The Kinabatangan River is the longest river in Sabah, and we spent a couple of hours travelling along the river looking out for wildlife. The grey clouds shown above emptied their contents onto us and we got soaked. Our guide said there would be rainproof stuff in the boat, but none of us could figure out which bit of the poncho went where when it was all stuck together by the rain. Thankfully to rain eventually stopped, but we did sit in puddles for most of the journey.
So here are some photos of what we saw along the river bank.
After the rains:
Here is an orangutan, way up in the tree tops.
A relatively large blue-bodied orange-beaked kingfisher (apologies for it being blurred):
A couple of tiny kingfishers with dagger-like beaks:
Something (?) and a heron perched way up high on the tree tops:
Some proboscis monkeys in the trees (apparently they can eat anything but prefer sour to sweet things, and have special enzymes in their guts to cope with poisons).
A family of long-tailed macaques, otherwise known as crab-eating macaques. These are feeding on palm tree fruit at the edge of the river.
Back to birds again. I do not know the one on the left below, but on the right are a pair of hornbills (the national bird of Sabah). Again, the hornbills are perched right on top of the trees.
You might not be able to guess the bird on the left below, but it is an eagle of some sort sat on dead twigs. And on the right is another macaque, this time higher up in the trees.
It would seem that the proboscis monkeys prefer to sit in the cover of the trees, while the macaques hung out right at the top of leaf-bare trees.
By now there was a lot of traffic on the river, and I was glad we were not speeding too fast as I get sea sick. It turned out that we were going slowly because our boat was broken and the resort had to send another boat to get us home! Not that anyone bothered to tell us what was going on.
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