May 6 - Big tour day, with four excursions. Sitting around at 5:50 with my tea in the restaurant, a Moroccan traveler I’ve been talking with notices an bird in a nearby tree. It is a buffy fish owl.
Our first boat tour starts at 6:00, we go upriver again. See another Wallace’s hawk-eagle, macaques, oriental darters, and a few oriental pied hornbills. Veer off the river and up a canal to Kelenanap Oxbow Lake. Here the water is still and we see a few lesser fish eagles perched in the trees. The lake is full of water hyacinth.
Back to the B&B for breakfast.
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At 8:30 we go out again, this time to a trail where we walk for about 40 minutes through the undergrowth. This turns out to be not nearly as exciting as we had hoped. The dramatic part of the walk was the battle with leeches. Our guide (Johnny) shows us how they attach to the skin by putting one on his hand.
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Back to the rooms for lunch, then out again in the boat at 16:00 for the late afternoon animal activity. This time we go downriver, past a few large hills that come up against the riverbank.
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Past these hills, we run across a herd of elephants eating and ripping up the vegetation along the riverbank. Some of them tear off branches and use them to thrash the brush in front of them. Perhaps this is done to intimidate the people watching.
As with yesterday, the original idea of the elephants was probably to get in the river. But the presence of boats may have put them off of the idea. Eventually, two larger elephants do get in the water, though the rest of them still haven’t made a move by the time we leave.
Downstream from this we encounter a pair of rhinoceros hornbills. These are the famous birds that are constantly used to promote wildlife in Sabah and Sarawak.
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This tributary is small and choked with water hyacinth.
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Many more birds are seen as we get back to Sukau, along with flying foxes now that it is getting dark. Eat a quick dinner and out to the boat again for the night cruise delayed from yesterday.
See a few small crocodiles again, much easier to find now since their eyes shine in the flashlight. We head up a small tributary on the upstream side of the Kinabatangan River.
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Also see a slow loris, impossible to capture on camera, but crawling all over a large tree on the riverbank.
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