Back on my travels again after a short break at home, and I’m off East: to Singapore and then (for a whole day!) to Sydney, Australia. And the timing couldn’t be much better, as I arrived in Singapore just a week after the 25th Singapore Bird Race. The winning team, ‘Strix’, managed to find a whopping 142 species - many of the best ones (flycatchers and babblers and Siberian Blue Robins, which are the ‘best ones’ as far as I was concerned) in the beautiful Sime/Central Catchment Forest area where I’d decided to go (and have in fact decided to go many times before - eg Sime Forest, April 2008). The sun was shining, the clouds were high, I was actually feeling pretty good considering the 8 hour time change and that Jo and Evie were just going to bed as I was getting up: surely I was in for a bumper morning?

Macritchie Reservoir and the Central Catchment forest

Well, of course I was. I’m not so blase yet that I don’t know that any morning spent wandering around a (steamy, sweaty, and very hot) forest in Singapore is going to count as ‘bumper’ - it’s not EVERY day I get to see amazing tropical species like the Asian Fairy-bluebird after all (and even if I did I ought to be grateful - just look at that BLUE in the photos below!). Yet, there weren’t quite the numbers of birds I was hoping for…

 

 

Male Asian Fairy-bluebird Irena puella
The latest IOC list places the two fairy-bluebird species between white-eyes and goldcrests - an interesting placement considering it behaves and looks like neither of its ‘closest’ relatives.

If that last sentence seems a bit - well, ‘ungrateful’ let me explain. It does have to be acknowledged that a) birding in the tropics is hard work - it’s hot, the birds are absolute masters at slipping through tangles of undergrowth that you’d think water couldn’t find a path through, and you can go long periods seeing very little and hearing nothing but cicadas, and, more importantly, b) there has been a tragic decline in many of Asia’s bird species. Numbers of birds that would have been common just a few decades ago have plummeted - eg populations of formerly widespread migrants like Brown Shrike and Yellow-rumped Flycatcher seem to have dropped off the metaphoric cliff, and many of Singapore’s resident forest species have suffered from habitat clearance. It’s worth bearing in mind that just a hundred years ago Singapore - now a business/shopping hub with a population of over 4 and a half million people - was largely clothed in forest. The Central Catchment area is basically what’s left, and according to “An Annotated Checklist of the Birds of Singapore” (Raffles Bulletin of Zology, 2007) of 104 resident forest birds recorded since 1819 a depressing 41 (or 39.4%) have become locally extinct.

In essence the changes that have taken place on Singapore are a mirror of all the changes afflicting the whole of Asia’s birds. Massive deforestation is still taking place throughout tropical Asia (currently to grow oil palms for bio-diesels which will never make up for the enormous amounts of carbon released by burning down the original forests), huge areas of mangroves have been lost (often to feed the western appetite for Tiger prawns) which used to support a wonderful bio-diversity, and the fertile land around river deltas that used to support huge numbers of birds migrants and residents have been converted into towns and farmland which principally support us humans alone.

It’s a scenario being repeated all over the world of course, and it makes the fact that any birds survive at all something of a miracle (in my opinion anyway). It’s what makes seeing any migrant in the relatively small and less-than-ideal Central Catchment (it’s heavily disturbed and the noise levels from the nearby highways and overflying aircraft are surprisingly pervasive) such an experience. A hot, sweaty, and muddy experience at that!

Talking of which one of the first birds I saw at all well (which certainly doesn’t describe a female/imm Siberian Blue Robin I saw for just a few seconds as it landed silently on a thin branch about a foot off the ground, shivered its stumpy tail, twitched its spindly pink legs, and then vanished into the shadows right in front of me as if it had been tele-ported) was definitely an experience I’ll remember. I’d gone off the main track looking for a second Sib Blue Robin (see the last sentence to work out why I don’t have any photos of this one either) when I saw a small heron standing in a shaft of sunlight by a series of shallow pools. It was posing like one of those cartoons where a beam of light is piercing a stained-glass window and illuminating a particularly blessed member of the congregation - its beak upturned and standing totally still as if receiving a message of great importance (though quite what message herons ever get is beyond even my imaginings right now). A beautiful sight in fact, made even more beautiful when I realised that it wasn’t in fact a Striated Heron as I’d assumed, but a much scarcer and much less frequently seen member of the Ardeidae - a female or 1st winter Schrenk’s Bittern (a bird I’ve only ever seen a couple of times before)…

Female or 1st winter Schrenk’s Bittern Ixobrychus eurhythmus

Schrenk’s Bittern breeds in northern Asia and Siberia and winters across south-east Asia. It’s a bird though that’s declining and listed as Globally near-threatened, and which appears in only very low numbers in Singapore. Numbers peak in early November so whilst not an entirely unexpected species to see, I certainly didn’t expect to find one in the depths of a forest while looking for a Blue Robin! Almost inevitably I broke into whatever reverie it was in and after a minute or so it skittered away into the undergrowth. I didn’t follow it: much as I’d have like better views I wasn’t going to get any (it knew I was there), I don’t like going ‘off-track’ if I can help it, and I’d already stepped into some evil-smelling mud and wasn’t particularly keen to step in any more.

