skull another 1.5L bottle. I won’t be going out in the morning without having (or knowing exactly where I can get) water again.
Suitably refreshed, we took a taxi back into town - we were trying to get to the KK Wetland Centre, but the driver didn’t know where it was, and didn’t speak English well enough to understand our attempts to direct him. Luckily the first taxi driver we found once back in the city knew where we were going, and took us straight there, agreeing to return as quickly as possible when we called him.
The KK Wetland Centre is quite an interesting place - a large swathe of mangrove forest, maintained by Sabah Parks. Normally such forest is impassable after the first few meters due to the nature of mangrove mud (as past experiences in Darwin had taught me), but the Parks division had had the bright idea of putting out nearly 2km of boardwalks, hides and even a canopy tower for visitors. As such they do ask an entry fee, the modest sum of RM10 (roughly AUD$3). They do their job very well too - the boardwalks, though understandably not of Australian wetland quality - are nicely maintained, and signs are posted in every little hut warning “Don’t litter, it will make your life bitter” or one of a variety of other anti-littering slogans. Despite this, the mud was adorned in many places with the plastic remains of past visitors.
We walked the boardwalks slowly for about 3/4 of an hour before settling into the hide overlooking a colony of Purple Herons. At first I thought they must all have left to avoid the heat of the day, as all I could see was a large group of Pacific Golden Plovers bathing in the shallow water. I scanned the low vegetation on the far side for Striated Grassbirds (finding one) before noticing a large stripy head staring back at me. Suddenly everywhere I looked there were Purple Herons, camouflaging neatly into the long grasses.
Highlight of the stop though was a minuscule Common Kingfisher, pale apricot contrasting with shockingly bright sky-blue. Common Kingy is a migrant, and one I wasn’t at all confident we’d get, so finding such an obliging bird so early in the trip was a big bonus.
Common Kingfisher
After a quick detour to the canopy tower (it was getting towards midday, so no activity other than a swiftly-passing Green Imperial Pigeon) we went back to the office and filled out the guestbook. I suspect the lady at the desk noticed when I signed in that we were from Australia, because she asked to take a photo of us for their newsletter.
We managed to squeeze in one last lifer just as our taxi pulled up - Orange-bellied Flowerpecker, a tiny and beautiful slate-grey and orange bird, the first we had seen of that family.
We returned to the backpackers. It was hot, humid, the city was starting to become malodorous again (it had actually smelled quite nice when we got back from Tg. Aru, a result of every second store firing up their grills), and we were done with the city. We had intended to stay for the rest of the day, but we were impatient. It was time to go. We packed up our things and walked down to Padang Merdeka, one of the city’s major bus stations. A driver spotted us (looking very touristy with our big bags on), and on being informed that we wanted go to Kinabalu Park, pointed us to the right minibus. We loaded our gear and waited - the buses to Ranau (the town just beyond Mount Kinabalu NP) only leave when full, so we were prepared to have to wait a while. Thankfully it was only half an hour or so until a couple more people showed up and the driver decided he had enough of a fare to make the trip.
We rolled out of KK and headed towards the hills - at which point I fell into a much-needed slumber. The van was loud and the ancient air-conditioning clearly not designed for the tropics (neither were the black leather seats), but the windows were open and the promise of our destination meant spirits were reasonably high.
I awoke in the mountains, the twisting roads edged by montane forest, interspersed with random houses (some nice, others little more than wooden shells). A bit of activity and a brief increase in roadside buildings as we drove through the town of Kabalu signaled that we were almost there, and as we rounded a corner, there it was. Mount Kinabalu.
Easily the most massive thing I have ever laid eyes on - I mean, obviously mountains are going to be big, but Kinabalu, even from a distance, is bigger than big. Bigger than huge. Only such well-rounded words as ‘leviathan’ and ‘colossal’ come close. Sheer faces swathed in greenery, interspersed by huge grey areas of granite, probably cleared by the landslides in last year’s earthquake.
It was more than a little daunting.
We pulled up at the entrance to the park and had to ask a few people before finally being pointed towards our accommodation for the next 7 nights, the charming and comfortable-in-a-basic-way Mountain Resthouse. Situated ~300m from the park gates, this is the closest one can stay to the park without actually being inside it, property that is all owned by Sutera and thus costing more than our entire trip budget.
