Singapore again...

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23 October

This morning I moved residences. Then I went to the Bukit Brown cemetery to look for lesser sulphur-crested cockatoos that I had been told may possibly be found there. The cemetery is huge and, unlike what you may suspect from a Singaporean site, most parts of it appear to never receive any kind of maintenance. The ground is matted with weeds and thickets of trees crowd in all around. Its great. Getting there was easy. I love the Singapore public transport system: its easy to understand, easy to use, easy to get information about, and its reliable. When I first got off the bus I had to stumble through weedy gravesites and trample over the long-dead bones of their inhabitants, but then I found a concrete road snaking through and followed that instead. There were no cockatoos that I could find, but lots of mosquitoes found me.

24 October

Early pearly in the dawn I set off for the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. Again, easy to get to but in this case quite drawn out. I left at 6.30 and got there at 8.10, mainly because after getting off at the Woodlands train station I had to wait almost an hour for the bus to Sungei Buloh to arrive. The Reserve is $1 entry on weekends and public holidays, free on the other days. Today is Tuesday. Sungei Buloh is smack in the middle of the Kranji industrial area and survives almost by virtue of an accident, but its there and its brilliant. I would say its much better than Kuala Selangor's Taman Alam. It is Singapore's first and only wetland reserve and is home to all manner of watery bird type things. Apparently there are saltwater crocodiles there as well but I didn't see any (or any smooth-coated otters for that matter). I did see a couple of spotted redshanks accompanying a little flock of common redshanks, and I was informed by some local birders that they are very rare here. If I go out deliberately in search of a rare bird (Gurney's pitta say) then I can almost guarantee I won't find it, but if I'm just out rambling looking for birds randomly then I tend to find rare things. Something along the lines of a bird version of Murphy's Law I guess. There were probably hundreds of whimbrels there, and dozens and dozens of common redshanks, common greenshanks, golden plovers and more collared kingfishers than I'd seen in the whole previous three months combined. Quite a lot of curlew sandpipers too, which were new for me. Couldn't find the little ringed plovers though, no matter how hard I searched (that's that Law coming into effect you see). Non-birds included the ever-present plantain squirrels, a tree-shrew, water monitors, and archerfish and halfbeaks in the water. Best animal of the day, though, and a big surprise, appeared in the middle of the day (exactly at midday in fact) when a bat flew down the trail, straight past my head and landed in a thicket. "That was a bat!" I said out loud in total surprise, but to no-one in particular seeing there was no-one else there. I snuck back down the path, the bat flew a little further and then landed on a bare branch where I could get a good look at it through my binoculars. It was a lesser dog-faced fruit bat (Cynopterus brachyotis), which is a type of flying fox but only a wee bit bigger than a very big mouse. It had huge Japanese-cartoon eyes and a teddy-bear head. By far the cutest bat I've seen so far. The photos would have been fantastic but, of course, I hadn't brought the zoom lens with me. Always the way!

On the way back on the train I passed the Townsville Primary School. That's where the Powerpuff Girls go!!!!!

25 October

Back for a return trip to Pulau Ubin was the order of the day today. Pulau Ubin, for those of you who have not been paying attention, is an island off the east coast of Singapore. Its quite close to Peninsula Malaysia so every so often big beasts swim across and make their presence known, things like tapirs, elephants and even a tiger. Most of the time, however, the biggest mammals you'll find are the wild pigs, which I saw last time and which I saw again this time. There were no hornbills in evidence this visit, but I did get several looks at red junglefowl (that's the ancestor of the domestic chicken and it looks like, well, a domestic chicken. Not all birds can be exciting...). Apparently they're quite difficult to spot on the island because they're kind of skittish. I didn't actually find anything new this time, but I still had fun cycling around. Also, because it was Wednesday there were almost no people there, unlike last time which was a weekend day and there were LOTS! I'd taken my zoom lens with me, but there was nothing good within range to use it on. Always the way, etc.

