Day 10 (cont'd) - Some Wilderness

Time for the resident Singaporean to post a blog or two I guess, considering a large portion of environmental advocacy such as information dissemination and event organizing in this country is done through mailing lists, blogs, Facebook, websites, RSS feeds, and yes, even Twitter. (Phone plans here generally give tonnes of free text messages and not so much talk time - say 100 minutes or so? - and so Twitter is much more cost-effective here.)

To continue from Isaac's post about Day 10 and our trip to MacRitchie, I thought I'd include some photos of wildlife. Yes, even though Singapore is a small island with 4.6 million people on it, there is still some "wildlife" to be found.

Part of the MacRitchie Reservoir trail branched off to the treetop walk. A few of us missed it at first, even though it was clearly labelled as such, and actually headed further up the trail where it simply ended in an open space. Uh. Weird. We thought, surely we should be going up and not branching off towards steps that lead downwards right? Well, wrong. Anyway, the coolest thing about the the treetop walk? Not the suspension bridge in the canopy, not the giant blue beetles or cicadas that were buzzing about, but the sleepiest cutest owl I have ever seen in my life. (Ok, so I haven't seen many owls in my life.)


The ranger at the start of the bridge warned that we should be real quiet, "or else the mother (owl) will fly away and then what happen? - the monkey will come and eat the eggs... but if not, two weeks later, you can see the chicks." And when we got to the tree that the owl was in, I realised why. The bridge was an approximate 3 metres (9 feet) or so away from the tree, and we were quite literally towering over the bird and its home. I felt like we were a disturbance. It seemed a tad uneasy and was watching us instead of sleeping - which should be what most owls do during the day, right? Anyway, a quick snapshot of the bird and we were on our way. I grimace just thinking of the large group of hikers that followed behind us. Thankfully, they were quiet, but I now grimace further thinking of those groups that didn't heed the ranger's advice to be quiet. I really really hope the owl hangs in there and that her chicks will eventually fledge!