We lurched along an unpaved road in the night, walls of trees and knotted vines on either side. In the darkness lurked some of the world’s most unusual mammals, and I had come to Borneo to fulfill a lifelong dream to see them: catlike civets, scaled anteaters called pangolins and big-eyed colugos that spread their body flat as they glide from trunk to trunk.
In the open back of a pickup truck, two wildlife spotters stood in front of me, whirling their flashlights. To my right stood my father, whose lifelong obsession with wildlife had inspired my own. Clothes damp from the humidity, we plunged deeper into the moonlit jungle.
My father and I had long wanted to travel to Borneo together, inspired by an online community of people called mammal watchers, who shared tantalizing stories about their sightings on the island on the website mammalwatching.com.
Mammal watching is superficially similar to bird-watching: trying to see as many different wild species as possible. It is hard — mammals can be elusive — but rewarding, as the most interesting mammals dwell in the earth’s wildest and most vulnerable places. Searching for these creatures is both an adventure and an exercise in supporting conservation, particularly in Borneo, where palm oil plantations have replaced large areas of rainforest.
So much of my interaction with mammal watching had been virtual that, on a warm June night, as we rumbled through the 140,000-acre Deramakot Forest Reserve in the Malaysian state of Sabah, I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
A flashlight caught a gleam on a branch to the left. We trained our flashlights about 50 feet up a fig tree to see a binturong, a blackish gray, shaggy, whiskered creature also known as a bearcat.
This was one of the creatures that had been living in my imagination since I was a child, and I felt an electric thrill.
Drawn to an endangered Eden
I don’t remember exactly when I came to love animals. But wildlife is intertwined with some of my earliest memories.
When I was 6, we saw 16 black bears on a family trip to Canada (I kept count). The next year, I spotted a tiger in India. Over the next two decades, my interest deepened during trips to Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Kenya, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania and other countries.
No place beckoned, though, as much as Borneo, the third-largest island in the world, smaller only than Greenland and New Guinea. Three countries share this Southeast Asian island: Malaysia and tiny Brunei occupy the northern third, and Indonesia controls the rest.
The island is home to some of the most iconic, and unusual, mammals on earth, species like orangutans, pygmy elephants and proboscis monkeys with their bulbous noses.
“It had a mystique that was larger than life,” said my father, who read about all these animals when he was a child growing up in India.
Until a few decades ago, Borneo was covered in tropical forests. Then, in the early 1970s and the decades after, many forests were logged and then cleared for palm oil plantations, until more than one-fifth of the total area of Sabah was planted with oil palms, according to a 2022 study published in the journal Land Use Policy.
Bornean wildlife paid the price. The population of Bornean orangutans, found nowhere else in the world, declined by more than 50 percent over the last 60 years, according to the World Wildlife Fund, a conservation nonprofit.
With a sense of urgency, my father and I planned a trip for last June with the help of Jon Hall, the founder of mammalwatching.com and the de facto leader of the mammal-watching community. We ended up with an itinerary that included Deramakot, the majestic Kinabatangan River and some of the oldest rainforests in the world in Danum Valley.
An outfit called Adventure Alternative Borneo offered a relatively affordable price for a mouthwatering 10-day itinerary: $2,950 each, not including airfare. And just like that, we were headed on our dream trip together.
Serenaded by cicadas
The Bornean jungle felt intensely alive.
There was the daily chatter of cicadas, a different buzz going off every few hours; the so-called “6 p.m. cicada” sounded like a saw screeching against metal. Everything was always wet, drenched by daily downpours and humidity so heavy it made gulps of air feel like full glasses of water. Sinuous vines, mosses and fungi — some looking like luminescent teacups, others like miniature red lava lamps — grew anywhere there was space.
After landing in Sandakan, a city of nearly 200,000 in the island’s northeast, we met our guide, Lister Johns, a native Bornean, who drove us about 20 minutes to a town called Sepilok. We stayed at the Sepilok Forest Edge Resort, a modest lodge with an open-air cafeteria, a few chalets and a glamping area. Orangutans, gibbons and monkeys were said to cruise through the trees on the property, and the roof to our small room was also home to short-nosed fruit bats.
