Conservation

International Orangutan Caring Week,

12th-20th November 2011

Jarot & Pinky, our newly adopted Orangutans in Sumatra

The Australian Orangutan Project has three other little orangutan infants that are in desperate need of support and care. Adopting Meki, Rosi or Wigly is an ideal way to secure care for them as well making a great gift for friends or family. Each infant adoption costs just $55 per year.

Please follow this link if you would like to adopt a baby orangutan and help rehabilitate it back to the rainforest http://www.orangutan.org.au/adoptions-new

Bird release at Besikalung temple, Batu karu mountain – 12th November 

There will be a big ceremony at Besikalung temple (Batu karu mountain) to celebrate “Indonesian Planting Day” and the anniversary of the Tabanan Regency. The Tabanan regency and local government officials will also attend.

FNPF will purchase many birds for release at the ceremony. 

We will purchase “Peaceful Doves” and “White Vented Mynahs” for release during the ceremony.

If you would like to release a bird, please donate Rp 60,000 and we will purchase a bird for you.

The Besi kalung temple committee, 5 villages and 9 subaks have invited FNPF to help them transform their area (approx 50 sqare kms) into a sanctuary for birds and other wildlife, in the same way that FNPF partnered with the villages to transform the whole island of Nusa Penida into a sanctuary. It is a beautiful location and easy to get to from Ubud, sanur or other place in Bali . This is a new project area for FNPF and your attendance would really help us demonstrate support to the local communities. 

You will need to make your own way to Besikalung temple (near Utu village). It is 1 about 1 hour drive from Ubud

Please send an email to info@fnpf.org for details.

Note :

Dress code : Traditional Balinese

Norm & I were happy to be invited to the recent TEDx talk in Bali last month. Speakers from a range of environmental fields highlighted the need to protect Bali’s natural image.

The stand our speaker was Pak Dharma Putra M.Sc from Udayana university, speaking on the importance of protecting Bali’s marine life & the new proposed marine parks located at key coastal areas in Bali including Nusa Penida. Thanks for organising this event Alan Bywaters, we look forward to the next one.

For those of you who don’t know about TED talks, please click here to learn more about this informative & often inspiring nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.

My favorite talks at the moment is: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

We now have our pair of Bali Starlings at the lodge, in association with the Begawan foundation.

The pair have already hatched 3 babies before their arrival, so we are hoping they will feel happy in their new surroundings to produce some more chicks.

We are all surprised how active they are; bathing, washing, flying and jumping from tree to tree.

They seem always to be close together and make lovely bird calls.

We will keep you posted on their development.

Our Bali Starling Project is now officially underway, with the cage now completed, our breeding license procured

and our pair of Bali Starlings waiting to arrive to their new mountain home.

A special Thank you to Carolyn Kenwrick,  Shirley Hermawan and the

Begawan Foundation for making this happen!.

A NEW ECO LODGE CONSERVATION PROGRAM

THE BALI STARLING

Bali Starlings once common in Bali, are now one of the World’s rarest birds. Except for a small, and closely guarded, population in West Bali, and 60 odd birds, which have recently been released on a neighboring island, Nusa Penida, the Bali Starling is essentially, extinct in the wild. Only captive breeding programs have saved it from total extinction.

The most successful Bali Starling breeding program, is privately funded by the Gardner family, under the auspices of the Begawan Foundation. www.begawanfoundation.org We’ve known the Gardners for many years, and recently, having watched the Eco Lodge develop and mature, they offered to give us a breeding pair to start our own program.

For the Birders:

There’s been a lot of discussion about where Bali Starlings can, or will, live. When the Begawan Foundation proposed a release program for Nusa Penida, there were experts who argued they wouldn’t survive on the island, for various reasons from, capture by (very low income) residents, to predation by migrating raptors.

