The Best Places for Colugo and Gliding Wildlife

Most wildlife-watching in Southeast Asia’s rainforests rewards the traveller who looks up. Fewer rewards are stranger than the colugo — sometimes, misleadingly, called a “flying lemur,” though it is neither a lemur nor, strictly, capable of powered flight. What it does instead is glide, spreading a membrane of skin that runs from neck to fingertip to ankle to tail into something close to a furred kite, and covering distances between trees that seem, on first sight, faintly impossible for an animal roughly the size of a large cat.

An animal built for the space between trees

The colugo spends almost its entire life in the canopy, descending to the ground rarely and clumsily, if at all — its limbs, so well adapted to gliding, make it slow and vulnerable on the forest floor. By day it clings, near-motionless, to a tree trunk, patterned bark-grey and mottled in a way that makes it almost invisible to anyone not specifically looking. At dusk it becomes, briefly, one of the most dramatic sights in the forest: launching from a high branch, extending its membrane, and gliding — sometimes over sixty metres — to a trunk on the far side of a clearing, losing remarkably little height along the way.

Spotting one takes patience and, usually, a guide who already knows which trees in a given patch of forest tend to host a resident animal. Daytime sightings rely on scanning trunks methodically for a slightly irregular grey shape; dusk sightings rely on being in the right clearing at the right ten minutes, since the glide itself lasts only a few seconds.

Where to look

Lowland and hill rainforest across Malaysia and parts of Indonesia offers the most reliable colugo populations, particularly in forest reserves close enough to research stations that guides have built up years of tracking knowledge for individual animals. Singapore’s own forest fragments hold a small, well-studied population, making a guided night walk here one of the more accessible ways to see the species without a long-haul detour — useful for readers based locally who want a first colugo sighting before planning a bigger trip.

Beyond the colugo itself, the same forests tend to host a wider cast of gliding specialists worth watching for after dark: flying squirrels, which use a similar if smaller membrane and tend to be more active and easier to spot in motion, and occasionally gliding geckos and frogs, which rely on webbed feet and flattened bodies rather than a true membrane. A single good night walk can turn up several of these in quick succession, each solving the same problem — how to move efficiently through a three-dimensional forest — in a slightly different way.

Making a night walk worthwhile

• Go with a guide who tracks specific animals rather than one running a generic loop; colugo sightings improve dramatically with local, current knowledge.
• Use a red-filtered torch where possible — white light disturbs nocturnal animals more and can cut a walk short.
• Dress for stillness, not just walking. The best sightings often come from standing quietly at a known launch tree for ten or fifteen minutes.
• Keep voices low. Colugos are shy gliders and a loud group will often push a nearby animal to delay its glide until well after dark.

Travellers building a wider wildlife itinerary around this kind of sighting should also look at our guides to the best places for slow loris and forest wildlife and the best places for tarsier and nocturnal wildlife, both of which overlap significantly with good colugo habitat and are frequently combined into a single night circuit by experienced guides. For daytime canopy wildlife on the same trip, the best places for gibbon and canopy wildlife covers the diurnal counterpart to this nocturnal world.

“You stop looking for the animal and start looking for the shape of the bark that’s slightly wrong,” a forest guide in Malaysia told us, pointing out a colugo we had walked past twice without noticing.

Planning around the season

Colugos are active year-round, unlike some seasonal wildlife, which makes them a relatively low-risk addition to a broader itinerary rather than something requiring precise timing. That said, drier months tend to make night walks more comfortable and slightly improve visibility, since heavy rain both suppresses animal activity and makes canopy-scanning with a torch considerably harder. Book any specialist night walk in advance where possible — the best local guides run small groups by design, and availability during peak travel months can fill quickly.

For a fuller sense of how to build this kind of wildlife encounter into a longer regional trip, our guide to the art of the wildlife safari in Asia covers logistics, guide selection and ethics in more depth, and our broader Travel & Stays section carries further guides to the region’s rainforest and reserve accommodation options suited to this kind of trip.

Why the colugo rewards the effort

There is something quietly humbling about watching an animal solve a problem — distance, gravity, the gap between two trees — with such apparent ease, using a design that predates almost every other gliding solution in the animal kingdom. A colugo sighting rarely makes the highlight reel the way a tiger or an orangutan does, but for travellers who value the strange and the specific over the merely photogenic, it is very often the encounter they talk about longest after the trip is over.

A word on conservation

Colugos are not currently among the region’s most endangered species, but they remain highly sensitive to forest fragmentation — a species built entirely around continuous canopy struggles badly once that canopy is broken by roads, plantations or clearings wider than a single glide can cross. This is part of why the best sightings increasingly happen in and around protected reserves and research stations rather than open countryside, and why the guides who track individual animals over years tend to be affiliated, formally or informally, with conservation efforts in the area. Choosing an operator that channels part of its fee back into forest protection is a small but meaningful way to ensure the population you’ve come to see is still there for the next visitor.

It is also worth remembering that a colugo sighting, however brief, represents years of quiet groundwork by people who know a specific patch of forest intimately — which trees a given animal favours, which nights it is likely to glide, which season its young are old enough to be seen clinging to its underside as it moves between trunks. That local knowledge is not something a guidebook can replace, and it is the single best reason to book a specialist rather than attempt a self-guided night walk in unfamiliar forest.