Asian Bridge: February 2011

Monday, February 28, 2011

Looking For Sporting Goods Products To Review...

Outdoors Ontario is looking for products to use, review and evaluate after using them like they were intended to be used. We will provide accurate true unbiased reviews and will work directly with the owner/distributor/manufacturer ensuring that your review receives a fair evaluation. If you have a product you would like real outdoorsmen or outdoorswomen to use and review and report back to our following, contact us by e-mail. We hunt, fish, camp, hike, carve, canoe, boat, travel, cook, photograph and many things in between. We will only accept your product for review knowing that we can provide you with an accurate and fair evaluation. We will not post any article regarding a product until we have discussed our findings and received permission to do so. So if you would like Outdoors Ontario to review a product and post our evaluation to our followers please contact us a outdoorsontario@gmail.com

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Logging Arch for ATV's

I've previously posted articles on the logging arch by Norwood Industries and have noticed the interest from all over North America and beyond. I thought it was only right to post yet another article on this logging Arch for ATV's. This thing is a brute, if you're disappointed in it's abilities you must be trying to haul giant redwoods. Seriously folks this is one awesome piece of equipment, I have nothing bad to say about it, the only limitations are the power and gripping ability of your tires on you're quad. During March I will be dropping approximately sixty 26 foot red pine for my log cabin, and I already know that the logging arch will probably be pulling two logs at a time; each tree being approximately 20 inches at the butt and 26 feet long. Now how can you complain about that............and that's with a 400 Outlander Quad. So if you are still wondering....................Don't! Oh and no I don't work for nor am I sponsored by Norwood Industries.........yet!

Fishing BC

During my career of working, and living what I would consider to be the greatest job in the world I have experienced more than the average outdoor enthusiast. This article is dedicated to my time spent employed as a Forest Officer with the Ministry of Forests in Stewart, British Columbia. This article is specifically dedicated to fishing Meziadin Lake, located in the interior of BC, 40 minutes from Stewart BC. If you ever find yourself in Stewart or on your way to the Yukon, or Alaska be sure to fish this lake. You can launch your boat at the Provincial park, and head straight across the lake, when you reach the far side, troll approximately 20 feet from shore and use a Cleo; no weight in 5 -10 ft of water. If you troll more than a half an hour without either catching a Dolly Varden or a Rainbow ....I can't help you.....lol . I can't tell you how many times and how many years this worked for me; the locals troll deep water, fish off the mouth of the creeks...........I used this method, would meet them back at camp and they'd say "Any Luck?" I'd simply say no, go help yourself to a cold one.........when they opened the cooler I'd get ........you " Jerk" What are you using? I'd simply reply "A Cleo"; to which they would say "What the heck is a Cleo" To which I would say ..."It's an Ontario lure for catching fish!" I used to laugh so hard, it made me cry. But seriously folks, this is one part of BC that is tuly amazing.

Nikon D800 Rumours

I summarize the Nikon rumour for D700 replacement:

D800 will have a sensor carriage that can be removed by an authorized dealer. The rest of the specs: 16.4MP FX and 12MP B&W sensors, 3.3″ LCD screen with a built in collapsible hood, new MB-D10i battery grip, 1/16000sec, full HD video at 120fps.

Shutter speeds of 1/16000sec and a new technology for very long exposures without noise or extra time. (This will be very good!)

Better AF in video mode with proper Full HD video at 120fps

D3 will be replaced by D4 at the end of the year.

Read more on NikonRumors.com: http://nikonrumors.com/

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Nikon D7000 Special Offer

I am now selling cameras and accessories! I will supply most brand except Sony.
Today's special:
Nikon D7000 is probably the best DSLR camera in the market for this price range of RM4-5K.

For a limited time only, I am now offering this full brand new set at a very special and unbeatable price.
For review of this camera, click here.

What is included in the kit: Nikon D7000 DSLR Camera Kit with Nikon 18-105mm DX VR Lens (Free Sandisk 8GB SDHC + Nikon DSLR Bag)

Please send me an e-mail (williamting(a)hotmail.com) or call me on 012 8782007.

