Borneo’s Deramakot Forest Reserve

The drive to Deramakot Forest Reserve is a long one, through acre after acre of palm oil plantation and past forestry depots where trunks of what were once mighty trees lie in towering stacks. It certainly doesn’t feel like the approach to what, just four years ago, was discovered to be a wildlife hotspot. Deramakot comprises 55,000 hectares of rainforest and, although it hasn’t been conventionally logged for 20 years, it is still sustainably logged. I was sceptical. Is it really possible that the logging has no detrimental effect on wildlife? I was keen to see for myself …
 
Looking for wildlife in Deramakot consists of driving (by day and at night) very slowly along a single 40-kilometre-long forest track, standing in the open back of a Landrover, scanning dense jungle. I couldn’t quite believe we were going to see anything, but within moments of setting out on my first night in the reserve, my guide asked the driver to stop. “Slow loris!” she said. And there, high above us in the crook of a branch, was a saucer-eyed creature with orange fur, hanging upside down by its toes, eating leaves. 

And so began five days and nights of wildlife viewing that was unlike anything I had ever done before. Every night we saw something new. The ancient colugo. A moon rat. There were regulars: the flying squirrels, palm and Malay civets, and the gorgeously decorated banded civet; and most nights we saw the small, exquisitely patterned, leopard cat. A long night of searching culminated in the sighting of two sun bears, only a few hundred metres from our base camp. We followed a trail of ripped-up vegetation and piles of dung to a family group of diminutive Borneo elephant.   
 
But there is one animal that has really made Deramakot’s name. It’s a show-stopper. The rarest and least known of the world’s big cats: the clouded leopard.  However, although the chances of seeing one here are possibly higher than anywhere else, many leave unsuccessful, including me. But there is another animal found here, one not as visually stunning as the clouded leopard, but even more rare and even more elusive. It is called an otter civet, and in the beam of my guide’s torch, I was fortunate enough to see this extraordinary animal, snuffling along in a ditch.
 
What I discovered in Deramakot’s forests, is that it is possible to use nature’s resources in a way that still satisfies our demands for natural resources such as timber, but not to the detriment of a habitat and its wildlife. And, at the end of my visit, with that optimistic realisation, I finally drifted off to sleep as the first light crept into the sky and the gibbons started to sing.

Join us in Deramakot on our Borneo’s Rare Mammals small group tour - contact our experts for more details.