Experts shocked by footage from cameras hidden in treetops: 'Used to have to sit quietly under fig trees for days at a time'

Thanks to some well-paced trail cameras, biologists in Malaysian Borneo are capturing thousands of valuable images of the many visitors to the fig trees of a national park.

According to Mongabay, the non-profit 1StopBorneoWildlife set up 16 arboreal cameras high in the trees of Tawau Hills National Park. The cameras caught several rarely-seen species foraging for figs, including some critically endangered primates. The organization's founder, Shave Cheema, told Mongabay he'd only ever seen the gray leaf monkey just once in nine years, but the cameras saw them almost daily.

One of the most thrilling sights was the critically endangered Borneo orangutan. As the World Wildlife Fund notes, they've lost over half of their global population in the past 60 years. A combination of hunting and extensive habitat destruction has caused their historical range to be halved over the past 20 years. As the park's website notes, the wildlife is abundant but shy and not easily spotted from the ground.

The cameras allow researchers to track elusive wildlife without intruding on their habitats or engaging in tedious and difficult field work.

Matthew Luskin, an Australian conservation biologist, explained: "Field ecologists used to have to sit quietly under fig trees for days at a time to monitor the arboreal frugivores, entailing discomforts such as loss of blood to mosquitoes and leeches. Even then, we were still unable to see many of the canopy animals."

The images demonstrate the immense value of trail cameras in conservation work. Similar key insights into the planet's most elusive creatures have been found worldwide. In this case, the footage proves the importance of fig trees to the park's threatened wildlife. That knowledge will aid community-based efforts to protect the park.

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As Shavez Cheema said, "These are high-value trees which should never be cut down. And since they're wildlife's favorite food, these individual trees are the best to plant."

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