Note: This is a first person essay which I have abbreviated to fit the Internet form of reading.
Enjoy !
I arrived in Kuching at the end of October, 1971. The monsoon season had just brought the first and longer lasting rains of the wet season. What was I doing in Sarawak? “everything about Tarsius”.
Kera hantu in Malay or in Iban Ingkat, the animal was about the size of a human fist. The mammal has huge head on a tiny body with enormous eyes. The head can rotate 360 degrees. The animal can jump one and a half meters from a small branch. Another outstanding feature are the hands which are strong frog like fingers with enlarged finger pads. The tail could be considered rat like but it has a tuft.
I started field work in Semenggok, some 12 miles from Kuching together with two Iban men. One of them could sleep walk through the forest at night, as he had worked here decades ago but still remembered the jungle.
I had planned to ring each animal like a bird, set it free and then recapture it later to learn about their territory. I had also figured we could study their sexual reproduction if we could catch a pair of them, release, re trap and continue our study.
With six so called nylon mist nets, we put them up in a number of places. Night after night we trudged through rain flooded forest checking the nets. Rain and cicadas sang through the night. We caught many leeches but no Tarsier. The laundry started to smell bad, the metal parts of the equipment began to rust and mould grew on leather and rubber. Still no Tarsier. Then one of the men said we did not have enough nets. I ordered first 24, then 38 and finally 56 nets. We caught birds and bats but the Tarsier remained elusive. After two and half months at Semenggok and no animals, I thought I would try my luck at Matang.
We strung the nets far apart, enjoyed a bottle of beer on Christmas and New Years and set to work. My wife came from Germany to help out. We finally caught a pair we named Jack and Jacqueline. I had to nurse a pregnant Jacqueline back to health. Then I took all the measurements, put a ring around her leg and released her hoping to watch her and the baby.
In a rush, I brought fence wire and tools and looked for a good place in the Matang jungle and started to construct a cage as large as a house. I selected suitable trees and fixed the first roll of wire five meters in the air which doesn’t sound very high until you are up there looking down. I had planned to re capture Jacqueline and put her together with Jack and observe them through the wires. Everything was ready to string the nets when the soldiers told us to evacuate as a 24 curfew had been imposed. I left the huge cage behind and looked for another place to work.
For various reasons, I returned to Semenggok. I became successful here mainly because of the experience I had gained at Matang and because I used more nets. I had some indications of the marking behaviour and I could examine this phenomenon in much more detail.
Tarsier had three ways of marking territory. The first was the deposit of urine which was placed at traditional spots. The second was the use of scent glands on their bellies which was deposited at different spots. The third was a large gland near the lips which they rubbed at the base of trees where they sit.
I noticed, by smell, over 110 trees where the Tarsier used the lip gland. My helpers and I went around the area sniffing up and down certain tree trunks. We identified each tree and by this “sniff” test and we were able to identify many different data points..
One day in early February we caught Petra, the second pregnant Tarsier. As it was impossible to keep her and not to risk an abortion, we quickly tagged and released her. I began building a cage like in Matang but it was so close to Chinese New Year I had to interrupt the work for a short interval.
The cage was about 90 square meters in a not very proportionate rectangle. It was 3.5 meters high and enclosed a space of 320 meters. The construction of the roof was difficult because we had to weave the wire around more than thirty tree trunks in order to leave a natural canopy over the cage. It took more than one week where we finally decided it had no holes. However, a new round the clock curfew cause us to remove all the nets and the camp as a whole destroying the last hope of observing the Tarsier and the behavioural patterns connected with the birth and care of a Tarsier baby.
Ten days later I installed the camp again in Semnggok using different methods. The Forestry department was a great help in identifying the trees. Meteorological data was taken, the diameter of tree trunks, the density of the canopy and the phases of the moon were all recorded. By the end of March we had captured 35 Tarsiers which included re traps which was still a very unsatisfactory result.
The first Tarsiers we kept in the huge cage was Timothy and later Osman. We observed both Tarsiers and recorded their range of behaviours. One morning I did not find Osman on the tree where he slept. A quick search found him weakly sitting on the ground. A large snake was found nearby. I chased the snake away but Osman died twenty minutes later. An autopsy did not reveal any snake bite or other cause of death.
I had to ask the German Research Council for more money. Stool samples had been preserved to determine parasites in the gut but this about all I had retrieved.
In May, with a parcel of new nets, I set up at Semenggok and Matang. We found Jack again but he was severely sick. We administered wound dressings, antibiotic injections, good food and the most intensive of treatment. I am still caring for him.
I had Susi in the big cage at Semenggok. She taught us that Tarsiers are extremely clever in escaping from the cage. However, she did not know the surrounding forest and kept getting entangled in the nets. She was caught again and again not knowing the location of the nets in her new forest home.
One day Joshua came to me with a big smile on his face. He was carrying Moses a 30 g suckling together with his mother in his bag. Unfortunately, the mother died for unknown reasons. Because of Moses, the next weeks of at the camp became exhausting. I cared for him every three hours feeding him with baby milk. I had my other work to do like taking x-ray pictures of all the stuffed Tarsiers in the museum. I grabbed the opportunity to take an extra picture of Moses. I also made a tape of Moses voice at a recording studio in Kuching.
Two days later we caught a female Tarsier in Matang. There was no baby but her mammary glands were big and active. She was so weak from struggling in the net. It took two days of recovery before she would accept Moses as her own. Things went along well for the next two weeks and I was able to make crucial observations. Brigitte was strong but developed a secondary infection and in the course of one night into the early morning both were dead. I had to do the post mortem and preserve them at once in spite of having been awake for the past 35 hours.
I moved removed the camp at Matang and concentrated in Semenggok. The local men were trained for the difficult work of observing Tarsiers for twenty four hours a day in consecutive shifts. We made hundreds of observations amounting to over 100 pages per day. The nightly observations were made with the new infra red night eye which leaves the environment, but the not the Tarsiers, in complete darkness. We continued this pace for seventy two hours had some time off with a cold beer and then another 72 hour period.
Winging my way back to Germany, I had an adolescent Tarsier named Nico with me. He was an adolescent male, much too young to be released. I shall make observations and then return him back to the Sungai Sarawak and the Sungai Santubong when I return much later this year.
From: Puzzle about Tarsius by Carsten Niemitz in the Sarawak Museum Journal, December, 1972
Carsten Niemitz would become a famous German biologist who earned his doctorate based on this and later research. He became well known for his work in biomechanics (how organisms move) and his studies of apes non verbal communication which led to the development of languages. This is one of his first articles
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