On Being a Small Polyp in a Big Ocean

I was reading cross-legged on my bottom bunk when a tattooed man came into the room. It was 11:00 pm, and he was just getting in from a long day fighting for an Indonesian visa extension. So it goes when you stay in hostel dorm rooms. I liked this hostel because I could pay the dorm price but, owing to the volcano and record-low numbers of tourists, I usually had the room to myself. Not tonight.

My new roommate made the usual small talk. His name was Federico. He was a dive instructor on Gili, one of the tiny, sandy, dive-and-party islands between Bali and Lombok.

“Where are you from?” I asked, unable to place his vaguely European accent and deeply tanned skin.

“Argentina,” he answered.

That got me excited – probably more energetic than my roommate would have liked as the clock neared midnight – because I love any opportunity to practice Spanish. I explained that I had lived in Ecuador for a year. Here, the conversation took an eerie turn. After a bit of back-and-forth, we realized that we had both lived in the same country (Ecuador), in the same town (Puerto Lopez), in the spare room OF THE SAME HOUSE!!! (The house belongs to our mutual friend, Pablo.)

Federico, my Argentine roommate in a Balinese hostel, and I take an excited midnight selfie to send to our mutual friends in Ecuador as proof that the world is small.

Now we were old friends. I told Federico about my Watson project on coral reef disease.

"You simply have to meet Anuar Abdullah," Federico told me. "He is a guru of coral propagation. He's the Man. You'll see what I mean when you take his class. You just have to meet him."

I am always happier to take personal recommendations than find random connections over the internet, so I looked up this Anuar character the next day. I found his organization, Ocean Quest Global, and a pretty inspiring video about his life's mission. I messaged Anuar on Facebook and signed up for his coral propagation class, two months down the road on Gili.

Gili Trawangan is a tiny circle of sand in the ocean. Motors are prohibited, so bicycles and mini-horse taxis prevail. You can walk around the whole island in two-and-a-half hours.

My hostel bathroom on Gili was home to one of the largest cockroaches I've seen (Madagascar Giant Hissing Cockroaches notwithstanding.)

Luckily, the bathroom also came equipped with an enormous gecko!

A tokay gecko, Gekko gecko, to be exact. Look at that gorgeous red polka-dotting.

Fast forward. I've finished my work on Bali, moved to Malaysia for a month, returned to Bali, made my way by plane and van and boat to Gili... and here I was, ready to learn from the legendary Coral Man himself.

We met up for dinner, and immediately I was hit with the same impression as Federico: this was a person to know. Anuar didn't mess around.

"I just got back from a two-week research cruise through the Pacific," he told me. "Big things are happening there. Big things." His tone was intense but his volume soft. He had an intensity directed at no one. I got the sense he cared far more about what he was saying than about who he was talking to. "Big patches are DEAD. Gone. Nothing to regrow on. We need to stop playing around with conservation. This is too urgent."

Anuar teaches the first day of his coral propagation course in the upstairs restaurant of Trawangan Dive Shop on Gili.

Anuar's face is dark from the sun and lined from caring so deeply for another organism's life. Born in Malaysia, Anuar studied oceanography in the United States at Florida Institute of Technology before working in naval and tourism industries. Fifteen years ago he left it all behind. Coral has Anuar's entire heart, now that his two children are grown and his marriage has ended. The corners of Anuar's mouth are always pulled down in a slight frown, even when he's laughing. He has the worn expression of a soldier who's lost too many battles but who refuses to give up for love of his mission.

Sabine and I wait for a herd of lumbering brown cattle to cross the road as we walk across Gili for the sunset.

Then I met Anuar's counterpart, and she could not have contrasted more starkly. Sabine has a Swiss-French lilt to her English and corkscrew curls. Her smile, which she flashes often, spreads across her whole face. Over the following days, Sabine became my close friend. Over beach sunsets and gelato dinners, we learned we had much in common. We were both 23-year-olds (less than a month apart in age!) with a propensity to work on vacation and dream about fixing the world's problems.

Sabine met Anuar a few months ago as a dive student. On her gap year before starting occupational therapy school in Switzerland, she'd planned to see Southeast Asia, learn to dive, and follow wherever the path took her. Well, it took her straight into a full-time job volunteering as Anuar's assistant.

"I saw how much passion he had, and how disorganized his operation was, and I just had to help," she explained, almost as an excuse for why she was toiling away on a computer screen during this tropical vacation. Sabine sees organization as her greatest asset, and she certainly has the talent, but I'm not sure even a hard-working wonderwoman like Sabine can put decades of chaos into order.

The next day, I had a great surprise when I met the rest of my classmates. They were my coworkers from Reef Check and Coral Alliance in Bali, plus a few of the higher-up conservationists I'd never had a chance to meet! What luck. I got to spend three days picking their brains and talking marine-conservation over every lunch and dinner.

