Last year, The Nature Conservancy’s Indonesia program was offered an undisclosed amount of money from an anonymous motorbike company. Presumably because the company knew of the Conservancy’s expertise in primate research, they somewhat bizarrely requested us to investigate bike preference among Indonesian apes and monkeys. As the senior scientist of the Indonesian forest program, I rejected [...] More

Do dogs have nationalities? Do orangutans have nationalities? And if so, why? Who has got the right to claim them as their own? More

On the pent up frustrations, swallowed pride, hurt feelings, suppressed anger, and unfulfilled hopes of working in conservation. More

Sanjayan’s recent Cool Green Science post on what you need to know to get a job in conservation lists some core skills for budding conservationists: basic ecology, economics & sociology, natural history, story telling and GIS skills, knowing your languages and how to manage people, being web smart, and having some knowledge of statistics and [...] More

Finding a new population of any species is good news in conservation. But finding a hitherto undiscovered population of orangutans (see one in the video above) is really exciting. And we did just that. In December 2008, we found a significant population of Bornean orangutans. This is some welcome news on a generally gloomy conservation agenda. Orangutans [...] More

I wrote about the Church Bird of Borneo a few weeks ago, and asked the question how species could be evolutionary winners and conservation disasters at the same time. The issue is about exotic and invasive species that are ecologically much better adapted to their new environments than indigenous species, which are often fine-tuned with their [...] More

Erik receives a photo of a 5-foot earthworm from Borneo and goes on a quest to find out which species it is. Unaware of the complexity of earthworm taxonomy, he fails miserably, but enjoys the search anyway. More

Here’s a line from Richard Yates’ novel “Revolutionary Road”: “Nothing happens in this world, nothing comes into this world, until somebody makes a sale.” Does that include conservation? Do we need to sell conservation? And if so, what is the product we are actually trying to sell? This may not be about selling for cash. But it [...] More

Tree sparrows (Passer montanus) would not rank particularly high on my list of the world’s most breathtakingly beautiful species. They are pretty average looking: chestnut brown, some white and a bit of black. Cute but..well, I guess, a bit boring. Or are they? In Europe, these sparrows are shy and don’t hang around near people. But here on [...] More

I spend quite a bit of my time flying through the Indonesian archipelago. On-board entertainment consists mostly of reruns of a hidden camera program called “Just for Laughs,” where practical jokes are played on innocent passers-by. Although the jokes can be pretty lame, it provides a perfect source of silent fun. Sometimes the whole plane bursts [...] More