Preparation, Patience and Luck

I had been living in Alaska for four years when I decided it was time to try to capture a calving glacier on film.  In researching the best locations for photographing this phenomenon there was only one that seemed to guarantee success and that was (and still is) Hubbard Glacier near Yakutat. Hubbard is the longest tidewater glacier (meaning that it calves directly into the ocean) in North America, with an ocean front that is six miles long and reaches a height of 300 feet.   At that time, in July of 1985, there was a small island that sat just one thousand feet from the glacier's high face.  That island was my target as a vantage point from which to obtain photographs.  So I recruited two friends, Dennis Gaither and John Gans (who is now the Executive Director of the National Outdoor Leadership School--NOLS), and we flew to Yakutat with foldable kayaks and all our camping gear, cameras, tripods, and enough food for ten days. We spent our first night sleeping in a Yakutat airport hangar and the next morning were flown by float plane to the head of the thirty mile Fjord.

After some reconnaissance of adjacent Nunatak Fjord, we got down to business and made a beeline for our objective.  We paddled for two days in calm water to reach the island in front of Hubbard Glacier. Due to a tidal rip we had to wait for slack tide in order to negotiate the channel from the mainland across to the island. With this accomplished we set up camp and were very prepared to wait for the perfect calving moment.

Hubbard loomed huge before us. It was more than huge. We felt like mice in the presence of a dinosaur. 

And adding to the glacier's enormity was the tremendous crashing, it seemed about every half hour, as house-size chunks of ice broke off the glacier's face  and plunged into the sea. This, in turn, created giant waves which pounded against the diminutive island just beyond where we set up our tents, sending up spray high into the air. We were in a safe location, but only by a small number of meters.

Our position on the island provided us with a unique vantage point from which to photograph. With almost all tidewater glacier photography one is limited to standing directly in front of a glacier and shooting as ice drops straight down. Such images are just not that dramatic. All you can make out is ice against ice, with perhaps a splash if you are lucky. But with Hubbard we had a sideways view down the line of the face looking north, which was to our left as we faced the glacier. The St. Elias Range, towering in the background, added yet more drama.

It was clear that a giant calving would take place at some time way off to our left at the glacier's edge, at  at the farthest point that we could see from our camping spot.  Dennis and I set up our tripods each day and mounted our Nikon cameras. I used a 300mm f4.5 fixed focal length lens. I was still using Kodachrome 64 film at the time. My camera was an FE2 with an MD-12 motor drive attached.  I aimed my lens down the line at the end most hunk of glacier and waited, as did Dennis.  John Gans was not so much into photography as simply the experience of the trip, so he watched and humored us.

No luck for three full days. Just calving straight in front of us, which we photographed from time to time as a consolation prize. We kept an eye on that end piece.  We were kept awake at night in our tents by the thunderous calving every thirty to sixty minutes.  In the morning we would awaken and check the end piece of glacier, and fortunately it was always still there.

I prefer to use a viewfinder without a crosshatched grid. But this was the one time that I have been in the field when the grid proved very helpful.  Dennis Gaither had one on his camera. On our fourth afternoon on the island, with our cameras on tripods aimed in the same direction--at that end piece of glacier--every now and then Dennis would let me take a peek through his viewfinder to convince me that something was actually happening, that the separate piece of glacier we were concentrating on was very very slowly falling away from the main mass of the Hubbard. I did not realize this from looking through my clear viewfinder; it required a grid pattern to discern it. We waited more hours. We might have given up if it wasn't for the proof of incremental movement that the grid provided.

Finally the immense piece of ice fell away from the main glacial mass. I had loaded a new roll of film for the anticipated event so I was able to hold down the shutter release and allow the motor drive to run through most of the 36 exposures before the calving was over. The above photo is the best of the sequence.

