The sequences broadcast in major wildlife documentaries are often the reason people decide to travel here. A camera gliding past a falling seed or a hornbill sealing its mate inside a tree cavity looks like a typical morning. The reality of making those films is different. Crews spend months in the field and piece together shots from across the island to build a single story.
If you come to Sabah hoping to walk into the exact scenes you saw on screen you need to know where the crews went. You also need to know what a standard 2-week visit reveals that television cannot capture. The forest is loud, humid and layered. Preparing for a trip means finding the right books so you understand what you see.
"Looking up at the unstratified canopy from the forest floor is an experience a flat screen cannot replicate."
Protected forests and cave systems
Producers often rely on the established reserves in Sabah to film rare animal behaviour. For Planet Earth III the BBC Earth team captured an oriental pied hornbill sealing its nest cavity at Gomantong and along the Kinabatangan River. They spent 5 years collecting footage for the series.
Judi Dench's Wild Borneo Adventure focused on conservation science in Borneo. The crew filmed at the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre and the Danau Girang Field Centre on the Kinabatangan before heading into the primary rainforest of Danum Valley. The crew filmed the forest of a lineage some 130 million years old.
Canopy heights and acoustic bands
A television cannot broadcast the scale of the landscape or the physical reality of standing in it. When you walk the trails at Borneo Rainforest Lodge you are underneath a 90-metre canopy; the lodge's construction and expansion project runs from 1 January 2025 to 22 January 2027. A camera cannot show the true height of trees like Menara.
The most profound difference is the sound. The pioneer bioacoustician Bernie Krause recorded the soundscapes of Borneo in 1991 to demonstrate his acoustic niche hypothesis. He showed that insects, frogs, birds and mammals vocalise in distinct frequency bands so they do not drown each other out.