Nikon D7000 Key Features

16.2MP CMOS sensor
1080p HD video recording with mic jack for external microphone
ISO 100-6400 (plus H1 and H2 equivalent to ISO 12,800/25,600)
39-point AF system with 3D tracking
New 2016 pixel metering sensor
Twin SD card slots
3.0 inch 921k dot LCD screen
New Live View/movie shooting switch
Full-time AF in Live View/movie modes
Up to 6fps continuous shooting
Built-in intervalometer
Electronic virtual horizon
Shutter tested to 150K actuations

Truck Overturned at Pujut/Piasau Roundabout

News 24-Feb-2011 Thursday: Those going to Lutong/Piasau this morning will expect delay and huge traffic jam as a truck had overturned at the Pujut/Piasau roundabout.

From the track on the road, it seems that this driver did not really slow down at the roundabout.

But it is a blessing in disguise for other road users as the truck did not really block much of the road.

Just in case you are curious, the truck was loaded with wood chips. The problem now is the quick cleanup required as it is raining heavily this morning and a big portion of the load had gone into the drain.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Sarawak Waterbird Survey in Mukah 25th Feb till 01st March

Counting waterbirds on our shores.

The MNS BCC-Waterbird Group and volunteers will be surveying Sector 18 to Sector 21 of the Sarawak Coast as part of the work for Waterbirds and Wetlands Habitats Survey of the Sarawak Coast 25th Feb-01st March (revised from original 21-27th February 2011).

The team will be led by Daniel Kong (Field Coordinator) and Rose Ngau (Logistics); and for these sectors will be based in Mukah.

Participation is invited from birdwatchers and members of the public to be involved in this first ever coordinated waterbirds and wetlands survey of our of coast.

Those interested to be involved to please contact Anthony Wong directly at antwong@sareaga.com or 013-8333163.

Please specify the date of your availability (you can choose to be involved for all or only selected sectors).

Mukah will be base for Sector 18-21 from 25th Feb until 01st March.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Meeting session with medium format camera owners or enthusiast

Shriro Malaysia, the distributor of one of the world most advanced medium format camera will be in Miri this Friday and Saturday (25-26 Feb). They would like to meet existing clients and anyone interested to know more about medium format camera.

Please sms me on +6012 8782007 if you are interested to join the meeting on Friday evening. Seat is limited and will be first come first serve.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Finally...Piasau Bridge is going to be dual lane

Piasau bridge provides an important link between Piasau Peninsular and the "Miri main land". With growing population at the peninsular, eg, the building of Bayshore housing estate, etc, ...

... the traffic across this single lane bridge is quite heavy. Anyway, this bridge has been in operation for more than 30 years or perhaps 50 years or more!

The government finally approved work to start building a separate lane on this bridge ...

... Piling has started to build the additional lane. I believe it is targeted to complete in August 2011.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Birding in Rasau

The road that leads to Kuala Balai, Brunei.

It started of from a bird's eye view of a pristine forest on both sides of the river separated by what seemed like a quiet hardly used surfaced road from our flight to Lawas the weekend before. Immediately upon our return, it became a convenient excuse to drag everybody over for a look and see. Steve deserved a rainforest birding experience as a belated birthday pressie from his birding buddies.

The area is located is a quiet segment of Mumong, turning right just before the junction to Mumong after the Rasau toll. A quiet surfaced road snaked through between swamplands with a small housing area and industry on the left and a few kampong houses and small farms on the right.

Almost immediately upon entering the quieter stretch of the road, we spotted Crested Serpent Eagle Spilornis cheela circling high up above us. Within a few minutes a pair of Blue-eared Barbet Megalaima australis was spotted. We had a good look at both male and female sitting on a branch just by the roadside. The male was calling profusely up to the point when we decided to get out of the car for a closer look.

