Hornbills on the Kinabatangan
After Trus Madi, Nikki and I headed to Mount Kinabalu, our usual favorite birding spot in Sabah, but only for one morning before continuing onwards to eastern Sabah (we're saving the Kinabalu outing for the next post, as we returned there later on). Our destination there was the Kinabatangan River, another one of the best-known birding sites in Sabah and the best place to see some of Borneo's best-known and most charismatic birds. I'd been ogling pictures from there for years, so it was exciting to get the chance to finally visit a new site and see some new birds. It was a 5-hour drive from Mount Kinabalu to the town of Sukau, on the edge of the Kinabatangan River. The drive started in the beautiful forested mountains of Kinabalu, but quickly got more depressing: first with the deforested slopes of Borneo's central mountains, cleared of their tree cover to plant vegetables and other crops, and once we got to the lowlands, an endless green desert of palm oil plantation