Apart from the perils of capture and death by eagle, the island is extremely dry much of the time, and there are few trees large enough to provide holes for nesting, so it is very heartening to see that recent survey of the released population on Nusa Penida, found their numbers are stable, and they are nesting opportunistically, wherever they can find a niche. One nest was apparently seen under the eaves of a house, and this is especially relevant because these are very low income communities, and each bird is worth a great deal of money on the black market.

To date, the release program on Nusa Penida, which is the only really wild population anywhere (the released birds in West Bali live in a tightly controlled environment), seems to be succeeding, and the Begawan Foundation wants to extend the program into new areas, on mainland Bali. It may be many years before we have enough birds, and the social environment is safe enough, for us to start releasing Bali Starlings, but overall, more breeding programs in more locations, can only be a good thing, for the survival of the species.

The Eco Lodge Program:

The Bali Starling was mainly known to live in the hot and rather dry environment of West Bali, so Linda, and others, worry that they may not enjoy our cooler, and wetter, mountain environment. My impression is that many years ago, they may have had a far wider range, perhaps the whole island, which gradually shrank, because of capture and sale, contracting eventually to the National Park on the Western tip of the island, until they disappeared altogether.

Whether they’ll thrive here at 700m remains to be seen, however, Bradley Gardner, who’s invested an enormous amount of time and money, watching the program carefully over many years, believes Bali Starlings are opportunists that, undisturbed, will live almost anywhere on the island. Pak Bayu, the veterinarian working for the Begawan Foundation, who was in charge of the breeding program from the beginning, also believes they’ll do well at our altitude. On balance, we believe it’s worth having a go, so…

We’re honored, and excited to announce, that we’re starting construction of the cage facilities immediately, and we expect to have our first pair of Bali Starlings in Sarinbuana, in March 2011.

Our landowner (and best birding guide) Jeru Ketut Arimbawa, will keep the birds next to his home, and he will be responsible for their daily care. This is particularly nice as he and his wife have accepted new spiritual/religious responsibilities in the community, and helping to save the endemic, and iconic, Bali Starling, seems an especially appropriate activity for them.

If you’d like to help us, helping to save a very rare bird, you’re welcome to contribute to this program.

From Norm’s desk…

Planting Native, Fruiting Trees in damaged areas in the Mt Batukaru Rainforest

‘Thirty years ago, local farmers were having a very hard season with far too little rain. Most unusually for this area, people were getting hungry. So some of them went into the protected forest, to cut down trees to be sold for timber, and to clear new land for gardens.’ Or so the story goes…

These cleared areas, were 1 or 2 hectares in size, and they’re scattered, near the edges of the ‘protected’ forest. Although trees have now had many years to regenerate, very few have been able to survive the aggressive vines that smother most tree seedlings, so, to this day, these damaged areas are still dominated by the vines, with just a few stunted trees surviving.

The Current Project…

In our ongoing effort to bring back more native food, for rainforest birds and animals, I’m currently overseeing a project to plant, and then maintain, 6,000, native, fruiting trees in damaged parts of the protected rainforest, on Mt Batukaru.

In late 2009, the Plant a Tree Today (PATT) Foundation sourced funding from Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) and passed it on, through a friend, who runs the Bali International Consulting Group (BICG). Working with the leader of the local Adat, we designed the project, and gained permission to start replanting native trees, inside the protected, Mt Batukaru rainforest.

In total, 6,000 native trees have been very densely planted, over an area of approximately 6 hectares. We hope the close spacings will quickly re-establish a closed canopy, which will discourage regrowth of the vines. Two local men, have been employed to maintain the young trees, mainly to protect them from the vines, over the next 12months.

The 6,000 trees, some fast, and some slow growing, were selected specifically to provide abundant food for native birds and animals. 5,000 seedlings were planted near the road through the forest, to an important local temple (Pura Jatiluweh), while 1,000, were planted several ridges to the East, near Bonkalanyar Village. This village has yet to benefit from any development, and one consequence is, that people are still exploiting the forest, taking birds, orchids, animals and timber. We took these first, 1,000 trees to Bonkalanyar to begin a process, whereby locals start to receive benefits from protecting the forest, instead of exploiting it.