DAY THREE - the one with the otters
The flight from Sydney was scheduled to leave at 8.45pm and to arrive in Singapore at 3.15am, and the plan then was to go animaling all day from dawn to as far into the night as it took to find a pangolin. Then there would be a few hours sleep before getting up at dawn to repeat it all over again. There wasn't a whole lot of sleeping going on in these first days of the trip. I'd only had about five hours sleep over the past forty hours or so before the flight out of Sydney so I was hoping to get some sleep on the plane, and I intended to catch a few winks at the Singapore airport after landing while waiting for the buses to start running. As it happened I did get maybe four or five hours on the plane, which apparently was enough because when I was off the plane I couldn't sleep at all. Instead I just sat around and wrote trip-notes until about 5.30am.
From earlier visits to Singapore I already had an EZY-Link card (one of the public transport cards I discussed previously in the thread). I wasn't sure if it was still valid, so I went to the train station inside the airport and found that there was SG$2 remaining and that the card wouldn't expire until March next year. I topped it up with another SG$20 which was an estimate based on how many buses and trains I had planned to take over the next two days. All the routes and fares for Singapore transport are available online making it possible to work this out fairly accurately, but I ended up making some small changes in my itinerary as I went and hence didn't need to take as many buses as expected. When I left Singapore I had about SG$8 left on the card.
My first wildlife site to visit would be Pasir Ris park. Landing in Singapore at 3.15am might seem like an annoying thing but actually it was perfect for me. Pasir Ris is only twenty minutes by bus from the airport, the airport bus goes right past the park, and they start running at 5.30am. I could leave my pack in the bag storage facility at the airport, go birding all morning, then just go back to the airport, pick up my pack, and head off to the hostel I had pre-booked. And Pasir Ris at dawn is a well-known site for Smooth-coated Otters. Honestly, I don't know why anyone
wouldn't want to fly into Singapore at 3am.
I arrived at the park at dawn and walked along the road to the bridge over the canal which runs along one side of the park. This was supposed to be a good otter viewpoint. I looked up the length of the canal in the morning gloom. First animal I saw was a Grey Heron. Second animal I saw was a Smooth-coated Otter. As easy as that.
There was a whole group of the otters; five of them in fact. They were quite far away, all the way up at the next bridge, but they were on the bank rather than swiming away in the opposite direction so that was a good start. I started heading that way through the park but before even getting halfway the otters all up and left. Fortunately they didn't go back into the canal. Instead they started loping across the park itself, eventually ending up in a fishing lake in the centre where, utterly ignoring all the early-morning fishermen, they started fishing for their own breakfast. It turned out that these otters are clearly quite used to people. I was standing within a couple of metres of them, on the shore, while they chased fish right in front of me. Sadly, with the relatively low light levels and the otters' constant activity none of the photos turned out properly. I did get some partly-usable photos as they left the fishing lake and headed back to the canal.
Apart for the otters Pasir Ris is supposed to be a very good birding location, and so it proved to be. There are quite a range of habitats in the park, including regular parkiness, mangrove forest, sandy beaches, canals, ponds, and patches of "forest". Chickens are roaming about everywhere. I had a recollection that Pasir Ris was a site for genuine Red Junglefowl, and these did look like real wild ones as opposed to the variety one gets amongst feral chickens, so I was going back and forth on whether to include them on my list of wild birds for the day. Much later when I had some internet access I checked up on them and while there is a local movement to have them recognised as genuine Red Junglefowl the official view is that they are feral domestic stock.
There is a list of birds seen this day at the bottom of this post. The most interesting was right after the otters had left. I spotted a group of birds fly into the very top of a tree and when I got my binoculars on their landing spot I saw a small green parrot. It had its head facing away from me so I could only see its back. My first thought was Indian Ringneck, simply because it looked entirely green. Then it lifted its head and I realised that it was a Monk Parakeet, which is from South America and is a species I had totally not expected to be seeing here. Singapore is full of introduced species - at least seven of the birds I saw today (and two of the reptiles) are not native here - but I didn't even know that Monk Parakeets were amongst them. Honestly I wouldn't have counted them at all, but I followed them as they flew from the tree and saw that they had a nest. Looking online, they have been nesting at Pasir Ris for at least two years, and the species has been recorded nesting elsewhere in Singapore as well. So I'm counting them.
The photo above is the nest of the Monk Parakeets, built in one of the towers which support spotlights (to light the park at night). This species is unique amongst parrots in building an actual nest, a massive structure of sticks in which they nest colonially. Other parrots nest singly in holes, usually in trees.
A little bit later I saw three further introduced parrot species: a single Lesser Sulphur-crested Cockatoo feeding in a tree, a flock of Moustached Parakeets (a very common introduced species in Singapore), and lastly Indian Ringneck.
