Sergio, Joe, and I went up the Kinabatangan to bait for monitor lizards. The bait is decomposing chicken guts, by the way. Once captured, Sergio records their data, and sets them free again–all of which is done in the field. After setting up the last bait, we wentdeeper into the forest, hoping to seesome gibbons that we could hear, but to no avail.

Back out with Sergio and Joe (and joined by Koko) later in the day to check on the bait. Three out of five had monitor lizards, which we captured and followed the data recording procedure. To make the data more efficient, each of the captured monitors are implanted with an ID chip, which two of the three didn’t have, so we added those as well. The largest of the three monitors was 12 kilograms, vomited up four or five large python eggs and a baby python; the mother must be huge.