The stunning malaysian hill station of fraser's hill

Fraser's Hill and I go way back. Would you believe it, this photo is dated 13 June 1981? I am not kidding; as I write, that is 40 years ago! That year I went for a four-day road-trip with my X between jobs in the South-east Asian oil fields. I drove up to Malaysia and spent two days on the beach at Kuantan and two days at Fraser's Hill.  

This is a postcard I sent to my Mum in Denmark and collected from her estate much later in 2012, she kept it all those years! It is dated Fraser's Hill 13 June 1981 and mailed from the small post office the village had back then. On the back it says that Malaysia is great, my X and I are doing fine and enjoyed the drive up through the plantations and forests. The stamp is a 40 sen image of a Colug

Fraser's Hill had a small zoo back then, here my X fools around with the captive Sun Bear. No, I didn't take the photo from inside the cage, there was another barred wall along the side! 

Just like my son Adam would some 23 years later, in 1981 I jumped into the stream just upstream from the Waterfall to cool off. My X and I were the only people in the Waterfall area that day, I never saw anyone else the whole time we were there.

Fast forward to 1990! I had started taking pictures of birds by then and would go to Fraser's Hill now and then to improve my collection of montane species. That year I drove up from Singapore with my friend Iain Ewing (left) who didn't have a car, and we participated in the bird race in the Novice category which wasn't quite fair I guess and we easily won. Third from the left is Clive Briffett, a

The next year, in 1991, I was rightly promoted to the Advanced category in the bird race. No, a bird race is not a competition where the birds race - the people do! We drive and walk around the designated area identifying as many different species as we can. I was team leader and driver, Lim kim Chuah (right) was spotter and recorder; his older brother Lim Kim Seng (left) was chief guide and ID ex

The choice of accommodation for Daniel and me was a no-brainer: I wanted to visit 

The Ming Ching McNeice Nature Discovery Villa that had opened up since my last visit. Stephen Hogg took over an old bungalow opposite the Telecoms Apartments and built this resort: The photo is from his book about the project and much better than any I could take on location!? Photo: Stephen Hogg. 

And we were not disappointed. The sprawling complex has eight spacious second storey rooms/with huge bathrooms and multiple recreational facilities at ground level. Everything was tastefully decorated and meticulously maintained. This is Daniel eating breakfast in the dining hall. We were the only guests there during our 3 nights stay, and every morning at 6 AM Stephen would come up and cook a sum

At the far side of the resort, facing the forest, Stephen had this moth trap set up.

I am no insect expert by far, but even I was overwhelmed by the moth and cicada diversity. I especially find the tiny 'micro moths' interesting: Miniscule but colourful and varied, as well as little studied. 

There were dozens, maybe a hundred, different species around the lights, but I found this beautiful hawkmoth in Leong et al: Marvellous Moths of Fraser's Hill (2017); it is an Amplypterus panopus. 

Stephen had mountain bikes available that Daniel and I used to zip all across the hill station, here coming out of the Telecoms Loop.  

Above you can see our bird race team from 1991. Here is a newspaper write-up about the event that year. 

The late photographer Jimmy Chew took this photo of me and the winning 2001 team: Tan Ju Lin and Lim Kim Keang. 

10 years after the 1991 event, the local newspaper prints in colour now and this is the write-up. 

I use my two bird race photos on the inside cover of my 2004 book Birds of Fraser's Hill. See more about this one further below in this tab. 

After 2001 I didn't participate actively in the bird race. But I would often go and help out as a volunteer; my role was usually to help establish and explain the rules to participants and to arbitrate the results afterwards. The FH Development Corporation was keen to promote the bird race as a way of attracting visitors, especially from overseas. On our part, the naturalists, we wanted the natura

The picture above is from the 2003 race flag-off. Here I am at the start of the 2012 race clarifying the rules to the teams before flag-off. On the right you can see Mohd Moni Ismail with the Pahang state Kuantan office. Moni was a great supporter of the birds and animals of Fraser's Hill and he did all the hard work organising the yearly bird race. The rest of us just turned up and had fun on the

As you can see if you scroll down further below to the printed material, or better yet, get a copy of the old Birds of Fraser's Hill (2004/2007), I have taken a lot of bird photographs at Fraser's Hill. It is hard to pick out a favorite species, but if pressed I might select this one: Green Magpie coming forward near dawn at the Jelai Resort. What a stunner, right? 

When I took bird photographs, my aim was not to make the audience say: 'What a great photograph'. My goal was to make people say: 'What a great bird. Isn't nature wonderful?' And look at this Sultan Tit from the Waterfall Road, isn't it? 