Arrival at Mount Kinabalu Park Headquarters
We did some light birding around the resthouse, picking up such fun montane endemics as Temminck’s Sunbird, the mountain cousin of Eastern Crimson and similarly breathtaking in scarlet and white, Little Pied Flycatcher and Mountain Tailorbird, before setting off on a walk up around park HQ.
It was around 5:30 at this stage, and we knew it would soon be dark, so we decided not to attempt any trails, but rather just check out the area around HQ. Our plans were pretty much halted after about 100m, as we turned a corner, and there was a spectacular view of Kinabalu’s barren peak. A view that only got better over the next half hour, as the light grew pinker and a strong rainbow spontaneously erupted on the mountainside. Two mini-busloads of tourists returning to the park for the night pulled up and joined us in gaping, awestruck, at the scale of the sunset spectacle. We chatted with a few of them (as they asked us to pose with them for photos with a mountain backdrop), turns out they had come over from Peninsular Malaysia on a filing and record-keeping course. Interesting place to run it, but I don’t think they were complaining!
Stages of a breathtaking Mount Kinabalu sunset
As the sun dipped below the treeline we made our way back along the dark roads, stopping to admire a Bornean Whistling Thrush and send a few emails. 3G and reception is good around HQ, but non-existent a few hundred meters down the road here at the resthouse, which is annoying.
We ate dinner at the 'Restoran Panatoran' outside the park gates, and returned to the resthouse in anticipation of our first morning on the mountain-slopes.
January 29th (Friday)
We started out early this morning - not as early as planned, perhaps, but 6am. Already pretty light by then.We went straight into the park, and decided on the Liwagu trail to start off the day. We followed the road around the back of the buffet restaurant, down the steep slope before pulling up abruptly - something black and white was moving around at the base of a bamboo clump a few meters away.
“Fantail!” I whispered. Brandon already had his bins up. “Nah - Forktail!”
It was indeed a Forktail, one of those strange river-loving birds, quite different to anything we have in Australia. Long and thin, with an elongated tail and curiously flat, sloped forehead, pied plumage and odd, slightly eerie, pale legs. There are two very similar species in Borneo (and a third quite distinct one), Bornean and White-crowned. Both look essentially identical, the tail of White-crowned being slightly shorter. Thankfully there is an easy way to distinguish the two - altitude. Bornean Forktail, which was once lumped with White-crowned before being split off as a Bornean endemic, lives only in the very high altitude areas of the country: Kinabalu and some peaks in the Crocker Range. White-crowned on the other hand is submontane and lowland, taking over from Bornean as you get further down the slopes.
As we were in Kinabalu Park, it was a safe bet that this was Bornean - a good tick to start the day! A strange one, too. Forktails are aquatic birds, that spend most of their time hawking along forest streams, extremely wary of people. This one was foraging some distance from the nearest stream (which, incidentally, was where we were heading), instead choosing some churned up mud beside buildings, and seemingly unperturbed by our presence.
We walked down a tiny side-trail (finding an adorable and minuscule Mountain Tailorbird on the way) between two roads before reaching the entrance to the Liwagu trail. We hadn’t gone far before we came across our first ‘bird wave’. Kinabalu works in interesting ways - it is one of the prime birding sites in Sabah (and easily the best montane habitat around), but the forests are often devoid of birds. You can (and we did, later) walk for hours and see nothing. The reason for this has to do with the way the birds move - they form small flocks of mixed species, and move around the forest as groups, often in the company of small mammals like Squirrels and Tree-shrews. Because of the way these groups move (certain species will lead the pack, others follow with still others bringing up the rear), people tend to call them bird ‘waves’.
This wave was small, but had some nice birds in it - Yellow-breasted Warblers, White-throated Fantails and Indigo Flycatchers. Nothing too small, indistinct or fast-moving, a good way to ease into the way birding works up here.