At the nearby Rainforest Discovery Center, a network of suspended walkways brought us into the canopy, where a large orangutan came crashing through branches and leaves and observed us from a treetop. In the evening, red giant flying squirrels emerged from their tree holes before sailing from trunk to trunk in the twilight.
But we knew Sepilok was just an appetizer compared with our next destination, Deramakot, about 60 miles to the southwest. This was where others posting on the mammal-watching website reported seeing some of the rarest wildlife, including tree-dwelling clouded leopards and diminutive sun bears, the smallest species of bear in the world.
There was only one place to stay in Deramakot, arranged through tour companies like Adventure Alternative: a station of the Sabah Forestry Department, which offered a few guesthouses with spartan rooms that had an air-conditioner, a pair of twin beds and not much more. Forestry department staff members cooked meals for guests at an indoor dining area a short walk away. But the station’s seclusion made it a perfect launchpad to explore the forest at night.
Deramakot delivered: On two of our five nights there, we set out after dinner for six-hour drives, finding not only binturongs, but also several leopard cats, with black spots marking their golden fur, and slow lorises, venomous primates that look like yellow teddy bears. During the day, we spotted red leaf monkeys, a family of orangutans and a pygmy elephant. We napped between excursions.
My dad was ecstatic. “The fact that these nocturnal creatures that live high up in the tropical rainforest, it’s possible to actually see them so well — to me that was one of the mind-blowing parts,” he said. “I used to drool over these pictures in the book on wildlife in India.”
A mammal-watching boon
After a few intense days in Deramakot, Mr. Johns drove us a few hours to Sukau, a community on the Kinabatangan River, the longest in Borneo. During the drive, Mr. Johns, a Sabah native, told us that guiding had become an attractive employment option on the island, particularly for people of modest means.
Shavez Cheema, the founder of the Borneo-based conservation and tourism nonprofit 1StopBorneoWildlife, who was not involved in our trip, said in an interview afterward that the interest in seeing Bornean mammals had been a boon. While many tourism companies are run by people from the West, Mr. Cheema said, the staff and workers are generally local and Indigenous people. He hoped the government would open new conservation areas to accommodate the growing demand to see wildlife.
Perhaps more than our previous stops, the Kinabatangan River area reflected the growing tourism industry on the island, with several lodges catering to hundreds of visitors. We traded the simple, government-style forest service accommodations for spacious rooms with patios and a dining area enclosed in floor-to-ceiling windows at the Borneo Nature Lodge, a modest establishment along the river’s edge. There, I ate some of the best vegetarian food I had ever had.
Traveling by motorboat through the Kinabatangan’s tributaries, cooled by the river breeze, we saw big troops of proboscis monkeys socializing in trees as enormous birds called hornbills, named after the casques on top of their beaks, floated above. Proboscis monkeys, which are endangered, are known for their bulbous noses, but they also have sinuous limbs and smooth, golden coats that seem as if they have been brushed with a fine comb.
Treading in ancient wilderness
I felt the most intimate connection with Borneo at our last — and wildest — destination, the Danum Valley, which teemed with rainforests that are some, by some estimates, 130 million years old, some of the most ancient in the world. The jungles there were relatively undisturbed, with liana vines twisting and spiraling through towering trees.
Ferns, mosses and other plants showcased different shades of green. Termite mounds and ebony trees added splotches of dark. The humidity dampened everything. We spent three nights at a nearby property called Infapro, which had a cafe and some guesthouses. From there, we drove every day to the main Danum Valley field center to hike in the jungle.
One day, we came across a family of Bornean gibbons, endangered apes that swing impressively from branch to branch using their extremely long arms and legs. We saw two more orangutans, this time a young male playfully chasing a young female around a fig tree.
Over just 10 days in Borneo, we saw nearly 40 different mammal species, as well as almost 200 species of birds, venomous snakes, freshwater crabs and more. We left the island exhausted and in disbelief at how much our senses had taken in.
But both of us are only getting started.
“Absolutely not done,” my dad said. For our next mammal-watching adventure, he’s already dreaming about the tropical forests of West Africa.
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