I never had any macro equipment, and I don't know the bugs anyway, but I couldn't help grabbing a snapshot off this large, noisy cicada when it came out in broad daylight off the Old Road. I later found out it was a Tacua speciosa and the picture was used in the feature below by the late Preston Murphy. 

Fraser's Hill has tons of other vertebrate animals (apart from birds), such as snakes, lizards and mammals. Adam took this picture with his compact camera in November 2004; we found out later that it was a Cameron Highlands Pit Viper. It was hanging around the forest edges outside the Jelai Resort where we stayed during that visit. 

During Daniel's visit some 10 years later in June 2014, the two of us were walking up towards High Pines from the village and came across this small snake making its way across a drain. I took this snapshot and it turned out to be a rarely photographed species, a Speckle-bellied Keelback. I was proud when Nick Baker later used this image on his amazing site, Ecology Asia. 

Even more bizarre is this one that we found one year making its way across the road just uphill from the village. I could see it was some kind of lizard with tiny legs and later found out that it was a Three-banded Larut Skink. If you follow the link you will see that we again had the honor of having the photos displayed on Nick's online guide to animals in South-east Asia. 

The mammals of Fraser's Hill are abundant, varied and conspicuous. I would dare the claim that it is hard to spend a few days there and not see some 5-6 different primates and squirrels, even without trying too hard. This Banded Leaf-Monkey that I feature here in Quest Insight Magazine in July 1991 issue is now called the White-thighed Surili (or Langur).

I sold a similar image to a Japanese animal encyclopedia some years later. 

Much later, in 2012, when the excellent Squirrels of the World came out, one of my Fraser's Hill mammals proved of interest. On page 193, that species had been split into a Malaysian endemic called Upland Squirrel.  

In 2002 and 2003, Bee Choo and I published a series of guides and checklists to four destinations in Kenya, more about that in the '1999-2013' tab. The next year, in 2004, we used the same format and grid designed by S.T. Leng to produce an illustrated guide and checklist to the Birds of Fraser's Hill. It was a lot of fun to do the writing and photo editing, as well as the design with Leng. 

The little book became a smash hit, and although it was very specific to a small location we sold 1,000s of copies, so it was also a commercial success for our company. Swarovski Optics helped us with sponsorship so that we could keep the price down. This is a review in The Malysian Naturalist Q3 2004. 

This is a review by Mike Crosby in World Birdwatch June 2004 issue. At Nature's Niche and Draco Publishing and Distribution, we did our own distribution, so it was important for us that the book reached a large international market. 

When we originally planned the book, Bee Choo and I met the CEO of the Fraser's Hill Development Corporation during a site visit in 2003 and asked him if he wanted to co-produce such a book. He declined, saying that Malays are not interested in birds, they will see plenty of birds when they get to Heaven. That turned out to be wrong; we marketed the book to most of the hotels and shops on the hill

Peter Kennerley wrote the review above for British Birds.  

Fat Birder was a website that was much used by birdwatchers at that time, we had a review published there a bit later, after the twin copy Birds of Taman Negara came out in 2006.  

Hey, I even used my Danish connections to get a review in the Danish Ornithological Society's magazine. I am not sure how much that improved sales, but you can always try, right!? 

This is a report from a trip to Fraser's Hill (with a stop-over in Kuala Selangor) that I had published in Singapore Avifauna, a birding newsletter that the Nature Society (S) produced at the time. Page 39 in the Jul-Sep 1990 issue.  

You can skip thru it if you want to. Page 40. That trip was pretty typical of the many drives I have done from my home in Singapore up to the hill station and back over the years.  

In those days, the Singapore Avifauna newsletter was just a collection of  photo-copied b/w sheets, so the article is printed as I produced it on my PC, complete with a few little typos - pls ignore those! 

This is a professionally edited feature I sold to Visage, a lifestyle magazine that I worked with back then. Page 46, Sep 1991 issue. If you are an expert ornithologist, you will notice that I was still a bit short of top-quality photos from the hill station in those days, so I include a photo of the Chestnut-capped Laughingthrush that I took in Sabah, Borneo - it is a different subspecies which t

Page 48, Visage Sep 1991. In those days I would use the excitement of the bird race event to get my bird features into general travel and lifestyle magazines, where biodiversity aspects of the rainforest alone in themselves maybe didn't quite resonate with readers.  

Visage magazine page 50, Sep 1991. As I mention above, Fraser's Hill is great not only for birds, but also for mammals such as squirrels, primates and others.