Qualla: Tabin Wildlife Reserve

Tabin Wildlife Reserve: Introduction

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Prince from Bangalore, India, CC BY 2.0. Somewhere in the 122,539 hectares of Tabin Wildlife Reserve, a Sunda clouded leopard is watching something you cannot see. This is the largest predator in the reserve, and you will almost certainly not find it. What you may find, at the mud volcanoes where animals gather to lick mineral salts from the earth, are the creatures that make Tabin one of the most significant wildlife refuges in Southeast Asia: Borneo elephants wading through the muck, their ears flapping in the humid air, alongside the ghosts of species the modern world is rapidly losing.

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Image: Mike Prince from Bangalore, India | CC BY 2.0

Tabin Wildlife Reserve: The Big Three

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Serols, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Tabin holds all three of Sabah's largest mammals. The Borneo elephant, a smaller and more gentle-faced cousin of the Asian elephant, maintains a population estimated at 120 to 300 animals as of a 1993 survey. The Bornean rhinoceros, a subspecies of the Sumatran rhinoceros, surviv...

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Image: Serols | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Tabin Wildlife Reserve: Lowland Forest on a Peninsula

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0. The reserve occupies a rectangular block of land on the Dent Peninsula, northeast of Lahad Datu, south of the lower Segama River, and north of the Silabukan Protection Forest Reserve. The terrain is covered with lowland dipterocarp forest, the tall-canopied tropical rainforest th...

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Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tabin Wildlife Reserve: Mud, Salt, and Wildlife Watching

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Prince from Bangalore, India, CC BY 2.0. The reserve's natural mud volcanoes are among its most distinctive features. These geological oddities push mineral-rich mud to the surface, creating clearings in the forest where animals come to supplement their diets with salts and minerals otherwise scarce in the rainforest ec...

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Image: Mike Prince from Bangalore, India | CC BY 2.0

Tabin Wildlife Reserve: A Reserve for the People of Sabah

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Prince from Bangalore, India, CC BY 2.0. Created in 1984 to preserve Sabah's disappearing wild animals, Tabin operates under a dual custodianship. The Sabah Wildlife Department manages the animals. The Sabah Forestry Department is responsible for the trees. The land itself belongs to the people of Sabah, held under gove...

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Image: Mike Prince from Bangalore, India | CC BY 2.0