We moved along the trail, picking up Ochraceous Bulbuls and Grey-chinned Minivets, before turning off the Liwagu trail onto the Bundu Tuhan View Trail. This was quite a long trail, and it took us some time to reach the top - the lookout presenting a nice view of the surrounding hills and scattered settlements. More interesting was the vegetation. Kinabalu has an incredible diversity of plants - I forget how many are endemic to the mountain, but it’s in the hundreds. In KK we passed a bookstore, in which I noticed a two-volume set of books each about 3 inches thick, titled “Orchids of Mount Kinabalu”. The forest itself is a very odd mix, with typical rainforest-type trees (as one might expect to see in Lamington National Park) side by side with tall seeding grasses, pale eucalypts and conifers. Of more interest to me was the avian inhabitants of the trees, which at the top of the trail, included a pair of brilliant Bornean Leafbirds.
View from the Bundu Tuhan shelter
We came to the end of the trail, and walked back to park HQ, stopping to admire a male Mugimaki Flycatcher (a winter visitor) and a pair of Bornean Green Magpies, feeding alongside a squirrel (neither of us has a mammal guide, so there’s going to be a lot of “a squirrel” and “a tree-shrew” in this write-up) and some Chestnut-hooded Laughing Thrushes.
Bornean Green Magpie
We went for breakfast at the restaurant outside the park gates, before setting off on our main trail for the day - the Kiau View Trail, the entrance to which is actually just before the park gate. We birded the trail for almost the whole afternoon, intercepting a few bird waves along the way. The low point of the day was suddenly hearing a rasping call coming towards us, one I recognised as belonging to a Whitehead’s Spiderhunter, a major target for Mount Kinabalu, one of the famous (or infamous, given how many dip on them) ‘Whitehead’s Trio’ of Spiderhunter, Trogon and Broadbill. We scrambled to get into a position from which we could view the treetop it was calling from, but we had no luck - by the time we reached a suitable vantage point the bird had stopped calling. A twenty minute wait showed no further signs of avian life in the area.
We emerged onto the road and took the trailhead opposite, the Silau Silau trail, back to park HQ before returning to the resthouse for a break and to settle our room fees with our host. As we relaxed, we could hear a Dark Hawk-cuckoo calling “just down the road there”, as Brandon put it. I disagreed, and ended up being right, as he disappeared for half an hour to chase it without success.
We returned to the park in the evening to watch the sunset over Kinabalu, hoping for a repeat of yesterday’s spectacular show. I suspect it was a one-time performance though, as today the clouds shrouding the mountaintop barely lifted in time for the sun to illuminate the top of the ridge. Still, we have 5 nights left, so you never know.
After sunset, we spotlit our way back up the main road to where we had left the Kiau View trail this afternoon, hearing very distant Mountain Scops-owls and Collared Owlets. With nothing much to see, we came back down, looking forward to a hearty and cheap meal at the restaurant outside the park gate. Except when we got there we were informed the kitchen was closed, leaving us no choice but to go 700m back up the hill and into the park, to the much-more-expensive Liwagu restaurant, one of the Sutera Sanctuary Lodges establishments.
Despite having to pay three times as much for a meal, the food we got was excellent - and they had roti canai (chicken curry with delicious flatbread), which I wasted no time in ordering. Brandon deliberated over the menu for five minutes before ordering bolognese. The waitress and I were both very disappointed.
We made the long walk back to the resthouse and I disappeared up to the outhouse for a shower - cold water only, as I very quickly discovered, and off to bed.
January 30th (Saturday)
The 5am wake up this morning wasn’t too bad actually, as we dropped off to sleep quite quickly around 10pm last night. We readied ourselves for the day, and set off to the park gates. The man on the gate gave us a quick glance then ignored us, so we walked right past him without stopping to pay the entry fee - at RM10 a pop, and only a finite amount of cash remaining, it’s better for us to avoid expenses wherever possible. Plus it’s not like Sutera isn’t making the park enough money, with the prices they put on everything.On the topic of VISA acceptance over here, so far I’ve found that pretty much everything is cash-only. Brandon and I both brought the equivalent of AUD$500 in Malaysian Ringgit, which should last us until we next encounter an ATM in Ranau. There are no ATMs of any kind at Mount Kinabalu HQ itself, annoyingly!