But the story does not end there. This is where luck entered the equation. The above photo could have been taken by anyone with enough preparation and patience.  It might have gotten published and might not.  This was July of 1985.  Exactly nine months later Hubbard Glacier decided to surge forward and in May of 1986 its ice rode over our island and completely pinched off the outlet of Russell Fjord into Yakutat Bay. This surge created the largest glacier-dammed lake in the world. Water in the new lake rose eighty feet, killing trees and trapping marine life, such as harbor seals. This phenomenon created a worldwide hoopla throughout the summer as lake water levels continued to rise and sea life was threatened. Jaques Cousteau's team showed up. News media from  everywhere descended on sleepy little Yakutat. Talk of dynamiting the ice dam to save the seals became a topic of everyday discussion. And Newsweek Magazine put out a call for anyone with good images of Hubbard Glacier calving.  They snatched up my image, which was sold through a stock agency, and published it right away that summer.

On October 8th the ice dam broke of natural causes, the "lake" waters of Russell Fjord rapidly emptied back into the sea with the flow volume of 35 Niagara's, and the world of Yakutat and it's famous glacier calmed down to normal again.

Mark Newman

The Writing of Golden-The Novel

I had already been photographing wild horses for fifteen years when I had the opportunity to spend a week with a wild herd in the Spring of 1994.  Experiencing the above scene unfold in front of me had a powerful effect. It made me want to write a story about a wild horse.   Both the photograph and my young daughter's love of horses were the original inspiration for the book. Yet I did not sit down and actually start writing it until the fall of 2009.  In the intervening years I occasionally thought through a plot in my head, but not very thoroughly. The only aspect of the storyline I was sure of was having the horse running wild across Yellowstone Park and encountering a variety of adventures in that great landscape. Other than those chapters I really had no initial idea of what would be in the book.

Photography keeps me plenty busy without doing any writing and I successfully procrastinated writing the story for years.  What I kept in my mind throughout this fifteen year period was the stallion's name, Golden, and that Yellowstone chapter. I thought of getting started on the book many times but never managed to do so.  I knew I had this book in me but getting it out would take some discipline. I remember hearing an interview with John Grisham in which he said that if a person wanted to write a book all he or she needed to do was be disciplined enough to write one page per day and within a year they would have a book. He said it did not even mean quitting one's day job. It just took discipline and setting priorities.

Finally, when visiting a friend in the Yukon in September of 2009, I decided to throw myself into the project. The only difficult part was making the decision. Once I made the commitment and started writing every day the book just flowed out and I came to enjoy the book-writing process itself.  I went to the Whitehorse Public Library every morning and sat down with my laptop and maps and notes and began to compose. The first few days I wrote longhand on paper simply because that had been how I had always written articles in the past. I felt that I could think things through better that way. But after three days I realized that this was a mechanically foolish way to write a book these days. Inevitably everything would have to be typed and I certainly did not want to have to be continually transcribing from longhand.  So I forced myself to use the laptop and Microsoft Word.  I soon got used to it and now cannot imagine ever writing longhand again.

The library had wifi so Internet research was at my fingertips. As I composed the story I was easily able to click back and forth between Word and the web, looking up information as needed, verifying details, and even visiting locations in virtual mode.  I used to live in Wyoming and know the state well, but it was invaluable while writing to be able to see photographs on the monitor of the exact landscape I was describing rather than having to rely on my own memory. My memory provided the feeling and the Internet provided the accuracy. For the description of stallions fighting I studied YouTube clips.   When I needed to know anatomical details as a horse goes airborne and jumps over a fence the information was just a click away.  Likewise for researching the anatomy of a forest fire,  the workings of an Anderson sling, the dosage of Rompun, or the lifting capacity of  a  Bell Jet helicopter. It was all just a click away. I can't imagine writing a book like this without the Internet.

I did not work from any outline and often did not know from day to day where the story was headed. I knew that a significant chapter or two would be within Yellowstone Park, but the rest I created as I went along. At first the writing seemed a little intimidating without an outline. How could I possibly write an entire book by ad libbing?  But that's what I did.  I came to trust the process of writing.  I knew that once I sat down at the table with my laptop that ideas would flow and the story would progress.  Before writing this book I had no idea that that's how things can work out.

