25 January 2014

Big round eyes, sticky little toes, ruffled brown fur and strange pointy ears was my first glimpse of the tarsier, a tiny creature that I have been dying to see since starting our travels in South East Asia. Nocturnal by nature, the tarsiers are sleepy during the day and these mostly insectivorous primates spend the daylight hours fast asleep.  At night, it is a completely different story with jumping, shrieking and feasting on whatever they can find.

The Philippine Tarsiers, like their cousins the Western Tarsiers, are the cutest, tiniest, weirdest-looking animals ever!  Tarsiers are only found in South East Asia and are critically endangered.

Bohol island in the Philippines is home to some of the only Philippine tarsiers left in the world and there are conservation efforts happening on the island to increase the dwindling numbers of this lovely little creature.  Many of those animals kept at the conservation centres have been rescued from illegal trade and can never survive again in the wild.  Others have been successfully bred through carefully guarded breeding programmes and then successfully released into their natural habitat.

Travelinds was forced to visit the Carmen Tarsier Sanctuary (in Loboc) instead of the Corella sanctuary which I’d read so much about, because the road had been severely damaged by the October 2013 earthquake and made it impossible to get to Corella from where we were staying in Panglao, Alona Beach.  It was great to finally meet these amazing little monkeys, but I felt guilty once again that captivity is no place for wild creatures.  Even though I so badly wanted to see one of these animals, I would still have preferred to see one at a far distance knowing it was free and wild!