Back to this morning - it was still dark, but there was enough ambient light along the road for us to see where we were going without torches, so we made the trek without them.It was a very long, steep walk. At about 6:30am we reached the Kiau lookout, with a lovely view of the mountain’s peak just as the first rays of the sun touched the rock. Brandon stopped to mess about with his boots, but I could hear Crimson-headed Partridges off the path ahead, so I went off to chase them. I couldn’t, as they disappeared to cackle at me from further down the heavily-forested hill, so I continued on, assuming Brandon was following behind.
This was probably the biggest mistake I’ve made all year.
I continued on up the road by myself, stopping every now to look at birds moving across, and admiring a Grey Wagtail which a passing ranger’s car flushed up from the road ahead of me. Reaching a clearing on a corner at the top of the steepest part of the hill, I stopped for a while to let Brandon catch up. As I sat there, I could hear what sounded like a tiny person blowing raspberries at me from the cover of a tangle of vines, and it rang a vague bell as the contact call of Sunda Bush-warbler, one of our montane targets. A quick search turned up two of these tiny, nondescript birds - pretty much plain brown all over, with a few markings on the face - and I turned back to find Brandon so he could get a look at them too.
By this time I’d been in the one spot for about twenty minutes, and as I turned back, Brandon had finally caught up. He had a disgustingly smug look on his face. It gave me chills.
“Sunda Bush-warblers over there”, I said, waving my arm in the direction of the bush they were chirping from.
“Oh nice. Hey, guess what I saw.”
“If you say Mountain Serpent-eagle I’m going to clobber you with my lens.”
“Nope. Whitehead’s Broadbill.”
My stomach dropped through the road. One of the biggest targets we and any other birder had on Mount Kinabalu, Whitehead’s Broadbill is an iffy bird at best, a grass-green iridescent tennis ball with purple streaks and throat patch. And I had missed it.
Pausing only to get hurried directions from Brandon, I sprinted back off down the hill. “Where are the Bush-warblers?” he called after me. I called back over my shoulder, but I’m not sure he heard me. It turns out you can really get some speed going sprinting down a mountain.
I arrived back at the patch of forest next to the lookout panting, knowing that within the last half-hour a Broadbill had been sitting in one of these very trees. I paced up and down the road, tuning in to spot the slightest movement among the tangled greenery. Silence on the road. I broke out the speaker and started playing the Broadbill call - no response. I stayed in that section of the road for nearly 30 minutes, seeing nothing other than a single Little Pied Flycatcher. Clearly the Broadbill had moved on.
I went and stood at the rail of the lookout, cursing my decision to chase partridges, along with my companion’s decision not to come and find me after seeing them - given that he saw them just after the lookout, I couldn’t have been more than 40m up the road. After fuming for a while, i figured that standing around moping about Broadbills wouldn’t get me any lifers, so I walked back up the stupid hill to where Brandon was still waiting. About half way up my phone buzzed, and I had a facebook message from Brandon which read “Julian get up here noe”.
Given that he’d been in such a rush to type that he’d made a typo, I took off and sprinted up the hill, arriving breathless at the top, where Brandon was just lowering his bins.
“Spiderhunters were just here.”
Oh COME ON.
I could hear the Whitehead’s Spiderhunters in the valley, but they were now out of sight. For the second time in twenty minutes I paced a section of road, playing a Whitehead’s call at a bird I couldn’t see. This was immeasurably frustrating - and bush-bashing off the path wasn’t an option given the sheer hillside.
We waited. Ten minutes - still calling, though less often than before. Fifteen. Silence. Then all of a sudden at about twenty minutes, a call close by. We rushed back to our original vantage point over the treetops where Brandon had initially seen them - there was definitely one calling in that tree, its raspy voice echoing out across the valley. I stared intensely at the tree, searching for any minute sign of movement. There - a flutter in the very top. I raised my bins, and had to search for a second to pick out the small, black-streaked grey shape, its enormous bill curving scimitar-like from its face. Whitehead’s Spiderhunter was on the list.
Distant views of a Whitehead's Spiderhunter
There were actually two working the tree, poking their immense bills into the tube-like yellow flowers. We watched them for a little while, before I turned to Brandon. He looked sheepish.
“While you were away chasing the Broadbill I got Bornean Bald Laughing-thrush”
Open This Link to see a representation of how I greeted this news.