The Coral Team, from left to right: Chris, Nyoman Sugiarta, Jaya, Nyoman Swastika, me, Nikin.

Nyoman Sugiarta pulls on his wetsuit, always an unpleasant task, before we hit the water.

Anuar's paperwork and contact lists might be a rat's nest, but Anuar's coral propagation class lived up to its reputation. Anuar's goal is to replant corals all over the equatorial ocean, to give them a boost in the face of mounting stresses like rising temperatures, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, sewage runoff and destructive fishing techniques.

When it comes to coral propagation, I've always had one lingering doubt: if the coral has already died in a particular bay, why would replanting the same coral help? Won't it just die again, unless the root cause is addressed?

Anuar had a clear answer ready for me. "We only plant where we know the cause of the coral's original death," he explained. "So if it was killed by bomb fishing, and that's not happening anymore, for example, we will plant corals in that area."

Anuar shot and edited this video of our first day building a coral nursery on Gili Trawangan. The pile of rocks will be the nursery where corals grow from tiny fragments into large colonies, forming the broodstock for replanting the rest of the reef.

What about the bigger, global threats? I asked. What about rising temperatures and acidity? You can't stop those on the local level.

To that, Anuar explained that by planting corals, we are speeding up their recovery. We are allowing the reef to repopulate decades faster than it would without human intervention. By doing so, we are essentially accelerating evolution by natural selection.

Think of it this way: today, you have a full, healthy reef, 100%. Then a major storm hits and kills 90% of the reef. We use the remaining 10% to repopulate the reef. Already, by starting with the survivors, we have allowed natural selection to work; we have chosen the storm-resilient individuals to repopulate with. With our help, the reef recovers quickly, and in five years, it's full of healthy coral again. Then another disaster hits. This time, let's call it a heat wave that bleaches and kills 90% of the coral, again. Only 10% remains, and again, we replant from that stock. Now the corals have been selected to be both storm and heat resistant. Get it? It's far from perfect, but the idea is to give corals a chance to avoid extinction as they evolve to withstand their new, strange environment.

Human-induced climate change has accelerated the cycles of destruction for reefs, and without our help, corals wouldn't grow back quickly enough between major disasters to survive. But if we can also accelerate the cycles of regrowth, maybe we can give corals a chance to do what they've been doing so well for millions of years: evolve in response to changing oceans and survive.

Sabine and I watched this unreal sunset, but it left me with a deep melancholy. Maybe it was the techno dance music blaring on the beach, making me homesick for Sweets dance parties. Or maybe it was the heart swing for couples.

As I looked down the beach at the hordes of relaxed vacationers, I felt entirely alone. My heart and mind were too fiercely stuck on this urgent question, how to save our planet's corals? I'm glad I had Sabine at my side, or I might have imploded with the magnitude of the feeling.

That's the theory behind coral propagation in general. Anuar has some strongly-held and well-defended ideas about just how coral propagation should be done.

For one, he bans any use of plastic, concrete, or metal substrate. His experiments have shown than corals do much better when attached to aragonite stones, the porous, calcium-carbonate skeletons of long-dead corals. Plus, if you refuse to drop human-made junk in the ocean, you have done no harm in the event that you have to abandon a coral propagation project partway through (an unfortunately common occurrence).

Another of Anuar's unique gems is his glue system. He has a particular method of securing each type of coral to the rock. For hard corals, he suggests gluing the coral fragments to rock underwater using a combination of mineral gel and patented calcium-based catalyst. (If you don't have that, or if you're working on the surface, superglue will suffice.) For soft corals, pin the fragment into place with a pair of wooden toothpicks. For sea fans and sea whips, simply wedge the fragment into a crevice in the rock.

The third piece of Anuar's system is the nursery. Anuar discourages the "pluck and plant" method of cutting or gathering large chunks of healthy coral and gluing them to other parts of the reef. He says this method is haphazard, wasteful, and difficult to monitor. Instead, he recommends gathering only broken coral from the seafloor and cutting tiny pieces, about 1 cm long, and gluing each of those to its own rock in a centralized "nursery." Once the nursery matures, you can continually harvest those corals into tiny  pieces, which you then glue all over the wild reef you are trying to rehabilitate.

The turtle nursery on Gili is an example of a conservation strategy gone wrong. The turtles are often collected from their nests and put on display in this box-like tank to generate donations from tourists.

The baby turtles are too crowded, as you can tell from the scratches and bite marks on their shells and fins.

  

During the four days I was on Gili with Anuar and Sabine, my mind was working overdrive. I was inspired to have found a tool for conservation, since so many of my previous Watson projects have been merely attempts to study and understand the problems, not strategies for solving them. But was this the right tool? Would Anuar's coral nurseries prove scalable to the entire equatorial world? Did he have the necessary networking and organization to keep the momentum, or would the project fall apart once its charismatic founder retired?

