Biawak

In evenings, we often walk around the camp, mostly within Oleander complex. Two rounds to Oleander would take 40 minutes and bring sweat out of us. We generally finish this walk before 6:30pm, before sunset. Especially Vrush avoided such walk since one evening we heard some strange sound of animal from jungle, while we were walking on the other end of oleander where most of the houses are unoccupied. We suspected this sound must be of tiger or some big bear. Next day, when I told about this sound in office, my Indonesian friends voted for tiger & also told me not be worried, since there is lot of wild pigs available for tigers to feast, so they may not try to eat humans!

Though we never seen any other animals in camp except monkeys, wild bores, snakes and huge lizards, we are sure there are other wild animals live just few meters away from us, outside the fence. When I was here in 2004, someone spotted a tiger inside the camp. In 2006, an 8 meter long python was found sleeping in a garage of one of the house in Jati complex. In Duri, there are instances of herds of Elephants visited the camp at night. Despite the massive deforestation for palm plantation, there is still large area of dense rainforest, housing these animals.





I heard a lot about the Komodo dragons, which are big monster lizards, live in Komodo Islands of Indonesia. The smaller version of these is seen in Sumatra & sometimes even inside camp. These are called “biawaks”. One evening, when we were walking around Oleander, we saw such a biawak. Its head was inside a big hole, it was trying to dig it deeper. Generally these biawaks are very shy & run away on seeing humans. This time it could not see us till we go very close. I went home to bring camera, took some pictures without disturbing it.

I think it may be laying eggs on that hole previous night. Next evening when we went there, the hole was leveled with fresh soil.