Dan,

Nice video and you are definitely privileged to be able to see these animals in their natural environment. I’ve maintained a lot of species in captivity, but nothing ever beats seeing them in the wild. I watched an excellent nature show back in the late 1980’s that was filmed in central Borneo. It wasn’t your typically showoff production, but was well done by some people who really cared about and were really interested in this ecosystem. It was more of a documentary of their expedition and study. A couple of scenes that I will never forget were videos of them coming up on retics resting on the jungle floor. On two separate occasions, when they startled these resting retics, they both immediately shot up the nearest larger tree with unbelievable speed. They were both in the 12 to 14 foot range I would say, but showed incredible agility moving up the trunks of these trees in a matter of seconds. To accomplish this, they would pull their bodies up the tree trunk by alternately coiling around, pulling, and releasing the front part and then rear part of their bodies up the trunk. It was amazing how rapidly they could progress upward by this method. These were larger trees, and I could see why retics in smaller understory trees like you encountered, would be more likely to want to leave it. It would be interesting to see if they would have moved upward if the trees had been considerably larger and offered more in the way of height and structural protection. Thanks for sharing.



Kelly

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