A hornbill flew past from our right, we caught only a glimpse and suspected that it was a Wrinkled Hornbill Aceros corrugatus judging from the faint red on the forehead, light colored pouched throat and relatively smaller silhouette. We waited for more to fly fast, alas that was our one and only for the day.

Up the road we encountered several men sitting on the verge in the shade of their parked cars. Suspiciously eye-ing each other, while we are more concentrated on the bird calls from the forest, they are intently looking up towards the same direction. They had to be birding too.

We were right, they were birding. We met two old hand bird-trappers, apparently famous in the Mumong area for their trapping skills. Fifty meters from where we were having a conversation, another household name in the 'birding" fraternity sat doing his thing.

It's interesting how the conversation picked up once the subject of birds was brought up though via two completely different methods ... one more traditionally done in these parts ie. via capturing, observing caged birds up close and the other more through a more "westernised" passive non-intrusive observations of birds via optics.

We spoke at length about their vanishing "craft" and their motivation for indulging in such activities. Most caught the bug in their mid teens, infected by their parents. Two of the men were in fact cousins, and they have been at it since they we 16 years old at the tutelage of one of their elders.

They were gracious enough to share their knowledge about birds with us and gave us an opportunity to take pictures of their quarry and decoys, we in return shared Susan's book ... they seemed interested, paging through the illustrations and calling out the local names for the birds they clearly have an affinity too.

Our birding session sort of ended right about the same time we concluded the conversations. What we lost in terms of bird ticks that day, we gained tiny shreds of insights into bird trappers, their drive and activities in return. It'll definitely be a subject to be further explored. One of the elder of the three men claimed to have captured and sold 4000 Long-tailed Parakeet Psittacula longicauda in his 40 years; and a pair of Red-breasted Parakeet Psittacula alexandri over the last 20 years!

Surely this doesn't end here, all three men have given us their addresses for us to visit.

A beautifully colored Blue-rumped Parrot Psittinus cyanurus nervously eye-ing spectators from it confined space.

The trapper contemplating the illustrations of parrots in Susan Myer's Fieldguide to the Birds of Borneo.

Blue-crown Hanging Parrot Loriculus galgulus sitting in a steel cage waiting for deployment as decoys to trap more of it's kind.

A resplendant mature male just recently captured and placed in this temporary holding net.

Several of the twelve brightly colored parrot trained as decoys used to call other wild parrots to their sticky trap, these birds are cared for and trained for up to 2 years before they are taken out to the field again.

Images and words by Nazeri Abghani
Map by Musa Musbah.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Homicide or sudden death?

This morning, a dead man was found near a monsoon drain along Pujut 5C in Miri. From a distance, I saw a crowd, ambulance and police cars. Being nosy, I went to "investigate" and become an unqualified "crime scene investigator".

The man seem to have slipped from the top. The drain wall is vertical. So, his legs was "below" and body at the top of the drain.

His belt was loosen and he was clashing a plastic bag which was found ...

... to contain a small mobile phone.

There is a little trail just beyond the place the body was found. So the police went in and found a sleeved short knife, a pair of slipper and an empty Carlsberg beer tin.

The police kept all the finding in the plastic bag, a mobile phone and wallet .
At site, no blood was found. Robbery seems to be ruled out as the wallet was still there. However, his belt was loosen! Why? I suspected that he went in to the trail to release himself during the night. When he returned, he wasn't careful, slipped into the steep drain and suffered a heart attack and died. His eyes were still open.
I just realise that this does not tally as to why the slipper was left behind. So my other theory was that as he was inside the trail, he could have saw something or bitten by a poisonous snake and ran for his life, dropping his slipper, slipped and fell into the drain, heart attack and died.

Ok, lets wait for the report from the pathologist. Then we will know the actual cause of death.

By the way, this dead person looks very familiar! Sorry, I can't publish his face.

Update: See Hua Newspaper reported today: The man just stabbed his ex-wife the day before. The police think that he could have died of hypothermia. I thought that if this is the case, then the man should be in fetus position and the eyes closed because he will first went into coma. I may be wrong!

