Cerita Umi Bakrie

It was one of the worst imaginable nights I ever felt in the field. I was in Cibeureum, Mount Gede National Park for 2 days. My team has already camped there for 3 days when I arrived in the first day of January 2007 with Lutfi, Nuryani and Dian. Wempy's team (Inggar, Lubis, Boby) has surveyed Surya Kencana (around 2300m asl) for 4 days before returning below to Cibeureum and Telaga Warna (around (1300 m asl) and joined Fitri's team around Christmas. The first night, I joined Fitri's team and do some search on terrestrial transect near the walking bridge. We found three Leptophryne cruentata below the bridge. I was so happy. That night after the survey, wind began to howl. When we woke up in the morning, all our gear that was left outside was scattered all over the place. The day passed quickly, we even managed to find a secluded area where we found lots of L.cruentata ! Then night came, along with its fierce wind. All trees were swaying dangerously, and we knew for s...

It was nearly midday when suddenly Fery brought me three bleeding toad ( Leptophryne cruentata ) in separate bags. "Where did get them?" asked me curiously. It was rare to find them, least at all during the day. Later I learnt that after finding some tadpoles in the nearby waterfalls three of my students Fery, Yazid and Lubis decide to search further. Bingo, in one of the waterfall they found lots of toad well hiding in moss covered rock crevices. So, we (I, Inggar, Wempy, Neneng and Fitri) decided to come along, guided by Lubis . Jeez, it was really cold! The water temperature is around 14 degress Celcius and with all the water spray from the falls it is impossible to stay dry. But, it was WORTH it! Congratulations girls and boys! We found their home base!

It's breeding time! Of course, I did not refer to the famous ulama in Bandung, Aa Gym who choose polygamy (much to the dismay of lots of Indonesian moslem communities), which as my friend dr. Mangatas pointed out is a wrong term. It should be bigamy, or maybe if Aa Gym decides to have more than 2 wives he can then use the word Polygamy afterward...... Anyway, here is breeding season in the world of frogs. Although it is known that most of tropical frogs breed all the time, but we have seen that for some species breeding occurs only during rainy season. This year we have a very long dry spell, even for West Java especially Bogor where we don't usually have dry season (what we have is a heavy rainy season and a light rainy season). So it's been a while since we found a pair of breeding Rhacophorus reindwartdii . Even though rainy season began early November, we did not hear any male calls in our Faculty of Forestry's arboretum. We have a population of about 20 individ...

Have you ever felt that "something wrong is going to happen, soon ..." Well, it was certainly one of the things that tingling in my head yesterday. It was actually one of those days. I was busy right from the beginning of the day, teaching in the morning and in the afternoon (and blast .. the electricity down .. so I have to cut 1/2 hour of student's presentation ... so typical of PLN), sandwiches between them a department's meeting and a line of students waiting to discuss their projects ... so... in the end you just want to go home on schedule, relax with a cup of hot tea, chats with the children and have a good night sleep. Dark lining already dotted the clouds, so I know for sure that fiery rain will soon come. Fortunately, the university's bus is not really full so I can get a decent seat in front near the driver. Soon, however, thunders crashed and wind howled so fiery ... I was really reluctant to get off from the bus. Still, I get off in front of Jl. Paj...