Anuar and I pose with my certificate after I finished the course. I am now an official Coral Propagator.

Then the more existential questions set it. Is coral conservation the career I should pursue? What's the best way to make a difference in the world -- neat, published research from a university, or a messy underwater stab at growing things before they die forever? Yes, Anuar was right: the situation is urgent. The biosphere is unraveling. The oceans are emptying. The life is dying. But where does that leave me?

It was hard to say goodbye to Sabine, but I know we will both be working hard on whatever catches our hearts, and we can always commiserate about that from across the world.

For that, Sabine offered a trip to the gelato counter, and a bit of consolation. "Why do we always pretend we know everything?" she mused. "We don't control anything!" She told me about her worldview, which seems to center on sincere gratitude. From someone who is meticulous about filing and obsessive about doing good, the next piece of advice came as a surprise. "It's a wonderful thing to let things go," she told me. "Just let them really, really... go."

I was reminded of a poem Collin sent me back in September, when I was lonely in Brazil:

“Understory” by Mark Nepo

I’ve been watching stars
rely on the darkness they
resist. And fish struggle with
and against the current. And
hawks glide faster when their

wings don’t move.

Still I keep retelling what
happens till it comes out
the way I want.

We try so hard to be the
main character when it is
our point of view that
keeps us from the truth.

The sun has its story
that no curtain can stop.

It’s true. The only way beyond
the self is through it. The only
way to listen to what can never
be said is to quiet our need
to steer the plot.

When jarred by life, we might
unravel the story we tell ourselves
and discover the story we are in,
the one that keeps telling us.

I'm no expert at that process of letting go yet, but I accepted Sabine's reminder to stop analyzing everything for its lessons and just let the experience wash over me for a while. Without a chance encounter in a hostel and a stranger's advice, I never would have met Anuar or Sabine. I would not have glued my fingers to a baby coral by mistake. I would not have carried a laundry basket of stones across the bottom of the ocean or built Gili's first coral nursery from scratch. I wouldn't have felt the existential fear of being lonely when surrounded by dozens of laughing, drinking beachgoers, nor the nostalgic comfort of remembering that I'm always with myself, no matter who else I am with.

On the two-hour boat ride back to Bali, I was alone with the sun and the sea. Nothing was solved. The earth was still in biotic crisis. My graduate school plans were still nonexistent. The ideal career continued to elude me. But, for now, it all felt okay.

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Diversity-lah! One Health in Malaysia

A Malaysian black fly in the genus Simulium.
Photo credit: Zubaidah Ya'cob.

Dr. Zubaidah Ya'cob is a black fly taxonomist. Or is she a bird ecologist? A parasitologist? Or perhaps a medical researcher looking at River Blindness? Such is the label of a One Health researcher: messy, flexible, shifting among disciplines to answer a tangled question.

Dr. Ya'cob peers at a black fly preserved in ethanol.

This poster behind Dr. Ya'cob's desk explains how bird species use degraded forest habitat, evidence of her shifting research focus since graduate school.

I made contact with Dr. Ya'cob, who prefers the nickname Izu, through that heavenly and hellish tool, Facebook. A quick Google led me to the Malaysian Nature Society, an active group of birders, herpers, photographers, hikers, and environmentalists living all over Malaysia. I posted a message asking for birding buddies and disease scientists. Within minutes, I had been invited to a Raptor Watch Festival, an ant-tree symbiosis lab, a three-day field trip to Tasik Kenyir National Park, and a guest lecture at Monash University (in which I was the guest lecturer.) Most importantly for today's post, I was invited to Dr. Ya'cob's black fly lab at Universiti Malaya, the oldest university in the country.

Many Malay words are phonetically-spelled English. The Fakulti Sains is the Science Department!

Dr. Ya'cob showed me her lab, an open space filled with half a dozen desks, empty for the moment. "I like the open floor plan," she told me. "All my colleagues work in here. I don't like to be isolated." That mentality flows into her One Health perspective. By definition, One Health is an intersection of three fields: human medicine, veterinary medicine, and environmental science. Nobody can do it alone.

Dr. Ya'cob introduced her microscopes to me as her "two best friends."

She started explaining black fly species, and I had to hit rewind. Why was she studying black flies? What's this about River Blindness? Start from the beginning, please!

A few fly species from a poster in Dr. Ya'cob's lab.

You'll get to the real-life fly photos if you keep scrolling!

Here's the story. In Africa there is a disease called River Blindness. At least 500,000 people are completely blind from it, and many more suffer impaired vision. A microscopic worm is to blame: the Filarioid roundworm called Onchocerca vulvulus.

