50 amazing wildlife found in the Central Catchment Nature Reserve. Spot the odd one out! All adorable pixel animals by our resident artist Jacqueline Chua; Collage design by Adeline Koh.
The BES Drongos are back! We are here to celebrate Singapore’s big fifty with the natural heritage of the Central Catchment Nature Reserve (CCNR) – you can find all 50 amazing wildlife (as pictured above) in our nation’s largest nature reserve! (See, Singapore got wildlife what.)
CCNR is known as the green lung of Singapore, occupying up to 2800 hectares of lush greenery – housing a magnificent diversity of flora and fauna right at the heart of the city-state. A mixture of young and mature secondary forests, as well as retaining a small patch of virgin primary forest near MacRitchie Reservoir, CCNR is home to fascinating creatures such as the Crimson Sunbird, the slow loris, the Sunda pangolin and even the critically endangered Raffles’ banded langur.
Can you imagine a better way to celebrate national day than spending it in CCNR, walking through the verdant forests and observing dazzling flora and fauna? I can’t.
Keep your eyes peeled for the next 50 days as we bring you more interesting facts and figures on each of the fifty species – right on our Facebook page!
Also, stay tuned for more updates on the next guiding season – we are currently gearing up for public walks soon, with new stations and more entertaining stories from our guides!
Hello everybody! The BES Drongos are quickly gaining traction as they begin their first edition of Trail by Fire – a series of trails where selected members of the public (aka our friends) to join our walks and add that little bit of authenticity to our practice walks. Why “Trail by Fire”? It’s a pun on ‘trial by fire’, nature trail style.
Last Saturday’s trail saw us encountering new biodiversity, particularly birds! It was the first time that we, the BES Drongos, encountered our namesake – the Greater Racket Tailed Drongo! Its scientific name is Dicrurus paradiseus. The drongo is an immensely interesting bird, and not just because they are our mascot animal. They are visually very distinctive as they have a pair of long unique tail feathers called “rackets” as seen from the photo. They are excellent mimics and can imitate the calls of a variety of other birds, although they tend to attach a metallic ring to the end of the call, which is unique to this bird.
This picture of the drongo was captured during another trail at the Venus loop of the Macritchie Reservoir Park.
Drongos are also sneaky creatures. They are known to practice kleptoparasitism, which means that they often steal prey from other foraging animals such as macaques. One of their favorite tricks is to follow a flock of birds like babblers, and then make an alarm call to scare the foragers away while the drongo picks up the spoils. This is the story behind the BES Drongos’ tagline, “Follow that monkey!”.
As we were walking through the trail near the entrance to the Petai Trail, we heard a distinctive call that reminded us of a rooster. These were the calls of Red Jungle Fowl, also known as jungle chickens! Red jungle fowl are essentially the ancestors of our domestic chickens, and can be distinguished from them by their white ear flaps.
This picture of the red jungle fowl was captured during another trail at the Venus loop of the Macritchie Reservoir Park.
Red jungle fowl also distinguish themselves from their more placid descendants in that they can fly, often flapping their way up trees to escape predators! Their call also differs from domestic chickens in that the end is cut off (sounds kinda like it has a sore throat). An excellent example of this call can be heard in the Youtube video below:
This beautiful bird perched on the tree overlooking a large water body near the end of the trail is a Blue-throated Bee Eater. This bird is not a permanent resident of Singapore. Instead, it migrates around the SEA region seasonally. They normally visit during their breeding season, although they are sometimes also classified as uncommon winter migrants (that means that they spend time here during winter, but rarely). They are insectivores that favor flying insects, and the one that we saw was eating dragonflies that it picked off from the surface of the water. When taking venomous prey or prey with stings, they will “wipe” their prey against their perch to get rid of the venom or sting. This is probably where they get their name from; they basically specialize in eating stinging insects that other birds find unappetizing.
The photo below is of a bird that is as yet not properly identified because it is unclear, but we suspect that it is a Pin-Striped tit-babbler. During the trail, we may have also seen a forest babbler but failed to get a photo.
Babblers are common residents in most of our nature reserves in Singapore, including the Central Catchment Nature Reserve. They can be noisy little birds with a distinctive and repetitive call, as seen in this Youtube video:
Babblers are important to note because they are one of the vulnerable bird groups that could be affected detrimentally should the Cross Island Line be built through the Central Catchment Nature Reserve. This is because certain species like Abbott’s babbler can only live in the lower story of mature secondary or primary forest, which is obviously quite scarce in rapidly urbanizing Singapore. Because of their small size, these birds also dislike flying across large open spaces. As fragmentation occurs due to the building of developments across the nature reserve, these birds are unlikely to travel between forest fragments. Thus, their breeding potential is limited and their gene pools are reduced due to less mixing between populations.
We hope you have enjoyed this short sharing on some of our discoveries on the Petai Trail at Macritchie Reservoir Park. Each trip is an eye-opening experience and as you can tell from our posts, we never cease to find something new and unexpected each time! More Trails by Fire will take place over the next few weeks. We will be providing more information on the impacts that developments within nature reserves can create, such as forest fragmentation and soil disturbance in future blog posts, so keep an eye out for them. For now, pop by the Love Our Macritchie Forest website, run by the Toddycats, to find out more about how the Cross Island Line can impact the Central Catchment Nature Reserve.
Credits to Jacqueline Chua for the photos.
For more awesome photos, check out our Flickr page!
The BES Drongos adventures on the Petai Trail and more!
BES Drongos | Follow that monkey! 