26 October

Today is the final day of my little sojourn through southeast Asia. On my first day of the trip I went to Bukit Timah in the middle of Singapore, and that is where I returned (coincidentally) on my last day. As you may recall, Bukit Timah is where I saw my first tree shrews and a paradise flying snake, and where I took a photo of a sign warning people not to feed the monkeys. There is another sign there now too, a big billboard style one with a photo of monkeys being fed from a car and the words "Stop feeding the monkeys. Help them return to the forest". It makes you feel sorry for the monkeys really. They're just trying to better themselves, move up the evolutionary ladder a bit, so they come out to meet the cars, stand up on their hind legs like little Rory Calhouns, and eat the human food they're given. But the park wants to beat them down and send them back to the jungle to grub in the dirt for their food like animals. Its sad. Personally I think the park is just scared of a 'Planet of the Apes' scenario arising.

I saw lots of monkeys today. I had no food. They all glared at me.

When I came into Singapore from Malaysia I had a list of 263 new birds for the trip. I thought it would be a good plan to see seven more before I left, to make an even 270. Its a nice round number. I got one on the 23rd (striped tit-babbler at the Bukit Brown cemetary), two waders on the 24th at Sungei Buloh, and nothing on the 25th on Pulau Ubin. I needed four more today. I didn't think it likely, but there was no harm in trying. I had forgotten how steep the path up the hill is at Bukit Timah. And there appeared to be somewhere in the region of several hundred thousand locals there for their early morning constitutionals, all either going up the hill or coming down. Most of the ones coming down were doing so backwards (its a Singapore thing), and most of them weren't checking what was behind them. So I'd be standing, perusing various bits of birdless vegetation through my binoculars, and some gormless idiot would come barging into me (of course from their point of view I was the gormless idiot, standing there not watching what was coming down the hill towards me). There were precious few birds along the main path, but even on the side paths there were still quite a number of people out walking. I was thinking I was going to have to settle for 266 new birds, but then I found a brown-streaked flycatcher, not a very exciting bird to look at but only a vagrant to Singapore so I guess that's worth something. While I was seeing the flycatcher, a Siberian blue robin turned up. This was a bird I'd heard calling in forests lately but been unable to see. Its really pretty, rich dark blue above, pure white below, and its tail constantly quivers like a tuning fork. A few minutes later what I thought was a big butterfly comes flooping out of the forest, lands on a branch about six feet away from me and turns into a bird. It was one of those moments of complete beflummoxment. It looked a brighter red than anything has a right to be, with a white underside, and I had no idea what it was. Then it turned its head and showed its giveaway kingfisher beak which had blended into its head when facing me, then it flew away. It was a rufous-backed kingfisher, smaller than a sparrow. According to my Craig Robson field guide to the birds of southeast Asia (which certainly doesn't picture it to its advantage) it is an uncommon visitor to Singapore. . So I just had one more bird to go. Would it be a jambu fruit dove, a blue-rumped parrot? Those were what I wanted, but instead the birds all dried up. I wandered for a few more hours. Saw a few things I'd seen before, met a few more gormless idiots, then finally (to my surprise) got the 270th species. It was the last of the six malkohas in the region, the chestnut-bellied, the one I thought I wasn't going to get after all. There was a pair of them. I didn't want to make a mistake, so I tried for the best view although they weren't the most co-operative of specimens. Then I checked the book. It turned out the only malkoha still found in Singapore is the chestnut-bellied, so it was final. Nice round number is 270. Then a 271st happened along. Luckily it was some kind of little warbler that I couldn't identify. So the number stayed at 270. Good bird to end on, the chestnut-bellied malkoha.

Quirky aside: outside the Cozy Corners Backpackers is a restaurant called Yukee Food House.

End.

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Comments

[Peter Ericsson]

You have been very persistent in your birding adventures. Thus you have been rewarded with plenty of memories. It surprises me you didn't connect with Striped Tit-Babbler in Thailand. It is everywhere if even a bit hard to see. It took me years to see the Rufous-backed Kingfisher. Well done!