Photos of Onchocerca vulvulus in a book written by Dr. Ya'cob's mentor.

The disease also exists in South America, because O. vulvulus snuck in from Africa on slave-trading ships in the 1600s. In Ecuador, River Blindness has the largest impact on indigenous Amazonian tribes. Dr. Ya'cob's mentor, Dr. Hiroyuki Takaoka, found that 90% of Yanomami people are infected.

Dr. Hiroyaki Takaoka, or Hiro, has spent his career studying black flies in Japan, Ecuador, and Malaysia. Dr. Ya'cob introduced him to me as her sensei, the Godfather of black fly research.

But where do flies come in? I'm so glad you asked! Black flies are the vector of this tiny worm. They reflux it through their mouthparts into humans as they suck our blood. Unlike mosquitoes, which prefer stagnant water, black flies breed in flowing, unpolluted streams. That's why the disease is called "River Blindness" -- you're more likely to catch it if you hang around rivers.

Dr. Ya'cob patiently explains black fly ecology.

Flies of all kinds belong to the order Diptera, which means "two wings" in Latin. (Could apply to a lot of things, right? Birds, butterflies, airplanes... but no, just the flies!) Within that order is a family called Simulidae, the black flies. (No, they are not all black, in case you were wondering.) There are 37 genera within that family, but only one lives in the Oriental region: the genus Simulium.

Dr. Ya'cob moves a tiny black fly into focus in a Petri dish. She says the ethanol fumes make her sleepy -- just one more challenge in this difficult job.

Now, you might be wondering why a professor in Malaysia is studying an African and South American disease. Currently, River Blindness doesn't occur in Southeast Asia --- but it could arrive anytime, and when it does, it could spread through the native Simulium black flies.

In 2013, this lab discovered a single case of Onchocerca dewitti (a related species of Filarioid roundworm that does not affect humans) in a Malaysian wild boar. Since then, Dr. Ya'cob has been on the hunt for O. dewitti's vector. Which black fly is the culprit? Who spreads roundworms among Malaysia's wild boar? This question matters to more than those scruffy swine in the jungle (no offense, wild boar --- we love you too), because if O. vulvulus arrives in Southeast Asia, it's likely to hitch a ride in the same species of black fly.

That's why Dr. Ja'cob spends her days catching miniscule black flies in a net and painstakingly dissecting their thoraxes in search of O. vulvulus worms. The hardest part: "The flesh is white, just like the worms!" So far she hasn't found any, but she's not discouraged. "I just have to increase the efforts," she resolved.

My one attempt to photograph a black fly through the microscope. This little guy is off the hook -- no Filarioid roundworms were found in his species.

In the process of settling the taxonomy of black flies in Malaysia, Dr. Ya'cob has described five new species. She showed me the pencil sketches she drew for each fly's body parts. They were incredibly detailed artwork.

The pencil drawings are converted to digital images by a graphic design team for publication.

Dr. Ya'cob lovingly handles the original drawings that were published in her recent description of a new black fly species.

If O. vulvulus does come to Malaysia, it will be very important to know which black fly is the vector. In Africa, a biological control agent called BTI is sprayed on the streams to kill black fly larvae and nymphs. BTI stands for Bacillus turgiensis israelensis, a larvae-eating bacterium. You know what they say: a pathogen of a pathogen is a friend!

Black flies are particular about their streams. Different species require different conditions: fast-flowing or slow, large or small, extremely hot or just warm or frigid. By knowing which black fly species are vectors, Malaysian scientists will be able to spray BTI on only those streams preferred by the vector species. "No need to harm other species of black fly that live in other habitats," Dr. Ya'cob explained.

Amazing how a tiny insect can wreak such havoc.

Wow, they get so much more interesting under a scope!
Photo credit: Zubaidah Ya'cob.

You don't look very black to me, little black fly.
Photo credit: Zubaidah Ya'cob.

As we sipped chamomile tea in the air-conditioned conference room, Dr. Takaoka offered a puzzle."The patients affected by River Blindness in Africa and South America show symptoms in their lower body. The patients in Central America show symptoms on their upper body and head."

"Is that because it's a different species of Onchocerca worm?" I guessed.

"No, same worm. But different effect, because different vector," Dr. Takaoka explained. "Each species of black fly has its own preference where to bite."

"And related to human ecology, too!" Dr. Ya'cob chimed in. "If we cover the head, they go for the feet. Everything related -- One Health!"

  

A black fly emerges from its pupa.
Photo credit: Zubaidah Ya'cob.

  

Pupa and newly emerged fly.
Photo credit: Zubaidah Ya'cob.

Next, Dr. Ya'cob hopes to look for a wider variety of hosts and vectors. The possibilities become dizzying, but she wouldn't have it any other way.

