Why do people always want to go somplace exotic for their vacations? Lets go to Europe and see all the sights, Lets go to to a tropical island for our honeymoon. Why not explore America and all it has to offer?

Why do people always say French is so expressive and exotic? If Americans don’t have a word for something we steal it from another language or make one up. How much more expressive can you get?

People are always searching for the exotic. They want what isn’t in their back yard, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence theory. They want to get grants to research things in locations that fewer people (in theory) have been to. If I went and told investors I wanted to get a party together to search for an unknown primate in Seattle it is a much harder sell that it is in another (Perceived) Underdeveloped areas.

Here’s what I think is going on with the relative situations of the sasquatch and orang pendek (and what the heck, the yeti too).

1. Apes Aren’t Found In The Temperate Zone. We still have scientists trying to pin the tropical ape template on the sasquatch to ‘prove’ that it doesn’t exist. Never mind that it’s hard to find a kind of animal – deer; cats; dogs; monkeys (primate!); bears; cetaceans; pinnipeds; frogs/turtles/lizards, I could go on and on – that doesn’t have representatives in both the tropics and the temperate zone (and many if not most you can extend to the polar regions as well). The yeti at least lives in a ‘more plausible’ place (Asia, although temperate zone and almost polar cold in winter at elevations frequented by yeti); and sightings of the animal by credible European observers have, if not a longer continuous history, one that’s been more publicized. The shroud of mystery hanging over the yeti’s habitat even into the present day sure hasn’t hurt.

2. North America Is All Paved Over, Populated and Under Constant Surveillance. No. Sumatra is, if anything, LESS hospitable to a large secretive primate. As you point out, large swatches of the continent don’t see but a few visitors per year max. And people say the animal is elusive because it isn’t being seen. This flies firmly in the face of the anecdotal evidence; LOTS of encounters are reported, about the quantity one would expect for an animal that, while secretive in the main, is large, and being a primate, curious (a main reason it’s frequently seen near houses and other buildings on the margins of suitable habitat). The yeti and its sign are also seen quite a bit, and in places one would expect for a large, omnivorous primate.

3. Nobody is Seeing Sasquatch. Actually, I just addressed that one.

4. There Isn’t Enough Food for Sasquatch. Poppycock, there’s MORE than enough. As Robert Michael Pyle pointed out: the vast majority of nutritive material in temperate forests is composted, uneaten. (That’s, um, how they became FORESTS.) Every attempt to ‘prove’ otherwise begs the question, i.e., implicitly accepts as proven what it is attempting to prove. Never mind that large bands of hunting and gathering primates roved over North America for centuries before Europeans displaced them (showing themselves, in the act, how hospitable the continent could be for such an animal).

I could go on; but that covers it well enough, I think.

In addition, at least two Western observers in the past two decades with impeccable scientific credentials have claimed orang pendek sightings; a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) artist, making drawings from descriptions given to him in person, by natives who had been brought to him from various locales, with no time before the meeting together to compare notes, kept drawing the same animal. But similar consistency can be seen in similar exercises conducted with sasquatch sightings.

I’d agree with you: if orang pendek exists, the sasquatch and yeti are slam dunks. The stories only appear different. They aren’t.

Hello

You are a part of this expedition? If so, are you planning on getting a type specimen (capture or kill)?

what is the battery life for trail cameras? I’m curious if a solar power solution could be accomplished for this technology?