Occasionally I would get stumped. I would know where the story was now and perhaps have a notion of where it might be a little down the line, but did not know how to get from A to B. Whenever this happened I would go jogging and carry a small digital recorder.  I found that some of my best ideas would come to me while alone running. I don't know why. Perhaps it was endorphins, or maybe it was simply being out a trail in the forest and relaxing. This trick never failed me. I was always able to come up with good ideas for the story when exercising. It was my way of overcoming so-called writer's block.

While much of the writing was accomplished in Whitehorse, I still continued to travel as usual, always with my laptop in tow.  While photographing birds in the winter in Florida, I would work on the manuscript in the evenings.  When in western Washington state for a week, I photographed during the days and spent the rainy evenings in one public library or another plugging away at Golden.  When the libraries closed, usually around 9 PM,  I just drove to some rest stop and slept in the car and was ready at dawn to begin photographing again. It was a time of total focus and I loved it.

These days I  head south for much of the winter and in January of 2010 I began living in and photographing out of my VW van.  My laptop with the book manuscript was never far from my side.  I kept up the writing in Ashland, San Francisco, Lake Mead, and points in between.  I finished the first draft by the beginning of March, six months after first sitting down in the Yukon and forcing myself to begin writing.  I was in a fitting setting for completing the task. It was mid-morning and I was inside my VW camper high above the Lake Mead shoreline, overlooking that vast body of water, in the state that has the most free roaming wild horses. 

Much work was yet to follow, the more tedious aspect of the trade.  As my book agent, Carolyn French, is frequently eager to point out, "Writing is about rewriting."   All writers should take those words to heart.  I finished that first draft early March of 2010 and here I am this first week of July in 2011 still making tweaks and corrections to the text and adding some wild horse images (at the suggestion of a good friend)  to increase the book's appeal. The process can be never ending, especially with electronic books. In the "old days" of print, a publisher might be stuck with 10,000 copies of a faulty text with many typos and glitches.  But today there is no excuse for having an inferior product.  Corrections and revisions are always just a few clicks away. An improved version of a book can be uploaded to Amazon at any time to replace the previous version. This can occur multiple times, with ease and for no cost.

Mark Newman

Jump or Die in Yellowstone

Yellowstone in winter is recognized by most photographers as the most exciting time to visit the great park. This has been even more true since the reintroduction of wolves to the park in 1995.  I had visited in winter on several occasions when I used to live in Wyoming, getting around by snow machine and skis. I was eager to return.

So a few years ago I contacted a photographer buddy, David McChesney,  and we traveled to the north part of the park in early February of 2007.  This was two years after I had made the transition to digital photography, so thankfully I would no longer have to be changing film after every 36 shots in the brutal cold that is so typical of Yellowstone   I brought with me a Nikon D300 camera body plus the only two lenses that I use these days, both zooms:  a Nikon 80-400 and 18-200.  Both are VR stabilized lenses. Since they are stabilized I rarely use a tripod but for extremely cold weather, in which my fingers will not tolerate holding a camera up and steady for prolonged periods, I relent and bring one along. Such was the case on this trip. I also brought a Nikon D200 as a backup camera.

David and I based out of a riverside motel in Gardiner, Montana, on the northern border of the park.  The east-west road through the park in the north is kept plowed and open to regular cars all winter from Mammoth  to Cooke City. It is the only Yellowstone road open to conventional traffic in the winter months. All other routes within the park require the use of snow machines, skis, or snow coaches to get around.

In February the bull elk still retain their antlers, which makes for some spectacular imagery as they negotiate through deep now.  One morning David and I climbed a hillside and spent time with one particularly handsome bull. David steadied his monopod a legal and comfortable distance away from the elk and began shooting. I walked back behind David to get him as well as the elk in the photo, for an interesting perspective. As I was shooting, for some unkown reason, the elk started coming towards David, providing me with this shot which I captioned for my stock agencies "Panicked Photographer in Yellowstone in Winter".

