Thanks so much to Amanda, Carol, Heather, Jennifer, Barry, Judy, Paul & Christine for being such great company on my recent Borneo orangutan photography tour. I’ve been running these trips for many years now and I’m delighted that they’ve contributed tens of £1000s to The Orangutan Foundation. Their work is utterly inspiring to ensure that these great apes, the forests and local people have a long term future.
We had a lucky start on this trip with good sightings of these wild orangutans shortly after entering the national park on our very first journey upstream to Rimba lodge. There are over 4000 wild orangutans thriving in these forests and the rest of our week was utterly wildlife tastic.
As always we saw so many orangutans every day including this new dominant male at Pondok Tanggui. I’d photographed the old dominant male called Doyok in this part of the forest for over 15 years and was sad to hear of his demise. But he made old age for a wild orangutan and the cycle of life goes on.
It was wonderful to see so many baby orangutans as it’s a good sign how well these primates are doing here. For some of these images I used the OM1 camera by OM Systems for the first time. A review of this camera can be found here.
It might be an orangutan photography tour but we had lots of opportunities to see and photograph other primate species including long tailed macaques …
And even the odd Silver leaf monkey and agile gibbon.
By default if you conserve orangutans you protect so much other bio diversity and there are well over 200 bird species here.
We saw so many kingfishers every day including Blue Eared …
Stork-billed, White Throated, Ruddy & Rufus Backed.
A lovely sighting of a young Changeable Hawk eagle and plenty of Black and Red Broadbills.
But for the avid bird lovers on this trip our incredible sighting of a Blyth’s Frogmouth took some beating.
Along with this Buffy Fish owl.
Hornbills are a good sign of a healthy forest eco system and we saw quite a few including Asian black and Oriental Pied.
The insect life in these forests is mind boggling …
I could got on forever but I think time to end there with a terrible quality photo of us all at the tree planting project. Just can’t get the staff these days.
On reflection it’s rude not to end with another couple of orangutan shots from this wonderful week. If you fancy coming on a future orangutan photography tour there’s more info here.
