day one

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it has begun...

I watched King Kong on the flight over. All I can say is I'm glad I never paid to see it at the movies. What a piece of rubbish. How can a film with so much action be so incredibly tedious? And the dinosaur stampede was the stupidest thing I've ever seen on a screen. Then the woman in front of me tilted her seat back as far as it would go and kept it that way for the next seven hours. Arrived in Singapore at 7pm, and saw some crested mynahs from the plane. Bird number one.
I'm staying at a place called Cozy Corners Backpackers. Its a bit of a rabbit-warren of rooms and corridors (the sort of rabbit warren you'd get if some badgers moved in and turfed out all the rabbits and then let the place go to seed).

The next day (today) started out the worst way possible, with me managing to tear one of my contact lenses in half. Luckily I have spares (but not great ones sadly). I went to a nice little place called Fort Canning Park at about 4.30am to look for owls and nightjars but no luck. I did find some black-spined toads; a lesser false vampire bat (Megaderma spasma, a very little bat with very big ears) in the roof of one of the shelters; and a feral rooster crowing by the side of the road. Heard some cockatoos too (lesser sulphur-crested I believe) but couldn't track them down. At about the time the sun was coming up I got to the Botanical Gardens and continued not finding new birds for a while (just the same old common stuff I'd got last time I was in Singapore).

Then I headed off to Bukit Timah nature reserve. What an awesome place. An awesome hot, steep and hot place. The birds were mostly hiding from me as is usually the case when I go out looking for them (true it was the middle part of the day, so unlike me they were rather sensibly staying out of the heat), but there were tree-shrews everywhere which more than made up for it. They were just a bit too nippy to get photos of them however. I found a few slender squirrels too, which were very nice (and very small!). And then, as the rain started to come in, I found my very first snake, a female Wagler's pit viper with a rather prominent bulge in its stomach, so it didn't move an inch the whole time I was there watching it.

ANIMAL OF THE DAY started out as the absolutely-brilliant lesser false vampire bat, then the tree-shrews tied it (with the inch-long giant forest ants Camponera gigas coming in for an honourable mention!), but I think the pit viper stole the show.

And that's my first day. Its too hot.

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Photos

camouflage in nature
there are many insects that endeavour to resemble dead leaves to escape predation. Sometimes, however, a leaf is just a leaf...