Sometimes You Do, Sometimes You Don't

The forests of western Java are not pristine wilderness. They are fragments — pockets of green hemmed in by rice paddies, tea plantations, and the sprawl of thirty million people living on an island the size of New York State. It is here, in these improbable remnants, that the Javan gibbon holds on.

Our survey team spent three months moving between forest patches, documenting gibbon populations through morning call counts and transect surveys. The work was straightforward; the results were not.

What I learned in Java was that conservation biology is often the science of what is missing. We counted the gibbons that remained, but the real story was in the silence — the patches where no calls echoed at dawn, where the forest was intact but empty. Defaunation without deforestation.

Sometimes you find what you are looking for. Sometimes you don't. Both results carry weight.