"Wild boar and black flies are obvious suspects, but the worm could also be carried in rodents or birds," Dr. Ya'cob explained. "It could be vectored by a different Dipterid, like sand flies or mosquitoes. And there could even be different types of Filarioid roundworms here! Diversity-lah!"

I couldn't help but laugh. In Malaysian English, "lah" is added to any word to give it emphasis or personality. It's my favorite Malaysian saying, and it can be used to mean almost anything. For example, "What lah you?!" expresses utter disbelief, while "sorry-lah" is a typical apology. Another gem is self-explanatory: "Why you so like that lah?" I can think of no better way to sum up One Health in Malaysia than that: Diversity-lah!

Thank you to Dr. Ya'cob and Dr. Takaoka for the wonderful welcome!

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Birdwatching on Lombok: Tracing Wallace's Path

If you've taken a biology class, you've probably learned about (and forgotten) a man named Alfred Russel Wallace. But even if you've never taken a science class in your life, you've heard of (and remembered) a man named Charles Darwin. Seriously, just look up at my blog banner. I've spent the past six years "tracing Darwin's path" and writing about it on this blog, titled Natural Selections in his honor. Well, I think it's time I traced Wallace's path for a moment instead.

Here I am holding an original 1859 first-edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in the basement archives of the Whitman College library.

Wallace was born in Wales, the seventh of nine children, when Darwin was a teenager. Unlike Darwin, he grew up poor, and he had to drop out of school at the age of 14 to work, but he didn't give up on education. He became an avid beetle collector and kept up on the latest scientific happenings by reading the original literature as it was published (goals!) One of the unsolved mysteries in natural philosophy (as science was called back in the day) was the origin of species. Where do new life forms come from? Wallace became obsessed with this question. An intentional, focused guy, he found a career that would let him explore nature and puzzle over this question full-time. At the age of 25, Wallace boarded a ship for Brazil to begin his professional life as a collector of valuable specimens: big butterflies, colorful birds, pressed plants. He then shipped these preserved organisms back to England where they were sold to wealthy private collectors.

Here I am holding my overpriced, paperback copy of Wallace's The Malay Archipelago, bought in a bougie Kuta bookstore and read in the jungles of Bali and Lombok, where I like to imagine Wallace hiked before I did.

Brazil didn't treat Wallace well. During his four years there, his brother (who had come to join him) died of Yellow Fever, and his crates full of specimens burned up in a ship fire that nearly drowned Wallace himself. Incredibly, Wallace tried again. His next destination was Southeast Asia, and here he found his greatest successes. During a malarial fever, he penned an article about the origin of species, which turned out to be the very same Theory of Natural Selection that Darwin was working on. The two men were co-authors on the first published paper, but Darwin gets most of the credit in hindsight because of his powerful book, On the Origin of Species.

Today, Wallace is most famous as "the father of island biogeography," a field that concerns itself with understanding the distributions of organisms across islands (and the ever-increasing fragments of habitat that exist on mainlands.) While collecting in Indonesia, Wallace noticed a peculiar thing. The islands closer to mainland Asia were home to one set of fauna, while the islands closer to Australia were home to another. Curiously, the transition was not gradual. As he pinned butterflies and skinned birds, Wallace made a startling discovery: the change occured on an invisible line between the small, nextdoor islands of Bali and Lombok.

Wallace's original map showing his revolutionary line, not yet named in his honor.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

This invisible divider has been named Wallace's Line. It can be traced diagonally through the islands of Indonesia and Malaysia, separating them into biogeographical zones labeled "Indo-Malayan Region" and "Austro-Malayan Region." I couldn't pass up a chance to cross the line myself. What could be more human than to flaunt the limitations of the natural world by travelling from the land of primates into that of marsupials? The biogeographer Jared Diamond wrote, "Our ancestors may have crossed from apehood to humanity as they crossed Wallace's Line." Surrounded by divers headed for Gili Trawangan, honeymooners aiming for Gili Air, and surfers bound for Lombok, I boarded the ferry with an imaginary line as my destination.

Wallace's line is just an imperfect approximation of the real world. But I liked to think I crossed it right... here!

Once on Lombok, I couldn't just turn around and come home. I wanted to see this differet faunal assemblage for myself. So I hired local birdwatching guide, Saleh Amin, known to everyone as Ale, for one long day. Join us!

Collared kingfisher.

Another collared kingfisher. Isn't it funny how kingfishers always seem to be named for a circular accessory? In North America we have the belted kingfisher; in South America we add the ringed kingfisher; and now on Lombok I've seen the collared kingfisher. What's next, the braceleted kingfisher?

