A Forest,
Its Wildlife,
and the Travellers Who Found It

This book moves in two parts. The first tells the story of a working timber forest that became, almost by accident, one of the world's finest places to watch wild mammals after dark. The second is a slower walk through the animals themselves — the mammals, birds and other wildlife that visitors most hope to meet on Deramakot's roads.

None of it replaces a guide. Deramakot is found by ear and by patient spotlighting as much as by knowing where to look, and the people who work its roads carry knowledge no book can hold. What follows is simply an introduction — enough to recognise what you're looking at, and why it matters that it's still there.

In 1989, long before "sustainable forestry" was a phrase tourists cared about, the Sabah Forestry Department made a decision that would, decades later, reshape wildlife tourism in Borneo. Working with technical support from the German Agency for Technical Cooperation, the department began developing a management system for Deramakot Forest Reserve built around a simple but, at the time, unusual premise: that a working timber forest could be logged commercially and still function as a healthy ecosystem.

The approach became known as Reduced Impact Logging, or RIL — a method of harvesting timber designed to keep damage to the surrounding forest to a minimum. Only carefully selected trees above a minimum diameter are felled. Fruiting trees, a critical food source for the reserve's mammals and birds, are left standing. Buffer zones are maintained along rivers, watersheds and steep slopes.

Deramakot became the Sabah Forestry Department's flagship — a working demonstration of what steady political support and disciplined management can achieve.

This was not an easy or obvious choice for a state forestry department to make in 1989. It meant slower harvests and a longer road to profitability than conventional logging offered. But it set Deramakot on a trajectory that, a generation later, would make it famous for reasons nobody at the time anticipated.

In 1997, Deramakot became the first natural forest in Southeast Asia to be certified as a "well-managed forest" by the Forest Stewardship Council. No tropical rainforest has held the certification for longer. It lapsed in late 2019 and was regained in 2024.

What followed was not something the department had explicitly set out to achieve, but it followed logically from the method. Researchers working in Deramakot began documenting healthy populations of animals that are usually the first to vanish from logged landscapes — Clouded Leopards, Sun Bears, Orangutans, and a striking diversity of civets — persisting inside an active, licensed timber concession.

Across much of Southeast Asia, "logged forest" and "wildlife-rich forest" were treated as opposites. Deramakot offered quiet evidence that with sufficiently careful management, they did not have to be.

By around 2014, the Sabah Forestry Department began permitting a small number of licensed operators to bring visitors into Deramakot, using the department's own staff accommodation at the base camp as a starting point. It was a modest, cautious opening — nothing like the purpose-built ecotourism infrastructure found in Sabah's national parks.

There were no manicured trails, no visitor centre. Guests stayed in the same staff housing used by forestry personnel and joined slow, deliberate night drives along the reserve's forestry roads — a network of wide, well-kept gravel tracks left behind by decades of careful timber work.

That simplicity turned out to be an asset rather than a limitation. The roads were quiet, wide enough for good sightlines, and ran straight through forest the animals actually use.

By late 2014, reports of Deramakot had begun circulating within a small, tightly networked international community: mammalwatchers, whose travel is built specifically around finding wild mammals. Early accounts described Sun Bears, Banded Palm Civets and Marbled Cats turning up within days.

In May 2015, Jon Hall arrived — founder of mammalwatching.com and widely regarded as the community's most prolific chronicler. He travelled with fellow enthusiasts Tomer Ben-Yehuda and Jean-Michel Bompar, guided through the operator Adventure Alternative Borneo.

Over four nights in May 2015, the group recorded thirty-one mammal species — Binturong and Banded Palm Civet among them.

In a community that relies heavily on shared trip reports to decide where to travel next, that account functioned as an introduction. Deramakot's status as one of the world's premier mammal-watching destinations traces directly back to that period.

Mammalwatching.com has since become the place where Deramakot trip reports are shared, and each new report has added to the reserve's reputation among the people most likely to make the journey.

The BBC presenter and naturalist Kate Humble arrived at Deramakot in January 2019 with a more pointed question than most visitors bring: could a forest that still earned its keep as a working timber concession really hold onto the wildlife everyone assumed logging destroyed, or was that just a good story? She spent five days driving the reserve's forest roads to find out.

The animals obliged steadily rather than spectacularly — Slow Lorises, flying squirrels, Leopard Cats, Sun Bears and Bornean Pygmy Elephants, with palm civets and Banded Civets turning up so often she came to think of them as regulars. An Otter Civet, rarer by her own reckoning than the cat everyone comes for, was the trip's real prize.

The Sunda Clouded Leopard eluded her, as it eludes many visitors.

The Clouded Leopard itself never appeared. Humble left anyway believing she had her answer: that a forest can pay its way in timber without being stripped of the wildlife that makes it worth protecting in the first place — a conclusion delivered, fittingly, to the sound of gibbons singing at dawn.

In the years since 2015, Deramakot's reputation has continued to build. Species once treated as a once-in-a-lifetime encounter anywhere in Borneo — Marbled Cat, Sun Bear, Otter Civet, Binturong, the Sunda Clouded Leopard — are today reported with a frequency that would have seemed implausible before the reserve opened to visitors.

The format that made this possible — slow night drives, patient spotlighting, extended multi-night stays rather than single-day visits — has since been adopted, in varying forms, by other Sabah forest reserves seeking to open their own land to wildlife tourism.

A forestry department's 1989 commitment to sustainable timber management has grown, three decades on, into one of the clearest examples in the region of conservation and tourism reinforcing one another.

What began with a handful of independent mammalwatchers has, in the years since, become a fixture on the calendars of specialist wildlife travel companies around the world. Some now build whole itineraries around a week at Deramakot, timed to the reserve's spotlighting rhythm rather than a conventional daytime safari.

Small-group departures now run every year, aimed squarely at the reserve's specialist rarities, and the trip reports they leave behind — some logging more than forty-five mammal species in a single visit — have become one of the best running records of what the reserve actually holds.

None of this existed before 2015. That a working timber concession can now draw visitors back year after year is itself a kind of finding — proof, gathered one trip report at a time, that the approach Deramakot adopted in 1989 works.