When I arrived in Pangkalan Bun, Kalimantan Tengah at the beginning of June 2004 to begin the implementation of our GIS program, our USAID Project Manager, Pak Zaqie, shared some very disturbing news with me. For the first time, a long road had been plowed in Tanjung Puting National Park (TPNP) and the palm oil plantation company, whose plants already bordered the park, was planning on further expanding into park land. We were pretty confident [...]

In Tanjung Puting National Park, long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) are a fairly common sight along the Sekoyner River. During the late afternoon they can often be seen preparing to roost in the tall trees along the river’s banks. Amongst these riverside monkeys, dwells one group of long-tails that lives around the Rimba Orangutan Ecolodge. These high-profile monkeys have become the center of attention for the Rimba Macaque Project. Having first begun in 1999, the project [...]

Our adventure in Indonesia started with a trip to Jakarta. We were greeted by an (un)healthy dose of heat, noise, and smog and endured a week of frustrating, but necessary, red-tape, government officials (more often behind ping-pong tables than desks), and hair-raising taxi drives in order to validate our LIPI research permits. Eventually we received the go ahead to conduct our research and excitedly booked flights to Kalimantan (the Indonesian half of Borneo), enjoying our [...]