Ale picked me up at 5:30 am at my sketchy Sengiggi hostel, the confusingly-named Borneo Homestay, where I had been sleeping on a thin mat on the roof for $5 a night. (At least I wasn't in one of the beds downstairs, which turned out to be infested with bed bugs.) Since I was alone, I rode on the back of his motorcycle for a slightly-discounted $145 tour. We headed straight for the other side of the island. After two hours of wind in my eyes and knee pain from clinging to the back of his scooter, I wished I'd sprung for the $185 car version. Oh well.

White-shouldered triller female.

On the way, I opened a greasy cardboard box and ate my breakfast, which I'd asked the hostel guard to buy for me the night before. It was Milk and Cheese Mooncake, a spongy, sweet, pungent pastry with a smooth, brown surface and a honeycombed, yellow interior. I felt a cold coming on, morphing from yesterday's sore throat to today's asthma. Part of me wished I had stayed in bed, or should I say, on my sleeping mat.

Blue-tailed bee eater. Strikingly similar to the olive bee eater from Madagascar.

Our first stop (finally) was Gunung Tunak, a provincial park on the southeast coast of Lombok. We arrived around 7:30 am. There, we were greeted by Dennis Wahyudi (known as Wahyu), his wife, and his kindergarten-aged son. This three-person family shared a motorbike and followed us down the potholed dirt road for our tour. Wahyu and Ale were both skilled photographers, lugging enormous telephoto lenses and tripods all day. When we reached the sea, we scrambled up a grassy hillside to a raised wooden platform under a roof -- the Indonesian picnic table.

The picnic platform where we cooked gourmet ramen for a morning snack.

A grassy hillside and tidal lagoon in view from our picnic platform.

Snacks abounded. We started off with sickly sweet pancakes, sugary black tea, and mie, a less-soupy and more-flavorful version of Top Ramen cooked over a camp stove.

Zebra finches. These birds make popular and prolific pets. The preschool where I worked in eighth grade had a cage of zebra finches. The females laid fertile eggs every day, and the teacher was constantly trying to find homes for the glut of babies.

Pacific swallow. Looks similar to our barn swallows back home, but without the blue chest bar and long forked tail.

Ale is a 32-year-old birder and naturalist with an undergraduate degree in biology. He's taken the last nine years to figure out his next step. Now, he thinks he's found it: a Master's of Protected Area Governance and Management offered in Queensland or Tasmania, which will enable him to help Lombok run its parks better. Ale hopes to become a government minister so he'll have power to protect Lombok's ecosystems.

Ale and I pose on the sea cliffs of Gunung Tunak Provincial Park.

"All the research and knowledge in the world doesn't help," Ale told me, "if the government doesn't make good policies to support conservation." I was inspired to see such a knowledgeable naturalist motivated by management. No matter how much Ale loves basic ecology or bird photography, he will not let these passions distract him from finding applied solutions to the urgent needs of conservation.

Olive-backed sunbird.

Lemon-bellied white-eye.

I saw with my own eyes why Lombok's parks need Ale. At the entrance to Gunung Tunak lies a brand new butterfly garden, a grassy parkland studded with a few trees and divided by a pleasantly curvy concrete path. Two rows of windmills glitter in the sun, and a red-and-blue sign proudly claims, "Cooperation of the Korean Government." Lacking are the butterflies. The project lost momentum before the pollinator-attracting shrubs and flowers were planted.

The new butterfly garden, with windmills and grass in place of old-growth forest.

"That's where I found the elegant pitta nest," Ale told me, pointing to a bit of grass. "Right there." Two years ago, this so-called garden was dense, healthy, old-growth forest.  "I told them not to cut it," Ale continues. I don't hear an edge in his polite tone, but underneath his words lie a smoldering frustration and desperate hope to save what remains of Lombok's forests. "That's why I need to get my Master's and manage these parks." For the ecosystems, there's no one I'd rather see in charge than Ale.

Lombok spangled drongo. While technically categorized as a subspecies of Wallacean drongo (Dicrurus densus vicinus), found throughout Indonesia, this bird also shows some characteristics of the spangled drongo (D. bracteatus), native to Australia. That's why birders like Ale have given it its own common name, the Lombok spangled drongo, and hope to describe the species with a Latin name soon.

Pale-headed munia. I love the munias, a group of thick-billed seedeaters. The pale-headed munia is the most common, and one of the most beautiful in my opinion. I love its silver hood.

Scaly-breasted munia. This bird's intricate "scales" arise because each rounded feather is outlined in black.

Black-faced munia. We originally identified this bird as the more-common Javan munia. Over lunch, we looked through our photos and, noticing the penciled belly, realized we had seen a flock of three black-faced munias instead!

Five-colored munia. The highlight of our day. I was trying to identify these munias -- red head, pure white breast -- but they didn't fit any of the categories. Ale got a look and let out a whoop. They were five-colored munias, a bird so close to extinction on Lombok that Ale hadn't seen one since 2016. And here we were, watching a flock of five of them chatter and peck seeds at the seaside!