My accommodation in Singapore was a place called Jamilla Boutique Inn, booked through Agoda before leaving New Zealand. I usually stay at Cozy Corners when in Singapore but it really is a dump, so I decided to try somewhere new this time. The four-bed dorm was surprisingly cheap for Singapore (NZ$38 for two nights). Surprisingly cheap? Wait, suspiciously cheap is what I meant to say. The photos on Agoda looked nice, the descriptions sounded nice, there weren't many reviews of it but the ones that were there were fine. Yeah, no, not so much. The name "boutique inn" should have been a giveaway when used for a hostel. Later I found it had been through a few name changes, hence the lack of bad reviews. Change the name every few months; avoid the bad reviews haunting you.
Calling it a "boutique inn" is like finding a dead alley-cat on the road and entering it in a cat show as a pedigree Burmese. More like "poo-tique inn". It's what I fondly like to call a "death-trap hostel", where if there was a fire then everybody dies because the rooms have no windows and the only escape is via long corridors lined with the doors of similarly windowless rooms. I'm always uncomfortable staying in places like that.
The check-in time for Jamilla wasn't until 3pm, so I stayed at Pasir Ris until around noon-ish, then picked up my bag from the airport and caught a train across the city to Lavendar station. The street names on Google Maps aren't entirely accurate so I spent a little longer wandering around trying to find the hostel than I should have done, but I got there eventually, and after depositing my pack in the room I went off and caught a bus straight out to the most important place in Singapore - the place where I would be looking for a pangolin.
Pangolins are a little bit like unicorns for mammalwatchers. Everyone wants to see them but nobody can find them. There probably
is more chance of finding a unicorn than a pangolin for most people. I've been going to Asia for over ten years and have never seen one. Lintworm went to Asia once and saw one. Never have congratulations been offered through such gritted teeth before.
Singapore seems like an unlikely place as being the best locality for finding wild pangolins, but I think that it might be in exactly such a position. There is still a surprising amount of forest on the island, Singapore's wildlife laws seem to be strong and enforced nowadays, and there have also been releases of smuggled pangolins here. Apparently the BBC even did a documentary on one of the Singapore sites of these releases (at Bukit Timah). Unfortunately for mammalwatchers most of Singapore's protected forest areas are off-limits after dark, with the potential for hefty fines if caught. However, Vladimir Dinets found a pangolin on a public track through a patch of forest which is outside the reserves and can therefore be visited during the night. Since he was there a number of other mammalwatchers have visited the trail and also seen the pangolin. I don't actually know how "guaranteed" it is to see a pangolin there because rarely do you read reports of failure from animal-watchers. If you believe only trip reports then everybody has success at all times when looking for animals. Having said that, I know a lot of people
have seen pangolin there first try, including lintworm, so that's where I was going.
The trail was on the other side of the island from where all the hostels are clustered in the south. I had specifically looked for a closer accommodation but there didn't appear to be much outside that main hotel area. By bus it was an hour away. The driver didn't know the name of the road I needed. I told him I knew where I was going which wasn't exactly true, but I knew how long it should take to get there (from the bus schedules available online) and just kept an eye out for street signs.
I only had an hour or so before dark when I reached the trail. I had expected there to be a lot of bird activity at the end of the day, but literally the only bird I saw was a Greater Racquet-tailed Drongo. This meant that I successfully photographed every bird I saw at this location.
Unusually there were a lot more mammals around than birds. Wild Pigs were common, with several groups being encountered, as well as Slender Squirrels and Greater Tree Shrews. While trying to photograph one of the tree shrews (unsuccessfully) I was surprised by an large orange mammal clambering up a sapling behind the pandanus grove in which the tree shrew was foraging. As strange as it sounds, my first thought was that it was some sort of possum. I mean, I knew it wasn't because I was in Singapore and not Australia, but that was the immediate impression. It turned out to be a Colugo, looking a lot brighter in person than it appears in the photo below (I think because this was at the end of the day when the light was fading, so the camera didn't pick up the colours properly). It must have been roosting almost at ground level for some reason.
Lintworm had given me a rough idea of how far along the trail he had seen his pangolin. Right at the mid-point between his hundreds-of-metres estimates I had found a burrow. Right in the face of a sand-bank, easily visible from the trail. Was it a pangolin burrow? I couldn't think of anything else ground-dwelling that was the right size, and it had been used fairly recently by the look of the soil sprayed outside the entrance. Once dusk was falling I went back to the burrow to keep watch.
The trail was apparently a regular running and cycling track. Even after dark there were people rushing past on foot or wheels, all of whom seemed really surprised to come across a random person just standing on the side of the trail in the dark. Despite the sun having gone down I could just see the burrow entrance well enough to tell whether anything might be moving. Nothing did. After a good while of staring at a sand bank in the dark I started doubting whether this was a good strategy. I didn't actually know if it was a pangolin burrow and even if it was I didn't know if it was occupied or whether the pangolin might have more than one burrow. What if I was standing here like an idiot while a hundred metres further along the track a pangolin was just hanging out in plain view? Eventually I broke and decided to wander up and down the trail. Two hours later I was getting a bit sick of seeing nothing. I mean, not just no pangolins, but no anything. Not a mouse or mouse deer was I seeing. Also all the stars had been obliterated and thunder and lightning were promising me that it was about to start pouring down. Spotlighting sucks.
