Forest for the Trees...

Tree starting to grow around tag

Excluding the palm trees and trees that have very small trunks, all of the trees in the zoo have a little metal tag nailed to their trunks with a corresponding number. Zoo Negara has a partnership with The World Wildlife Foundation and with The Forest Research Institute of Malaysia to keep track of all the native species of trees Zoo Negara has on the 110 acres, so these tags provide a way to keep track of them all.

With all of the new construction over the last couple years, many trees have had to be removed, which is still  a small percentage of all the trees on the total acreage of land. So one of the jobs I’ve had to do while being here has been to catalog all the trees’ tag numbers to have an updated list of trees present. Eza handed me one of the old official blueprints of the zoo, before all the construction and separated into 6 sections, and asked me to go around the entire land area of the zoo and write the tag numbers of the trees at their locations on the map. It took me a full two days to complete the task. By the end of the first day, I had only finished zone 6 and half of 5. Due to the quantity of trees,I was writing down a tag number every couple of feet in some areas. The clustering was so extensive in some places that I had to circle an entire area on the map, draw a line to one of the blank spaces, and list the numbers there because it was an impossibility for me to fit them in on the tiny spaces they corresponded to on the map. I thought it would have taken me three days to finish this, but some zones of the zoo have a lot of buildings and not as much of garden space as zone 6.


Other than the trees being removed, an update on the catalog had to be done for trees that were now large enough to receive a new tag number or for trees that had began to grow around their old tags and required a new one. Before this, Ain and I had gone around and removed the tags from the trees and nailed them back in with a new galvanized nail, and we saw at least 20 or so trees that had grown around their tags. Additionally we saw trees that were just missing tags, so all of those had to get new numbers.

The most difficult part of those two days was trying to figure out exactly where the trees should be labeled on the map, so they were as close to where their actual location is with all the new construction. Other than the large amount of trees, this was the reason it took me so long to get all the tag numbers labeled. The zoo layout has changed a bit since this blueprint was drawn up, so some of the roads didn’t exist before, and some roads on the map were no longer present because of new enclosures. Multiple times I was where new construction had been done and spent a good 5-10 minutes trying to figure out where on the map the new construction started in the area I had been labeling. I’d end up rotating the map multiple times to view the street from different angles, followed by walking back and forth comparing landmarks to where they were on the map. It also didn’t help that the chimpanzees were throwing sticks at me when I was near their enclosure. Looking for a tag on a tree, while keeping an eye on the chimpanzees, proved to be taxing.

Part of Zone 5