Wow, so it's been a while!

I meant to update this thing a while back, but then Sophie arrived and from then on things got busier!

I guess I'll just talk about the highlights since I last posted! How have you guys coped? At the beginning of February we caught and collared a tarsier! Danica, myself and Anto were doing a survey when Anto spotted a tarsier and basically walked up to her and caught her by hand! We collared her back in the lab and she was really calm during the whole process so we named her 'Manja' meaning calm/affectionate in Malay. With the capturing of her, it meant my project became a lot more interesting and I started doing the nightly cycles covering the night from 6pm to 6am! It took a while to get back in to the swing of things, but I think I'm used to my strange sleep patterns once again! We also had a Cardiff student come back to DG; Luke who is doing his PhD on crocodiles.

At the end of the month, Josie, Danica and myself did our visa run to Hong Kong for 4 days. It was so good, a really cool city! Although it was a bit cold and all we had were flip flops to wear and I think we were about the only people to be wearing them in the whole of the city; we got some odd looks! It was fun though and we did lots of sightseeing, like the huge bronze buddah, so many markets, lots of view points etc!

When we returned to DG it was back to normality of carrying out night surveys to try and catch more lorises and tarsiers and also following Manja. We managed to catch another tarsier one night who wasn't happy at all about being captured, nothing like Manja was at all so it was quite difficult to collar her. She was also much fatter than Manja so we called her 'Como' (Chomo) meaning Chubby. Turns out she was actually pregnant and we saw the baby a few days later which must have been no more than a few days old, it was so cute! We named the baby Sabtu; Sabs for short. Pretty boring meaning, just means Saturday (the day it was seen), but we liked the name! Later the same day, we were all sat in the office when Anto walks in with a shoe box. Inside was a male tarsier which his dad had rescued from land which was about to be converted in to oil palm plantation! We kept him in a cage during the day and fed him insects before collaring him (of course!) and releasing him in to the forest. The collar seemed to be a bit of a dodgy one though, we found him the next day, pretty much by accident and haven't seen him since! The receiver also makes an odd alien sound when you turn it on so I'm not sure of the likelihood of seeing him again... The collaring doesn't end there though. A couple of weeks later, Doyo one of the staff saw a loris in a tree outside main building and climbed it like a maniac to catch it. We first sexed it as a male due to obvious reasons, but a few days later I actually spotted the loris in its sleeping tree (I didn't see Krik once during the day) and it had a baby! We were quite confused so Danica emailed her old supervisor (Anna Nekaris don't you know.... The woman from BBC Gremlins of Java programme...) and turns out female lorises have external genitalia.... Nice! So recently Ben has been going crazy with press releases and I've appeared in quite a few local Newspapers!

On to more human, less animal news, we had our first field course this month from Glamorgan University. I didn't really know what to expect, but it was really nice having more people around. There were two groups, each here for a week and about 18 people in each. Oh yeah, we also didn't have internet from the beginning of March until just recently so having some company was very welcomed! Was fun though, we just helped them out with whatever they needed and took them out on our projects! Funnily enough I didn't have any helpers for my 12am -3am and 3am-6am shifts... We also have some more long term people! Hadeel from Egypt is here for 2/3 months to help out and we also have two girls from France; Emma and Carole who are doing their internships for their forestry course, here for 2 and 4 months. We also have another French girl doing her masters, here for 3 months and she's helping me out with nocturnal primates, so she will be following the loris and I'll focus on the two tarsiers and try and find the male!

Other news, we had a Hornbill expert and her team visit from Thailand come and stay. She was looking for potential nesting trees around the area as nothing is really known about the birds here. We also went to a conference of hers in Sandakan at the beginning of the March which was really interesting.

I don't think there is much more to report on! For the next two months we're all just focusing on our projects and carrying out lots of habitat analysis etc before the next field course arrives in June! And of course Father Miles will be visting in a couple of weeks which I am very excited for!

Hope everyone is well!

Lots of love xx