orangutan photography tour November trip report

Positive people seem to get rewarded with positive wildlife experiences. Our last week in Borneo has been very very special Everyone gelled so quickly on this trip and it soon became a group of friends sharing a unique experience together. And blimey were we rewarded with some incredible wildlife encounters. Massive thanks to Scott, Jane, Rachel, Maggie, Charlie, Carol, Helena and Kevin for being so utterly fabulous. Together we also raised another chunk of money for the Orangutan Foundation UK. There’s more information on my future orangutan photography tours here. There’s also some photos from our October 2019 trip here.

Orangutan babies

In all of the years that I’ve been leading these orangutan fundraising trips  I think we had my most amazing ever visit to Camp Leakey. Over three and a half hours of an astounding quantity of orangutan encounters including this mum and baby breastfeeding just a few metres away from us.

Then on our very first day in the national park we had a brilliant sighting of a wild male orangutan up in a tree by the side of the river.

Male orangutans became a regular theme of this trip with a close encounter with the new dominant male at Camp Leakey …

And also at Pondok Tangui.

Storm’s Storks are a very rare bird with under 200 breeding pairs left in the world. But coming upstream one morning we had my best ever sighting of these birds enabling us all to get shots of them both perched …

And flying …

And of course the reliable Storkbilled kingfisher …

As always on these trips we had daily sightings up close and personal with Proboscis monkeys including this one that virtually leapt over my head close to Rimba lodge. 

Gibbons are notoriously hard to see in the wild but we had an incredible sighting of an Agile gibbon …

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Along with long tailed Macaques and silver langurs.

As always on my orangutan photography tours we visited the reforestation project where everyone chose a sapling from the nursery before planting them.

Over the last decade or so my orangutan photography tours have raised tens of £1000’s for forest and orangutan conservation in Borneo. I run these in partnership with the Orangutan Foundation UK whose work is helping to ensure there is a long term future for these forests.

A trip which starts with a welcoming rainbow has to be a good sign … and below is a photo of our night time trip to see the mass gathering of fireflies.

Borneo is heaven for macro photographers so finally I’ll share just a few photos from some of the smaller creatures which live in these forests.