It's always a dilemma whether one should stride on to cover promising new ground or stick around a lush spot and hope that in time, discrete shapes and shadows will emerge from the undergrowth. Far too often, life lurks in plain view. And yet the eye scans in vain, seeing nothing to distinguish beast from a background of bark and branch.
It took a twitch and shudder while my lens were aimed at another, tinier, thing, to reveal that one patch of lichen on a tree at Hutan Lipur Lentang bore widely spaced eyes, blue-and-white limbs and a cloak of veins in a series of shades that rendered it nigh indistinguishable from the living fissures of the trunk. The pretender was a large planthopper, probably an eurybrachyid or flatid, with a body that barely broke the lay of its vertical home. Finding itself still intact despite having given the game way, the bug crept about in a middling attempt to secure a safer perch and vanish from sight before other, hungrier, eyes spy a treat with but a single trick.
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