The following day it was my turn to experience an adrenaline rush.  We left our Gardiner motel at dawn and drove east through the park. Past Tower Junction, before reaching Lamar Valley, we came upon a herd of about forty bison loosely scattered across a small meadow.  A few were close to the road and we set up our tripods and began photographing. Another photographer drove up and joined us.  David and the other photographer stayed to one side of the bison and I back way off so as to be able to photograph the animal with the photographers in the background.  I often like to add a human element to my wildlife images when possible.   After about ten minutes of shooting the bull started to walk down the edge of the road towards me.

At this point I was not concerned.  The bison was simply changing his location and not being aggressive. I began backing off and walking down the road, always keeping a generous distance between us.  The bison kept walking and of necessity, so did I.  There were at least fifty yards between us. The road made a bend toward the right and when I rounded the bend I could no longer see the bison behind me because of the curve in the road. I kept walking and soon came upon a tramped down path in the snow leading up a thirty degree slope off to the right of the road.  I walked up to the top of the low hill figuring the bison could then pass below me and keep going down the road.  The hilltop was about twenty-five above the roadway.  I stood on the edge and waited for the bison to walk below. 

A minute passed and then a very agitated looking bison came running around the curve in the road.  But instead of continuing on his merry way he decided to charge right up the path that I had just taken.

Initially I doubt he even knew that I was standing at the top of the slope. There was this one path through deep snow and he just happened to choose it.  He came right at me at a full run.  Other than to accept death gracefully, I had only one option.  At the instant before impact, holding the tripod and camera high with my left hand, I leapt off the hilltop and tumbled and fell back to the road below.  I hit mostly snow rather than asphalt and sustained a tear to the elbow of my down coat.  The camera and tripod survived unscathed, as did I. 

As I lay there on the road a car came slowly around the bend and stopped. I got up, brushing myself off, and explained to the driver what had happened.  "Oh, I didn't know there was anyone up ahead," he said. 

He then apologized profusely for having inadvertently caused the incident. I told him no harm done and I walked back up the road to my friend.

Later, in a gift shop at Mammoth Hot Springs, I bought a yellow clothing patch which I sewed on my coat to cover the tear at the elbow. To this day, in winter,  I still wear that coat with the patch. It says "Buffalo Crossing."

Mark Newman

Where The Buffalo Roam

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Steve Seegers and I were good friends living in Hawaii in 1976 when we decided on a whim to try to produce an article for National Geographic about the American bison, better known as buffalo. Steve would do the writing and I the photography. We contacted the magazine and were told we could submit such a story "on speculation."  Being novices to the publication world at that time, we thought this was an invitation to fame and fortune and adventure. Many years later I now know that on speculation actually means "Yeah, send it to us, but the chances are a million to one that your story will ever see the light of day."

So we quit our day jobs in Hawaii and returned to the mainland and set off in search of the remaining bison herds in the US.  We were a little late--the last large herds were killed off exactly one hundred years earlier on the plains of Texas and Kansas--but that fact didn't phase us.  We were full of nostalgia for the Old West

and in our minds, at least, it still lived on.  There was no Internet or Google back then and it took some digging to find out where buffalo still existed. We headed first to Moiese, Montana where Teddy Roosevelt and his buddies had established the National Bison Range in 1908, hauling down some bison from Alberta to get things going.  We visited at the time of their annual roundup and got to watch former employee, Ernie Kraft, help corral the herd for vaccinating against brucellosis and for the subsequent auction.

The NBR is large, but it didn't feel wild enough. So we headed first to Yellowstone

National Park and then to Theodore Roosevelt NP in North Dakota. We were never able to get near the herd in that park and drove south to Wind Cave National Park and Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  In Wind Cave we got our first taste of how it feels to have dozens of bison at once come after you. Both Steve and I wound up hiding in the branches of the same pine tree for forty-five minutes until the herd below us finally moved on.

