With sustainability such a hot topic these days, you can imagine my excitement when I heard a team of bat researchers from Rimba Research was doing field work at Penang Green Acres the day I was due to visit Eric and Kim Chong at their durian farm last week.
I was curious as to what research they were conducting and what on earth bats have to do with durians.
As it turns out, a lot. In fact, bats or flying foxes (Pteropus hypomelanus) are critical to the life of this king of fruit. They visit the trees during flowering season to feed on nectar and, rather than damage the flowers as perceived, they have a positive impact on the durian’s reproductive success.
And that is what the team from Rimba is out to prove. Following a similar study in Tioman, Sheema Abdul Aziz, co-founder and president of Rimba, and her team want to capture footage at Penang Green Acres to compile more evidence so that they can convince farmers and anyone else to stop hunting and killing these bats.
We arrived just in time to see a crew member being hoisted up a tree by a new contraption designed in France, which apparently takes all the pain out of tree climbing. His job is to place a camera at the top of the tree, and that camera will then be left for three months to capture footage of the bats that come to pollinate the durian flowers.
The principal investigator of Project Pteropus, Sheema is clearly passionate about what she does as she shares with us the results of the Tioman study and what she hopes this Penang work will yield. In Thailand, she said, bats have been hunted to extinction that farmers now have to hand pollinate their durian trees. “We don’t want this to happen in Malaysia,” she said.
She’s had some success. In 2012, the state of Terengganu banned bat hunting and Malaysia’s wildlife department has moved the species from “protected” to “totally protected” – however categorisation is one thing, implementation is another and it’s difficult to catch bat hunters especially in rural areas.
“We have to do it by education, to show farmers how important bats are to their durians and, therefore, their livelihoods,” she said.
She couldn’t have found a better champion in Penang than Eric Chong, owner of Penang Green Acres. Eric cheerfully admits, “My father and I used to hunt them. We would wait for dusk and shoot them with a rifle. It was cruel. But we hunted them for food, sometimes fun. I also wanted to impress my girlfriend.”
It was only when Eric became a farmer himself, after he decided to start Penang Green Acres, that he changed his mind. Today, the reformed hunter is the one speaking to farmers and telling them, “Without bats, durians won’t pollinate.” He’s also leading the charge to stop farmers from using chemicals on their land.
Given how big a business durian farming is, and has become, thanks to travellers from China and South-east Asia who visit Malaysia in flocks to eat the fruit during durian season, we hope that will provide enough incentive for farmers to treat bats with more respect.
Meanwhile, the collaboration between Rimba and Penang Green Acres has produced this animated video called “The Secret Life of Durians”. The farmer, by the way, is modelled after Eric.
Speaking of gardens, I also caught the private screening of “The Gardens of Evening Mists” the movie adapted from Tan Twan Eng’s Man Asian Literary Prize winning novel. An enthusiastic crowd showed up to support their homegrown author, as well as Tom Lin Shu-yu in his first non-Taiwanese directorial debut. (Watch trailer here).
Born in Penang, Twan Eng worked in Kuala Lumpur as a lawyer before moving to Cape Town more than 20 years ago. It was at a cocktail party in Cape Town when he met someone who said he was the gardener to the Emperor of Japan. That meeting which lasted five minutes planted the seed for his novel which tells the story of a relationship between a Japanese gardener and a Malaysian judge at a tense time called the Emergency in Malaysia’s history. World War 2 had just ended, the Japanese had surrendered and the Communists were active in the jungles.
The movie, which won the 2019 Golden Horse Award for best make-up and costume design, is set in Cameron Highlands and is beautifully shot and lovingly told. Personally I felt the Asian actors were standouts – Sinje Lee and Sylvia Chang, who both played the judge Teoh Yun Ling, and Hiroshi Abe who played the gardener, Nakamura Aritomo – while I thought Julian Sand should have stayed in his box for this one.
If you’ve read the book, you may be disappointed that the story in the movie is slightly different and has less context but Twan Eng, after the screening, said he was happy with how the movie turned out to which Tom breathed a huge sigh of relief. “A book is a book but a film has to be visual,” said a visibly-moved Twan Eng.
Producers Astro Shaw – rumour has it it’s their biggest budget movie – are clearly hoping Malaysian audiences will embrace the movie as their own, and that it will also resonate with audiences in South-east Asia.
There are those in the travel industry who hope the movie will spark interest in travel to Malaysia. One reviewer even compared it to LOTR (Lord Of The Rings), calling it TGOEM – I wouldn’t go that far and I doubt if it will have the same global impact – but the movie does evoke the beauty of Malaysia’s nature as well as a sense of nostalgia and romance for a country that has gone through what it has.
As for its impact on tourism, I think it will be hard to beat durians – so please, let’s keep the bats flying and pollinating.