One more pass along the stretch of the trail and I would give it up. I reached the burrow for about the seventh time that night; no pangolins. The most annoying thing about trying to find a pangolin is that their eyes are so small that they don't give off any eye-shine. Even spiders have prominent eye-shine but not a pangolin. Instead you have to listen for them, which is something I'm not good at. Twenty metres past the burrow, I heard "something" crunching in the dead leaves covering the ground just near the path. Something not too big but not too small. I scanned the area from which I thought the noise was coming and saw nothing. I scanned the areas from which I
didn't think the noise was coming, and saw even more nothing. I scanned again, and the noise stopped. Had it been spooked by the light? I stared at the patch of forest lit by the torchbeam... more staring ... I suddenly realised I was staring directly at the pangolin. Probably the only reason I realised this was because the pangolin started moving. I had no idea that the scale-covered body would merge so imperceptibly into the dead leaves covering the ground. It may as well have been invisible.
Normally I don't take my camera out when I'm spotlighting. I don't like using flash on animals, and nocturnal sightings are often so brief that I'd rather look at the animal than try to get a photo. This night I did have my camera though, because the chance of anyone believing I had actually found a pangolin was slim unless I had proof. Unfortunately I discovered that I needed one hand to hold the torch, one hand to hold the camera, and one hand to focus the camera. The pangolin didn't seem bothered by me and had kept on foraging around in the leaves while I was trying to work out my one-hand-short dilemma. I suspect that the reason I saw the pangolin so well was precisely because I
couldn't take its photo. It probably knew that. So well did the pangolin know it, that it walked out onto the trail, literally a couple of feet away from me and stopped, daring me to figure out my camera. I took its photo. I had the camera on the wrong setting. The pangolin got bored with my incompetance and scuttled off the other side of the trail, shuffled noisily down the slope and disappeared. If I had come along five or ten minutes later than I did, I wouldn't have even known it had been there.
I haven't uploaded the pangolin photo to the gallery because we have rules about being able to tell what the animal in a photo is. In fact the photo actually makes my story even
less believable, because it really does look like I just took a bad photo of a picture on a computer. It was so close to the camera that only the head and forefeet are visible, and it is out of focus and just awful all round. Still, regardless, that made three new mammals in three days! (That's Sugar Glider on day one, Brown Antechinus on day two, Sunda Pangolin on day three). Would I get a fourth on day four...? Well, no.
The last bus back to town was near midnight - in my trip-plan I had been contemplating whether I would just stay out all night looking or go until 11.30-ish and then try again the following night. Now I didn't need to do either. I got back to the "boutique inn" right as the rain was starting. It would continue for pretty much the next week or so.
Tomorrow I would be going to Jurong Bird Park.
Animals seen today:
BIRDS:
Grey Heron
Ardea cinerea
Striated Heron
Butorides striatus
Germain's Swiftlet
Collocalia germani
Monk (Quaker) Parakeet Myiopsitta monachus
Feral Chicken ["Red Junglefowl"]
Gallus gallus
Pink-necked Green Pigeon
Treron vernans
Collared Kingfisher
Todiramphus chloris
Oriental Magpie-Robin
Copsychus saularis
Asian Koel
Eudynamys scolopacea
Oriental White-eye
Zosterops palpebrosa
Sunda Pigmy Woodpecker
Dendrocopos moluccensis
White-breasted Waterhen
Amaurornis phoenicurus
Red-whiskered Bulbul
Pycnonotus jocosus
Olive-backed Sunbird
Nectarinia jugularis
Yellow-vented Bulbul
Pycnonotus goiavier
Black-naped Oriole
Oriolus chinensis
Javan Mynah
Acridotheres javanicus
Spotted Dove
Streptopelia chinensis
House Crow
Corvus splendens
Common Mynah
Acridotheres tristis
Brahminy Kite
Haliastur indus
Lesser Sulphur-crested Cockatoo
Cacatua sulphurea
Moustached Parakeet
Psittacula alexandri
Common Sandpiper
Actitis hypoleucos
Pacific Swallow
Hirundo tahitica
Dollarbird
Eurystomus orientalis
Indian Ringneck Parakeet
Psittacula krameri
Little Egret
Egretta garzetta
Stork-billed Kingfisher
Halcyon capensis
Feral Pigeon
Columba livia
Tree Sparrow
Passer montanus
Zebra Dove
Geopelia striata
Greater Racquet-tailed Drongo
Dicrurus paradiseus
MAMMALS:
Smooth-coated Otter
Lutrogale perspicillata
Plantain squirrel
Callosciurus notatus
Wild Pig
Sus scrofa (vittatus)
Colugo
Cynocephalus variegatus
Common Tree Shrew
Tupaia glis
Slender Squirrel
Sundasciurus tenuis
Sunda Pangolin Manis javanica
REPTILES:
Asian Water Monitor
Varanus salvator
Red-eared Terrapin
Trachemys scripta elegans
Garden Lizard
Calotes versicolor