We visited Ft. Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska, which also felt too tame, before finding the photographic crown jewel of our entire journey, Badlands National Monument (upgraded since to  National Park status) in South Dakota.  It was by then early December and quite cold in that part of the country.  We based out of a motel in the town of Wall and before sunrise one day we drove into the Sage Creek Wilderness area at the western end of the badlands.  I had in mind getting a sunrise shot, with the sun coming up right behind a bison.  In those days I was big into sunrises and sunsets, using the backlighting to capture silhouettes of every conceivable critter and object, from horses to sailboats. 

I carried my Nikkormat camera with a Nikon 300mm/f 4.5 lens around my neck and no tripod. I  used Kodachrome 64 film back then. Those were the days when Kodachrome was everyone's favorite, before Fujichrome and Velvia took over as most wildlife photographers' film of choice. The temperature was probably 10F, and maybe colder than that. We parked along the dirt road which overlooks the Sage Creek Wilderness, a vast grasslands that stretches out below to the Badlands Wall in the distance. With binoculars, in the dim pre-dawn light, we located a few bison grazing about a mile out and we hiked towards them. They were three bulls, spread out from each other. To get the image I wanted I knew I had to have a bison standing broadside on a flat area so the sun would have the opportunity to rise right behind him.  One of the three bulls happened to be standing in just such a spot. 

I positioned myself where I needed to be to fill enough of the frame with the bison. Steve and I were both a little nervous, considering our Wind Cave NP experience, and the fact that there were no trees anywhere around us at the moment for protection. But no guts, no glory, as the saying goes. I wanted this image badly.
Steve stood well off to my right and we waited. My fingers got colder and colder as the glow on the hroizon became brighter.

By the time that the sun started to crest the distant horizon my fingers were totally numb and I could no longer feel the shutter release button on the camera. I had to stab at it. The Nikkormat had no motor drive. It was one shot at a time. From previous experience I pre-set the camera settings to shoot at f16 at 1/1000 second tro obtain the silhouette I desired. I  had to control my breathing so as not to fog up my glasses and the viewfinder of the camera in the cold.
I was on a level with the bison. Since it was December the grass was very short and allowed for the nice clean light of the sun brightening up beneath the bison without any vegetation in the way. This same photograph would not be possible in the tall grass of summer. As the sun rose I poked away at the shutter release with my numb fingers, hitting it correctly only some of the time. I shot a series of images, the best of which is included at the beginning of this article.

It took weeks before I had the film processed and got to look at the results. The sunrise silhouettte was even better than I had hoped for. I was thrilled. I was certain that National Geographic would use the image on their cover.  It seemed like the perfect cover shot.  Steve Seegers wrote up his story and I organized my images and we eagerly mailed the package off to the magazine.  We knew we had a hit. 

One month later we got a form letter telling us that this material was not what they were looking for. 

Steve and I went our own ways after that effort. The upside to the story is that I went to New York City and found my first stock photo agency to work with, an organization called Animals Animals. It was owned back then by Nancy Henderson and Eve Kloepper and the agency is still around today, 35 years later. They looked over and liked my then-limited portfolio of wildlife images--including the bison shots--and signed me up. Eight months later, in December 1977, Audubon Magazine used my bison/sunrise image on their cover. It was the first photograph that I ever had published.

Mark Newman

Guiding Bear Viewing Trips in Alaska

I spent a good part of the summers throughout the 1980's photographing brown bears at various locations in Alaska, mostly in Denali and Katmai National parks and at the McNeil River Sanctuary on the Alaska Peninsula.  That work laid the foundation for producing our Bears Of The World book.  It also put me into contact with many of the best professional wildlife photographers of that time. Many of us wound up at the best hotspots for bear photography at the same time and thus became friends really by coincidence. If it wasn't for bears we might never have met.

