LifeArtEarth

Sulawesi was a gap on the map for me. I had visited Borneo to the west many times and seen the orangutans, gibbons, monkeys, elephants and squirrels that live there. To the east, I had visited Halmahera and Papua New Guinea, with their birds of paradise, cockatoos and marsupials (but no apes, monkeys, elephants or squirrels). After some days enjoying the marine life of the Bunaken National Marine Park, we visited the nearby Tangkoko Batuangus Nature Reserve to look for some of the endemic mammals and birds. From Manado we drove around the south side of the imposing Klebat volcano and then north on the west side of mounts Dua Sudara and Tangkoko. The entrance to the reserve is next to the coastal town of Batu Putih. View looking east from Borneo across the Celebes Sea to northern Sulawesi, westernmost extent of the marsupials. "Wallace's standardwing" marks the habitat of the westernmost bird of paradise. As we walked into the park, we stopped to look at an elegant Draco f

The Fang peoples of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and southern Cameroon had developed a range of functional and beautiful tools and weapons, mainly made of iron, but also, as is the case with their crossbow, from wood. Du Chaillu (1861) in his early account of the Fang peoples he met in Gabon wrote, " They have a great diversity of arms. Among the crowd today I saw men armed with cross-bows, from which are shot either iron-headed arrows, or the little, insignificant-looking but really most deadly, poison-tipped arrows. These are only slender, harmless reeds, a foot long, whose sharpened ends are dipped into a deadly vegetable poison which these people know how to make. The arrows are so light that they would blow away if simply laid in the groove of the bow. To prevent this, they use a kind of sticky gum, a lump of which is kept on the underside of the bow, and with which a small spot in the groove is lightly rubbed ." He described the crossbow as follows, " The handle of the

 Introduction The Fang peoples of the West Central African countries of Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon seemed to exert a fascination in the minds of Europeans from early 19th century accounts onwards (Bowdich 1819, Wilson 1843, Du Chaillu 1861, Burton 1876, De Brazza 1878, 1888, Kingsley 1897, Bennett 1899). This related to their reputation for intelligence and energy, their vigorous and distinctive culture, their migration towards the coast, and their impressive physical appearance. Mary Kingsley (1897) described them as "full of fire, temper, intelligence and go." Early visitors avidly collected Fang artefacts as attested by the large numbers of items in museums such as the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, British Museum in London, Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, Musée d'Ethnographie Genève in Switzerland and The Metropolitan Museum in New York. Collections were made by missionaries such as J. Leighton Wilson (Wilson 1843); by traders such as Robert Bruce Napoleon Wa

Mulu is a dramatic area of forested limestone hills in northwest Borneo, the site of an incredible network of caves, some with huge individual chambers, others smaller in scale, but richer in beautiful cave formations. Bats in their millions inhabit the caves. I had visited once before, in 2004, but wanted to see the area again, with the idea of making some better pictures of the bats and butterflies, specifically the Rajah Brooke's. The flight from Miri inland to Mulu follows the beautifully sinuous Baram River and then its tributary the Tutoh, and then its tributary the Malinau. The border with Brunei is clearly visible, the forest cleared on the Malaysian side (up to the edge of the Labi Forest Reserve in Brunei) until the forested limestone hills of Mulu are reached.  A view to the North showing the location of Mulu and its famous caves at lower right, south of dark and forested Brunei. The Baram river at left terminates at its delta near the Sarawak city of Miri. The Malinau