The sea cliffs were so high, we couldn't hear the splash when we threw stones over the edge.

Pure turquoise water. We watched white-tailed tropicbirds fly across the cliff faces, but they were too far away for my camera to capture.

Wahyu had a smartphone by Xiaomi, "the Apple of China." The phone has a neat trick of blurring the background to imitate the focus of an old-fashioned camera.

  

I asked if the grassy hillsides were like that naturally, or if the native vegetation had been removed. Ale said the grass was native, but then I encountered these cow pies, and I'm sure bovine grazing has an effect. One thing that never changes, no matter where I go in the world: there are always cows.

Arctic warbler.

Yellow-vented bulbul. The most common bird on Bali. In the mornings, I watch these street-smart birds dine from the Hindu offerings outside my bedroom window.

Since 2012, Ale has been writing a Bahasa Indonesia guide to the birds of Lombok and Sumbawa (the neighboring island to the east). The book, illustrated with his own photographs, contains 80% of the 297 bird species recorded on these two islands. Ale tried to get the Department of Natural Resources to sponsor its publication, but he had to decline their offer, which would have left him with almost none of the profits from his six-year-long labor of love. I think the Department lost a big opportunity to attract naturalists to their island, but I know Ale will find another way to publish.

Red-chested flowerpecker. The female doesn't have the red chest...

... but she does have a nice red rump!

Long-tailed shrike. An evil bird, just like the loggerhead shrike I photographed in Florida.

When I told Ale that I was on Lombok to trace the footsteps of Alfred Russel Wallace, he gave me a funny look. "You know Wallace, don't you?" I asked.

Ale smiled. "Alfred Russel, of course. I am actually narrating a documentary about his servant, Ali, who worked with him for seven years." Sure enough, when I got back to my rooftop hostel, I found Ali mentioned in my copy of The Malay Archipelago. Ali was a fifteen-year-old boy when he joined Wallace's team, and he proved instrumental to the voyage.

Wallace wrote, "When I was at Sarawak in 1855 I engaged a Malay boy named Ali as a personal servant, and also to help me to learn the Malay language by the necessity of constant communication with him. He was attentive and clean, and could cook very well. He soon learnt to shoot birds, to skin them properly, and latterly even to put up the skins very neatly. Of course he was a good boatman, as are all Malays, and in all the difficulties or dangers of our journeys he was quite undisturbed and ready to do anything required of him."

When Wallace returned to England in 1862, Ali took his name out of respect, to become Ali Wallace. Here I was thinking Wallace was overshadowed in the history books, when really I should've been giving due credit to Ali!

Pied bushchat female.

Lesser frigatebird.

Pied fantail. Ale and Wahyu called this bird to a particular bamboo clearing, where it posed and sang and fanned its tail for us.

Later, after Ale and I left for lunch, Wahyu tracked down its nest and got some glorious shots. For my part, I'm content with this one, showing a territorial bird searching in vain for a rival to fight.

After Gunung Tunak, we crossed back over Lombok to the west side. On the way, we saw two little-brown-jobs called cisticolas. We also paid for parking at Lombok International Airport so we could explore the lake and weed-fields on its outskirts. We dipped on the cerulean kingfisher, a tiny bird of shimmering turquoise plumage, but we did find a few airport birds.

Zitting cisticola. This wide-ranging species is found from Africa to Europe to Asia.

Golden-headed cisticola. Of the 50 cisticola species, only two are not found on Africa. This one, the golden-headed, is found from India to Australia. And the other, the Madagascan cisticola -- well, you can guess where that one is found! No, I did not see one.

A lesser coucal after a rainstorm at the airport. This bird looked identical to the Malagasy coucal, which I saw both in the wild and tied up before being slaughtered for dinner. Ale told me that coucals are notorious for hiding inside bushes, even when they sing. (Most birds perch up high to put on concerts.) The only thing that reliably draws coucals out of the shrubbery is rain: once they get wet, the ruffled birds need to dry out their wet feathers. Thinking back to Madagascar, that explains why all my photos of coucals show disheveled, damp birds after storms!

Common myna. This species, native to continental Asia, is considered by the IUCN to be one of the world's most invasive species. I've never been to mainland Asia, but I have been surrounded by mynas in South Florida, South Africa, Madagascar and Lombok.

Eurasian tree sparrow. Another invasive making its home in the airport. At first I though this bird was the ubiquitous house sparrow, but look at that black cheek-spot, and you'll see that it's a close relative, the Eurasian tree sparrow. Without house sparrows as competition, these tree sparrows take on the aggressive, urban role on Bali and Lombok.

