Phillipps'
Guide to the Mammals of Borneo and their Ecology
By Quentin Phillipps and Karen Phillipps. 372 pages. John Beaufoy Publishing Ltd: UK.
Published in March 2016
This is an extraordinary book and is a paradigm shift from
what a field guide should be. It is also likely to generate some debate on the
layout. The genre police are also likely to get quite upset with this book
which seems to be a handbook, field guide, a rainforest ecology book and a
bedside read with various interesting titbits thrown in of ‘…did you know
that….’
We all know what a field guide should be. There are text
accounts of species and plates with photographs of the species or illustrations
usually on a white background. In the bad old days when colour printing was
expensive, the colour plates were in a block of pages which required some
furious thumbing to and fro to read the text and check the colour plates to
figure out how you told apart the ‘Greater Forest-thing’ from the ‘Lesser
Forest-thing’ for some guidance (field
characters in technical parlance), or how else to figure out ‘Long-tailed
Forest-skulk’ from the ’Short-tailed Forest-skulk’ because when you
photographed it, it was unfortunately not sufficiently obliging as to bring its
tail into view. By and large, field guides to mammals were fished out of the
book bag on a ‘need to’ basis and did not result in anti-social behaviour. This
field guide runs the risk that some tour participants may find themselves dipping
into the field guide for its various insights into ecology or behaviour or
historical titbits (e.g. how some animal or plant was collected by a zoological
explorer in the 19th century) etc. to the detriment of social
interaction with other tour participants.
Would it work as a field guide? I am confident that this
book would have served me well on my previous trips to Borneo. The plates are
good with many species having geographical races and colour morphs illustrated
and the text on identification is clear. But what is more interesting is that
users of this book will come away with a dimension that is typically missing in
other field guides; which is the wider and possibly more interesting issues on
ecology, behaviour and conservation. Many field guides attempt to address this
in the front and end sections. As an author myself of photographic field guides,
I have introduced text boxes to provide additional detail. What makes this book
so intriguing is the degree to which it has introduced additional information.
This comes at a cost. It looks busy. I tested the book on others and the
initial reaction was the same with people who are used to field guides. It
feels too cluttered was the initial complaint. But once the culture shock has
worn off, it is not long before you wish all field guides were as informative
as this. What is more, unlike a conventional field guide, this is one you will
feel like leaving around to dip into. It is a field guide with a lot of extras.
The amount of detail in the book is extraordinary and the
author has taken a further leap with departing from the tradition of popular
field guides by providing references in the text. This is at odds with the
young audience layout style which is used to cram the rainforest ecology into
the field guide. All in all, a bold adventure by the author, artist and
publisher. The experiment works because the type of person who buys a field
guide to the mammals of Borneo is likely to be a well-read and interested adult
who will have the appetite for reading this extra content.
I was not initially comfortable with the light yellow
shading on the text boxes, and the sheer density of information. But after a
few sessions with the book, any discomfort with the packed layout fades away
and you begin instead to take in the wealth of material. Normally, on wildlife
tours, a heavy field guide may be kept in the book bag in the vehicle and some long
form books on the natural history of a country will be in the luggage left
behind in the hotel room. This book combines multiple books which makes it a tad
heavy. As someone who carries a lot of photographic gear into the field and a
bird field guide, I anticipate that birders who are similarly laden with gear will
leave this one in the vehicle so that it is close at hand for consultation and
carry with them the field guide to the birds of Borneo if they have to ration
the books in their day pack. (The same author and artist duo have also
published a field guide to the birds of Borneo in which they began their
experiment with introducing a lot of text boxes). But if mammals are your
thing, I can’t imagine someone not wanting to have this in the field with them.
In addition to the illustrations by Karen Phillipps, a
number of photographs are also used, many of which are from camera traps which
illustrate something about the nocturnal behaviour or elusiveness of many of
these mammals. The text by Quentin Phillipps is first-rate and shows not only
the personal insight of someone who has been in the field but the voracious
appetite he has for consuming a vast
amount of scientific material and his passion for sharing it with a popular
audience.
The book covers the 247 land mammals (an incredible 63 are
endemic) and 30 marine mammals. But in several places there are references to
scientific papers which hint that the actual number of mammal species may be
much higher due to what are known as cryptic species; animals that look the
same as another but are shown to be different from studying their genetic make-up.