As context - the Laughing-thrush is essentially as high-profile a Kinabalu target as Whitehead’s Broadbill, but far less attractive (as you might guess by the name) and much harder to pin down. Broadbills are at least territorial; Laughing-thrushes roam the mountainside freely with the bird waves. I’ll be staking out the Broadbills every morning until either we leave or I see one - but Laughing-thrush is pretty random.
Nevertheless, the Spiderhunter, arguably the hardest of the Whitehead’s Trio to find on the mountain, was under the belt - it’s hard to be too sour after that!
We worked our way up the hill, birding slowly along the way, all the way up to Timpohon Gate, entrance to the Kinabalu Summit Trail. You have to pay (and hire a guide) to access the summit trail, so the gate is pretty much our stopping point on the mountain. On the way down we heard a call from an isolated treetop - a three-part rolling call that we had been hearing since we arrived at the mountain, but one whose maker we had been unable to locate. We figured this was as good an opportunity as we’d get to find out, so we sat down to scan the treetop for movement. It took a while for the bird to show itself, but when it did, it turned out to be a Golden-naped Barbet, a bird we had seen yesterday. No matter though, at least we knew what the call was now!
We stopped again at the Broadbill spot for another half hour, just wandering up and down playing the call with no success. Maybe dawn tomorrow will bring more luck.
It was a grueling 3km walk down the steep, twisting mountain road back to Park HQ, and by the time we reached the bottom our legs were on the verge of giving up. We struggled up the steps into the restaurant outside the park gate around 12pm, collapsing into the chairs and wolfing down a big lunch (we’d skipped breakfast in favour of being on the mountaintop at dawn).
We went back to the resthouse to relax for a while, sitting out on the verandah and watching the birds in the trees and flowering bushes opposite - Blyth’s Shrike-babblers, Bornean Flowerpeckers, Temminck’s and Olive-backed Sunbirds, along with squirrels of one variety or another. There are probably worse places to live, I reckon.
As the afternoon wore on, we decided to get back into the park (this time we were stopped at the gate to pay our entrance fee) to do some lighter birding around HQ. We had intended to go into the botanical gardens a little way up the main road, but when we got there it transpired that there was an entry fee of RM2.50. No thanks - we’d rather walk the trails for free. We took the Silau Silau up as far as the Liwagu restaurant, not seeing a whole lot, before returning to the middle of the trail to just sit and wait for a while.
I messaged Josh back in Sydney to tell him how we were going. No sooner had I sent a message reading “No Trogons or Woodpeckers yet”, we picked up a faint knocking sound deep in the forest. We found good vantage points, and after a while the sound seemed to be getting closer. Ten minutes later, I saw a dark shape moving like a massive Treecreeper up the side of a eucalypt. Woodpecker! She sat obligingly in the sun for a moment, allowing me a good view of her orange-and-black chequered primaries. Only one species up here has those - Orange-backed Woodpecker, described in the field guide as being a ‘scarce resident’. A pretty good start to our Woodpecker list, and an excellent last lifer for the day.
On the way back out of the park we passed the lookout from which we had watched the sunset over the peak of the mountain on the first day. This evening, you would never have known the peak was there. Behind the closer foothills, a solid wall of cloud and mist rose, completely obscuring the face of the mountain. With nothing to see, we went for an early dinner and returned to the resthouse.
"What mountain?"
I went for my cold shower as soon as we got back, before darkness fell and the temperature dropped properly. I have, however, just made a discovery. If you flip the Big Red Switch on the Ominous Looking Box on the wall, an explosion of red wires emanating from it and disappearing into the roof of the outhouse, it actually turns on the water heater in the shower (which we both assumed didn’t work, as the knob to adjust the temperature is missing and none of the taps in the room have anything to do with the heater). I enjoyed a blissfully warm shower.
I have decided to keep this revelation to myself. Brandon may have seen Whitehead’s Broadbill and the Laughing-thrush, but he won’t be having a warm shower unless he has the nerve to flip the scary switch, which happens to be in a completely different part of the outhouse.
Revenge is sweet.
We awake at 3:30am tomorrow to hike back up the mountain (if our bodies will make it) to stake out Everett’s Thrush and the Broadbill at dawn.
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