For the second half of our journey, we arrived at Kerandangan Nature Reserve just outside Sengiggi. I'd been here yesterday for a lovely forest hike to two waterfalls. I'd seen kera hitam (the Javan lutung, Trachipithecus auratus, a black monkey of the colobus family) and kera bali ekor panjang (the crab-eating macaque, Macaca fascicularis, the same kind I saw in the Ubud Sacred Monkey Forest.) I'd photographed giant millipedes and explored the smooth rock-chutes polished by flowing water. Today, none of that was on the agenda. We had two missions.

A derelict sign at the otherwise well-maintained Kerandangan Nature Reserve, advertising "wild watching."

Our first mission was the sought-after paok laus (elegant pitta, Pitta elegans). Ale found this bird a week ago by watching an adult pitta carry more worms than it could eat deep into the forest. He then spent days searching for the nest. Usually pittas nest in a meter off the ground in bushes, but this one was tricky. Ale finally found the nest wedged high above his head in the crook of a dead tree. Photographers come to Lombok from all over the world to capture an image of the elegant pitta, not only because of its beautiful green and red colors, but also because there is a fierce competition among Southeast Asian photographers to get a picture of each of the world's 43 pitta species. The current record by one photographer is 37.

I watched while Wahyu and Ale set up a tall, narrow tent made of camouflage-print fabric. The back was wide open, and the front contained one horizontal slit. It was a single-occupancy bird blind. Ale invited me to sit on his folding stool and hold a walkie-talkie. He'd be waiting out of sight. I sat in there for over an hour, mosquitoes pricking my neck, sweat trickling off my nose, sleep creeping in, eyes pressed up to the slit.

My view from the bird blind.

Ale and Wahyu piped in occasionally over the radio. "Do you see any pitta?" came the crackly whisper.

"Not yet," I replied. As if I would've watched the thing without telling them!

"We wait!" they encouraged me. I was impressed by their patience. Personally, I was ready to accept that pittas live wonderful, happy, undocumented lives and get out of there, but I couldn't disappoint my devoted guides.

My miserable hour in the bird blind.

Suddenly, there was a flicker at the snag. A flash of feathers, a green rump, yes! It was the elegant pitta!

The elusive elegant pitta spent half a minute at his next, delivering a mouthful of insects to his chicks.

The thrill of that moment more than compensated for the sweaty, buggy hour in the blind. I was glad that Ale and Wahyu had encouraged me not to give up.

I also shot this short video. It shows the elegant pitta feeding its chicks (from behind). At the end, when the pitta flies away, you can get a look at the nest itself.

Usually, my policy is to observe and enjoy an organism before trying to get a photo. I know I miss a lot of pictures this way, but I would rather have an experience than a trophy. Isn't that what Google Images are for, after all? In this case, however, out of respect for the Singaporean competitors who fly all the way to Lombok for this one shot, I prioritized the photo. And it felt wrong. I spent only a few seconds actually seeing this bird, this father feeding his adolescent offspring in Wallace's jungle. The rest of the time, I saw him on the viewfinder screen of my camera. I felt like I was watching an episode of Planet Earth, and I can do that from home.

I was reminded that I am not a photographer at heart, but a naturalist. Then again, I'm glad for the photo. Otherwise, this blog entry would be a lot less fun to share with you all. :)

Ale and I wait for night to fall.

Now, with the pitta photo securely on my memory card, we had only one target left: Lombok's only endemic vertebrate, the Rinjani scops owl. While we waited for night to fall, Wahyu pulled out the camp stove again, and we enjoyed black tea, spicy red crackers, and bananas. Then, just as dusk set in, the owls arrived. Two shadowy figures glided overhead in the canopy. Ready with his spotlight, Ale called me over to get the perfect shot.

Rinjani scops owl.

"Did you get it?" he asked eagerly. "Did you get both eyes?" I was content just to watch the owls soar into their night, but I kept taking photos until I got a few of reasonable quality. As an opportunistic photographer, I get the occasional gem of a photo, but today I realized how much effort and patience a true photographer must have to never give up on a potential shot.

I'll throw in another, since I took so many photos!

I was amazed to learn that the Bahasa Indonesia word for owl is burung hantu, meaning ghost bird, because the same is true in Madagascar. The Malagasy word for barn owl is vorondolo, also meaning ghost bird. The original Malagasy people were seafarers from Indonesia, and many cultural traits have been carried over: terraced rice paddies, ancestor worship, outrigger canoes, and much of the language. I wonder if this similarity is due to convergent linguistic evolution, or founder effect?

By the end of the night, I was too exhausted to join Ale for dinner. And if you know me, that is saying something! I took a quick shower before hitting my rooftop hut's floor mat. I wonder if this is how Wallace felt after a long day of collecting? A blanket over wooden slats never felt so cozy.

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