A number of phytotelmata were evident by Durian Loop during a slow walk through this trail last week. The vegetation by the path had become rather unruly since our last visit, a map showing the area's hiking routes had vanished, and the circuit seethed with an air of rusty unfamiliarity, which a troupe of long-tailed macaques echoed with regular alarm calls and noisy leaps through the canopy. Recent bouts of rain have stirred the mycellial networks that penetrate the nether regions of these woods, and one result is a smattering of brown caps, bleached parasols and gilled terraces, to which fungus beetles, jungle cockroaches and tiny flies of indeterminate affinity flock and feast.
Some of the logs and woodpiles on which these fruiting bodies sprout also serve as basins for rainwater, temporary refuges for frogs, crabs and insects with young that can survive elevated confines and grow up before next dry spell. Brief stakeouts for one possible visitor to such tree holes were futile, however. Something fluttered low near one stump, but the creature that settled was no coenagrionid; it was too bulky, with a box of a thorax, a thickish abdomen, stout legs that were far longer than the stumps of pond damsels, and clear paddle-like wings with a prominent stalk. The locality, despite its dimness, seemed atypical, though, for Devadatta argyoides, which usually favours miniature cascades on shaded brooks in undisturbed forests. A seemingly suitable stream flowed in a gully off the path, but its terraces were some distance away from the slope where this male grisette had chosen to hunt. This individual had probably wandered far from its exuvium to feed in the understorey, but now appeared ready to claim a patch of riffle range and emit signals of interest to passing dames.
When we emerged from the loop, the macaques that haunted the trail had abandoned caution and flung themselves at fruiting trees in the compounds of Kampong Chantek, crossing the paved road, scaling a grassy ridge and sidestepping a course of low walls and barbed wire. At least twenty monkeys, including mothers with infants and several squeakers of impressionable age, joined the raid, braving no worse a threat than irate domestics and lazy dogs before hightailing it back to the forest edge, where they nibbled on loot and exchanged naughty stories of life unboughed. This troupe, to their favour, have yet to learn the folly of trust in humanity and regard fellow primates with chattering suspicion. Other families, further down the hill and unfortunate enough to dwell by homes at war with their environment, must pay the price of natural instincts and suffer the wrath of people whose minds are trapped in a cycle of destruction with little desire for solutions that serve man and macaque in a city of gardens with little room for wild and rampant things.
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