At the end is a very useful guide to 25 of Borneo’s top wildlife watching sites
and throughout, the book is richly illustrated with 150 distribution maps. For
a book on mammals, there is a huge wealth of material on plants which provides
the ecological context for many of the mammals. The front has a visual index to
the mammalian orders and the endpapers have a map of Borneo.
Many double-page layouts cover just 2-3 species, indicating
a generous allocation of pages. But so many illustrations and fact boxes are
included, there is not much white space which may give the contrary impression
that the allocation of space per species has not been generous. A number of
species have an entire page or even a double page allowing this to be more of a
full-fledged handbook in content although in field guide shape and weight for
portability. The page allocation allows many subspecies of mammals to be
illustrated and their ranges to be shown in maps with text boxes discussing
taxonomic issues and recent research on efforts to establish how many species
are present. The confusion around Prevsot’s Squirrel with its many forms is one
of many such examples which has warranted a useful double page just for this
animal. Having a gifted illustrator has also helped whether it is to show a
party of Sculptor Squirrels feeding together or the gliding action of the
Colugo. A cute mother and baby of the Red Langur illustrates how some babies
grow into the adult colour and some do not. Accompanying this is a discussion
of asymmetric mimicry. Red Langurs seem to mimic the Orang Utan. With classical
mimicry, the model is more abundant. In this example, the mimic is ten times
more abundant. Why? I won’t spoil it by explaining it here. You turn over the
page and there is the cute Western Tarsier with illustrations of pitcher plants
which bring together botany and historical accounts of naturalist explorers;
something which the author is very adept at doing.
The double page on the False Vampire Bat and the
Hollow-faced Bat is another radical departure from the classic field guide
format. Here we have a molecular phylogenetic diagram that shows these two very
similar animals actually belong to different evolutionary branches that
diverged 50 million years ago. The illustrations by Karen Phillipps and a full-page
photo show the remarkable convergent evolution of how two animals that separated
50 million years ago still came out looking so similar. But there is also the
even more extraordinary fact that both evolutionary branches evolved the use of
sonar independently. It is a bold step by the publisher and author to depart
from the classical field guide but the results are wonderful in a book which
drives home so many important messages varying from evolution and biogeography to
the difficult choices faced in practical conservation. This book also reminds
us that the role of the illustrator will continue to remain important in the
age of digital photography. It would be so difficult to obtain quality images
of a Mountain Treeshrew perched atop a pitcher plant or a cut-out showing a Woolly
Bat roosting inside a pitcher plant. You
will need to read the book to understand more of the relationship between these
different mammals and the enigmatic pitcher plants or to read about the
discovery that a particular pitcher plant species has evolved a special
acoustic reflector to enable Woolly Bats to echo-locate them in dense
vegetation.
With most field guides, the objective is to help you put a
name to a species you have seen. To understand context, you may need the
equivalent of a book like John Kricher’s ‘A Neotropical Companion’ (Princeton University
Press) or ‘Kenya A natural History by Stephen Spawls and Glenn Mathews
(Bloomsbury). Quentin and Karen Phillipps have put together a fascinating field
guide which provides the identification information plus useful context for the
role of an animal in an eco system or historical or other relevance with topics
varying from archaeological evidence to the Economics of Externalities.
Alfred Russell Wallace who independently arrived at the
theory of evolution by natural selection spent time collecting in Sarawak (a
part of Malaysian Borneo) thereby adding an important historical aspect on how
Borneo has influenced thinking on evolution. Borneo is the third largest island
in the world and together with Madagascar is especially of interest to
botanists and zoologists for the large number of species and the high rates of
endemism arising from species evolving in isolation from the mainland. I have long
been fascinated by Borneo and its natural history ever since I first visited the
island as a backpacking birder in search of the special birds and other
wildlife on Mount Kinabalu, the tallest mountain in South-East Asia. I was back
again a few years ago with my family in Mount Kinabalu listening to the
evocative calls of Mountain Barbets echoing across forested valleys and holding
my breath as a Yellow-throated Marten bounded past me. Even if you are not
planning an immediate trip to Borneo, this is a book you can dip into, to
experience some of the magic of being in a tropical rainforest. If you are
going to Borneo take this in your hand luggage so that your in-flight reading
is taken care of.
The images of the Colugo and Tourists in Borneo are not from the book. Images taken in Borneo by the reviewer of the book.
