An encounter with a forest spirit

This month, we saw slender loris - like a foot away from us.

This elusive primate lives in the trees around us, at the Bamboo Pit Viper Research Foundation / Bamboo Rustles.

We had been seeing their eye shine almost every night preceding our iconic sighting. Each night we had spotted them closer and closer to camp.

Seeing a full slender loris is not something people actually get to do. These nocturnal primates are very shy and live in the canopies.
They are solitary foragers, unlike their other primate cousins, who live in more social troops. Which explains why we've rarely spotted more than one individual on a single tree.

But they sleep together (in the day time), groom, court and mate with each other of course, and give birth to twins. What’s better than one baby slender loris? Two baby slender lorises.

The slender loris is also slow, especially compared to other primates. They don't get up to typical monkey business. Instead, they tightly grip thin branches, and "creep-crawl" forward, like the guy in our video.

Their low metabolic rate and specialised gut bacteria allows them to feed on even poisonous, blister-causinng insects. Their usual diet comprises insects, bird eggs, nestlings, frogs, lizards, fruits, leaves and seeds.

Most sightings of the slender loris are through their "eye shine". To spot them, you must shine your torch on the canopies of trees and, if you're lucky, two big, bright, red spots shine back. That's how you know there's a slender loris on the trees.

That's how we found this guy, on a Vitex altissima (peacock foot tree), not even 100m from camp. The shine was clear and the tree was nearby.

So we ran, with slow, silent, steady footsteps, as must be done in the wild. The five of us - four interns and one naturalist - were about to have a sighting of a lifetime.

What pleased us is how unstressed the little guy is by our presence.

The rest of the night was tame. Jerdon's nightjar calls filled the air; a red-wattled lapwing screeched in the distance. Some of us examined the amphibian cacophony that was playing around us; others sat on granite slabs in an open field and contemplated how lucky we were to see what we just saw.

It was like seeing a Kodama (the forest spirits from Japanese folklore) in Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke.

The night was still. The forest was alive. Our hearts were full. We slept content that night.

What pleased us is how unstressed the little guy is by our presence.

Photo by Vibish