One such friend is Matt Breiter.  He had been guiding bear viewing trips for a Boulder, Colorado organization call Natural Habitat Adventures, or Nathab for short.  Starting in the summer of 2002 he set me up with them to guide brown bear viewing trips on the outer Katmai National Park coast, north of Kodiak Island across Shelikof Strait. I was comfortable around most wildlife, including bears, so the pairing with Nathab for these trips made sense. Groups of up to six clients would fly in to tiny Kodiak Airport by jet from Anchorage and there I would meet them and arrange to have them flown by floatplane across Shelikof Strait to meet up with and be transferred aboard a 70 foot converted tugboat called the M/V Waters, captained by  John Rogers. Each trip lasted four days. John's job was to ferry everyone around the coast of Halo Bay
which borders the southwest region of Katmai National Park.  My job was to bring the clients ashore each day and to wander around with them, showing them brown bears up close and personal. It was an easy and exciting job.

During the summer months the bears are everywhere along that coast, eating grass, fishing for salmon, digging up clams, lounging and playing.  And best of all they are very tolerant of humans.  It is true that the bears got some bad press when Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed by one on that coast, but most experts agree that he was not behaving rationally around the bears and given that, that the tragedy was inevitable. With a little caution and some common sense bear viewing on the Katmai Coast is quite safe.

Late one afternoon I took my six clients wandering up a side creek that happened to be full of salmon.  I always keep the people in a fairly tight group with strict instructions to never run from a bear no matter what.
There is no way for a human to outrun a bear and running may trigger a bear's pursuit and attack instinct.

As we walked along the creek a mother bear and her two spring cubs came walking up the same path, wanting to pass us.  I kept the people calm and let the mother walk on by.  But the two little cubs, weighing perhaps 30 pounds each, became very curious and approached to within four feet of our group. I won't lie and claim that I never get nervous in these situations. My heart races like everyone else's.  But I do have to keep things together. So I picked up some pebbles and tossed them at the cubs,  with their mother nearby, and they backed off.  When they tried a second time to approach I told them firmly, "No!", and raised my hand slightly. That was enough and mother and cubs kept on their way.

Thirty minutes later we stood on one side of the creek and watched a large bear on the opposite bank searching for fish in the rapidly flowing water. The creek at that point was about forty feet wide or so.
I almost always carry my Nikon camera with an 80-400mm zoom lens when guiding bear trips. Just in case I have time for grab shots. Naturally the clients are my first responsibility, but bear viewing involves a lot of standing around and watching and waiting and there is often time for me to take some quick photographs while my clients are doing the same.  This was one of those moments. The bear suddenly launched himself into the creek in what appeared initially like a charge right at us and at that instant I reflexively raised the camera and shot.  As a group we flinched a little but soon realized that the bear was aiming for a salmon and not us.

Mark Newman

Life and Death in Masai Mara

The above scene is not at all unusual in the great African landscape.  A photographer friend, Martin Grosnick, and I traveled to Kenya in 1994.  It was our second trip over there together.  We were mainly interested in observing and photographing Africa's big cats and there is no better place on the Dark Continent to do that than at the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. It was set aside as a wildlife sanctuary in 1948 and covers 583 square miles, with an effective reach that is much larger since it is contiguous with Serengeti National Park on its southern border.

Martin and I camped for nearly two months at the northern end of 'the Mara', as the sanctuary is known locally, near Musiara Swamp. We were there in one of the dry seasons, from February through March, and had perfect weather for photographing. And we had the campsite to ourselves, except for an occasional Maasai tribesman who might wander over to our campfire after dark.

Virtually every morning at sunrise or soon afterwards, driving our own rented 4 wheel drive vehicle,  we were able to locate one of the three species of big cats--lion, leopard and cheetah--and sometimes all three.  Whichever species we located we would stay with for hours, until it became so hot that they bedded down during the heat of the day. We were mainly interested in observing hunting activity and with lions and leopards the hunts occurred invariably in early morning (or during the night when we were back in camp).  Cheetahs, however, can be active all day. They are more heat tolerant. 

