Batek parents and children often make toys from forest materials, but recently they have been able to buy some toys from traders or shops. Here boys of various ages play with some toy trucks.
Batek also fish with gill nets, which they obtain from traders. They usually stake the nets out in a stream in the afternoon and retrieve them, with any entrapped fish, the next morning. Fish try to swim through the openings in the net, and their heads get stuck; when they try to back out, the net snags their gills. Here two men are putting out a gill net.
Batek farmers use various methods to minimize the labor of chopping down large hardwood trees. Here two men have built a scaffold of poles tied together with rattan and are chopping the tree trunk above the buttresses.
Men often care for their young children while in camp. Here a man carries his baby while discussing business with a Batek man and a Malay trader (center).
By 1990, traders came to the upper Aring Batek by road in four-wheel-drive pickup trucks rather than by boat. Here some Batek swarm over a traders pickup, selecting items, including fresh bread rolls, which they receive in return for rattan or Aloes wood.
Batek occasionally contract with traders to supply live fish of the larger, more desirable species. Here a man pulls in a gill net which is full of leaves. The bamboo container in the water behind him is a cage for storing live fish.
The most common species of honeybees in Peninsular Malaysia (Apis dorsata) builds nests that hang below horizontal branches of the tallest forest trees. Some Batek are skilled at climbing the trees, sometimes with the aid of rope ladders made of rattan; stunning the bees with smoky torches; cutting the nests loose; and lowering them to the ground in bark baskets. This is usually done at night when the bees are in their nests and quiet. Here two nests, dark triangular protrusions, can be seen hanging below branches near the trunk of the bee tree (center).
During the day before attacking a bees nest, the work party assembles its equipment near the bee tree. Here one man tends the fire, while another ties together lengths of rattan to form the line that will be used to lower the bees nest. To the left are some plastic containers provided by traders, a piece of bark, and a completed bark basket (inverted on a stump), which will be used as the container to receive the cut-off nest.
Here some men are sorting out the honey, honeycomb, larvae, and bees wax from a newly-obtained bees nest. They use flashlights acquired from traders to illuminate their work.
Companies developing plantations built workshops and simple housing for workers. Here a project headquarters lies in a valley, with rows of young oil palms on the hills behind.
Removal of the rainforest for plantations greatly increased the rate of runoff after thunderstorms, causing the water level of rivers to fluctuate wildly. Here a bridge across the Aring River at the Aring Lima oil palm plantation has become submerged after a brief storm.
Two men are dropping a few rice seeds in each hole and tamping soil over them with the butts of their bamboo seed containers. A square altar can be seen on the ground between them. Before starting to plant, they burned some incense on the smoldering log inside the altar and recited a spell to the earth spirit, a Malay practice that they adopted along with swidden farming.
Batek sometimes keep small animals as pets, but they do not coddle them as Americans do. When the animals die, people may eat them if they are common prey species (e.g., bats, bamboo rats), but not if they have raised them and become emotionally attached to them. This woman looks on while her two children play with their pet mouse.
Logging companies were required to cut and burn all remaining vegetation after they had removed the valuable timber, taking the former forest land down to bare earth.
Some crude sawmills were set up near the source of the trees to saw logs into rough planks. This is the log dump at one such sawmill with a pile of scrap wood in the foreground.
If fruit or honey trees are too big around at the base to climb, people sometimes make rope ladders of heavy-gauge rattan stretching between a smaller, climbable tree and the upper branches of the target tree. They throw weighted fishing lines across a fork in the target tree and then pull the rattan across, tying both ends securely to the smaller tree. Here some men have made a rope ladder to the upper part of a tree that produces large pods of edible seeds, like giant beans (Parkia speciosa). Two men can be seen climbing the rope ladder (center right) by grasping the two ropes with their hands and between their toes.
These men are holding the still-green seed pods from a Parkia tree. Batek eat the seeds as vegetables or condiments or trade them to Malays, who regard them highly as flavoring in various dishes.
Batek now build semi-permanent Malay-style houses like this at basecamps. They typically alternate between living in basecamps and in temporary camps in the forest.