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Expert Thief in Action

Ah Jon related this story to me as he just returned from his Europe tour. One of his group members were "robbed" in a train station.
As his group of four people just disembarked from a train in Paris, they noticed two men also hurriedly disembarked. Soon, one of the men knocked into one of the girls in the group who was carrying a bag like this on her back...

Later she discovered that her bag was opened and she lost a camera and some cash.
My analysis is that thieves always create distraction like knocking or stepping on your feet. When this happen, the companion will action at lightning speed. We habitually closes zip at the top and the thieves only need to pull the zip outward and the bag is wide opened. Closing the zip at the top is ideal to the thieves because the victim will not feel anything as the zip is being pulled open. Try it yourself.
So, when you go travelling, make sure that you either lock your back bag all the time, or carry it at the front or don't close the zip ending at the top.
What is your best suggestion?

Birding Lawas with SWS

We were in Lawas to check-out the birds of Trusan-Sundar Bay together with our SWS (Sarawak Waterbird Survey for Waterbirds and Wetland Habitats Survey for the Sarawak Coast) team Daniel and Rose as well as MNS Miri stalwarts Anura, Sara, Bor Seng, Musa, Majelah and Remli.

Accomodation in Lawas was fully booked due to the Lawas Festival, which none of us took note of in the planning. We ended up camping on the porch of Kuala Lawas Field Station operated by Sarawak Forestry Corporation, sleeping on the hard cement (thanks to our sleeping bags, the ground was a degree less hard), constant humming of mozzies and aircond compressor unit as well as sharing bathroom facilities with probably close to 15 other SFC people also in town that weekend. Lucky we had even that, otherwise we'd probably all end up cramped at the back of Anura's 4WD.

The birding was great though. Together with Daniel and Rose, we scoured the Sundar-Trusan Bay from our boatman Ismail Ahmad's house at Pulau Sari in two boats.

The birds at the coast of Lawas have received scant attention over the years. SFC has been conducting sea grass, turtle, dolphins and dugong studies in the area over many years. Fisheries Department also has a firm presence. Not much bird work has been done there save from NWPO (National Wildlife and Park Office of the old days) commissioned work back in the mid 80s and MNS IBA work in the early part of this decade.

SFC is stepping up work in the area to lobby for a Kuala Lawas Marine Protected Area, their past work on dugong, dolphins, sea grass were clearly showing some very promising results pointing to the importance of Kuala Lawas as a marine sanctuary and feeding ground for the vreatures mentioned. Hopefully with additional data provided by SWS, SFC could further add value to the protection of the entire coastal area to also include birdlife.

On a previous trip here Jan 2010 during AWC, we counted 20+ Chinese Egrets, Godwits, Far Eastern Curlew, Eurasian Curlew, Whimbrel and 2 Lesser Adjutant in the same vicinity. AWC work by UBD and PNHS over the adjacent Brunei Bay yielded similar high number of migrants over the years.

Though we didn't see as many Chinese Egret this time around, the highlight of this trip had to be the three Black-headed Gull we recorded on a sandbar located 5 meters away from a marked border of the sovereign state of Brunei. Other birds seen were White-bellied Sea Eagle, Long-tailed Parakeet, Blue-crowned Hanging Parrot, Brahminy Kite, Ruddy Turnstone, Malaysian Plover, Great Egret, Godwits, Broad-billed Sandpiper, Plovers, Eurasian Curlew, Whiskered Tern, Great Crested Tern, Lesser Crested Tern, Gull-billed Terns. An undisturbed sandbar towards the middle of the bay formed a perfect roosting haven for the waders.

A proboscis monkey was also seen lurking around near the bay. The Lesser Adjutant was noticeably absent.

We couldn't complete our survey of Bengkulit in the north due to rough seas at the Lawas estuary. The team decided to call it a day approximately 1400hrs and that concluded our survey of Lawas sector.

With the survey completed earlier than expected, we took the opportunity to check-out Lawas that evening.

We left for Miri via MASWINGS on it's last scheduled flight the very next day.