During our two months on the Mara we were able to observe cheetahs hunting on nine different occasions. We captured several of those hunts on film.  The most startling one is depicted in the image above.  The mother cheetah had three half-grown cubs.  That's a lot of hungry mouths to feed. But she was not interested in simply feeding the cubs.  She needed also to be training them to hunt so they could eventually survive on their own.  When she spotted a Thomson's gazelle and it's fawn she left her cubs behind and took off in lightning-fast pursuit.  The cheetah, even when running at 60 mph, was outmaneuvered by the adult gazelle who managed to escape. But the gazelle's fawn was left behind and did not do a good enough job of hiding in the short grass. The mother cheetah soon discovered the baby Tommy and we expected to see a bloody and quick finale to the episode. But such was not the case.

The mother cheetah held the Tommy gently in her jaws and waited for her three rambunctious cubs to catch up with her. She then released the fawn and stepped back and what ensued would seem comical if it was not so deadly. The three young cheetahs pawed at the Tommy and chased the fawn around and around, repeatedly getting out of breath and having to take a break. It was obvious that the cubs did not yet know how to kill. The fawn was a toy for them. They did not even try to bite it.  They seemed to only know how to use their paws and not their mouths.  After about twenty minutes of patient observation, the mother cheetah finally stepped back into the scene and delivered the inevitable coup de grace. 

Mark Newman

The Jungles of Borneo

In 1987 I teamed up with writer Terry Domico to collaborate on a book about the eight species of bears in the world.  I had already accumulated a decade of photographs documenting the three North American species.  Pursuing images of the remaining five species would prove more challenging and launched us on an odyssey that eventually had us roaming the jungles of Borneo in search of the elusive Malaysian Sun Bear.

Borneo, located north of Australia, is the third largest island in the world.  It is made up of three countries--Brunei and Malaysia in the north, and Indonesia in the south.  While still back in the US we read all we could about sun bears and knew they lived on the island.  So we bought plane tickets and flew into the capital city of Brunei, located in the north central part of the huge island.  It did not take us long after landing to realize we had chosen the wrong country to explore so we hopped on another plane and headed east into the Malaysian state of Sabah.  In Sabah's poetic sounding capital of Kota Kinabalu we sought out park service personnel and were advised to visit Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary. Sun Bears and orangutans share the same jungle habitat.

The sanctuary, encompassing old growth Dipterocarp forest, was established to protect a wild population of orangutans and to rehabilitate those that had been confiscated from poachers. Terry and I were given permission to camp on the edge of the sanctuary.  After setting up my tent I took out a spray can of water repellent and sprayed the tent's rain fly.  When I tossed the can on to the ground an orangutan appeared out of the forest and came over and picked it up.  She proceeded to go through the motions of spraying the tent in obvious imitation of what I had just done. Then she easily crushed the metal can in her hand before slowly disappearing back into the darkness of the trees.
Early the next morning I headed into the jungle alone.  After about thirty minutes of walking something silently grabbed my left hand.  I turned and jumped at the same time.  It was an adult orangutan. I yanked my arm to try to get free but this only caused her to tighten her grip. The harder I pulled the tighter her grip became. She seemed calm--certainly calmer than I was at that moment--and she was determined to lead me down a trail through the jungle. I had no choice but to go along.  My heart was racing.  After about fifty yards of strolling together I could feel her grip loosen and I yanked free. I ran back in the same direction we had just come from and stopped when I thought I was a safe distance. Orangutans move very slowly on the ground and I knew there was no chance of her overtaking me again. We stood and looked at each other for a few minutes before she continued on her way and out of sight.  I made it back camp in a rather stunned state of mind.

Later that same afternoon I was able to photograph a Pied Hornbill, and a group of Pig-tailed Macaques finally presented me with the best photographic opportunity of the day, the image at the beginning of this blog.

Mark Newman