Much of the birding in the Central Catchment takes place from a series of well-marked trails anyway, and many birds are seen as they either cross the trails or feed in undergrowth along them (the shy Emerald Dove is easiest to see well when it’s on a trail rather than in the forest for example, and Forest Wagtails seem to often feed along trail-edges). The Bluebird in the photos above was in a fruit tree right by the Golf Link trail, as was a Crow-billed Drongo, a female Asian Paradise Flycatcher, a pair of Crimson Sunbird, and an Arctic Warbler I saw later.

1st winter Crow-billed Drongo Dicrurus annectans

 

Female Asian Paradise-flycatcher Terpsiphone paradisi

Another set of birds best seen along the trails - and I suspect mainly because the secondary forest is too dense to give much of a view of anything when you try to get inside it - is the various bulbuls that still survive on Singapore. The island currently supports or is visited by twelve species (a couple of which are introduced), and a diligent search even by a jet-lagged Brit usually turns up at least three or four in the catchment. On this occasion I had my best ever views of the rather plain (but nationally near-theatened) Cream-vented Bulbul as well as good but unphotographable views of the very scarce (on Singapore at least) Red-eyed Bulbul which is even plainer and harder to see…

Cream-vented Bulbul Pycnonotus simplex

Virtually all the sightings here seem to be made against the backdrop of the mechanical calls of Greater Racket-tailed Drongos and the ‘chunk-chunk’ of Striped Tit-babblers (click here to hear a recording I made in March this year), both of which are reasonably common. It does all add up to a fascinating mix of sounds and sightings - but - going back to my initial paragraphs - you do have to wonder how many more birds there would have been fifty or a hundred years ago. I saw very few migrants really, and for anyone reading this and thinking “Well, of course there were more birds fifty or a hundred years ago” think what that response really means about how we’ve become so accustomed to losing birds that we almost take it for granted now…

Having said that, I’m going to end on a positive note, because I did see a species that whilst not all that rare is dependent on thick forest - and is undeniably exotic: the Chestnut-bellied Malkoha (a relative of the cuckoos). There are much better photos on the web (take a look at this series on the Bird Ecology Study Group website for example), but I still like this one. There’s just something about that slightly cocked tilt to the head, the curious expression, and of course that odd pale lime-green bill that I find very appealing. The fact that it’s still surviving - albeit in small numbers - on a developed island like Singapore is a wonderful thing too. Long may it do so…

Chestnut-bellied Malkoha Phaenicophaeus sumatranus

Bird List (Highlights only. New for the Year underlined)
Striated Heron Butorides striatus 1; Schrenck’s Bittern Ixobrychus eurhythmus 1; White-bellied Sea Eagle Haliaeetus leucogaster 1; Emerald Dove Chalcophaps indica 3; Chestnut-bellied Malkoha Phaenicophaeus sumatranus 1; Blue-throated Bee-eater Merops viridis 3; Blue-tailed Bee-eater Merops philippinus 1; Banded Woodpecker Picus miniaceus 1; Laced Woodpecker Picus vittatus 1; Cream-vented Bulbul Pycnonotus simplex 4; Red-eyed Bulbul Pycnonotus brunneus 1; Arctic Warbler Phylloscopus borealis 1; Siberian Blue Robin Luscinia cyane 2; Asian Paradise-flycatcher Terpsiphone paradisi 1; Crimson Sunbird Aethopyga siparaja 3; Asian Fairy-bluebird Irena puella 1; Crow-billed Drongo Dicrurus annectans 1

After my morning out I was fortunate enough to meet up with YC Wee (and his wife) and KC Tsang for dinner. Both are founder members of the Bird Ecology Study Group, which has an excellent blog that is strongly recommended to anyone interested in the birds of this region. YC and KC are both highly entertaining and interesting men incidentally, and we had a fascinating chat during which I aired some of my opinions and ideas regarding blogging and conservation (I can only hope they enjoyed it as much as I did!). My thanks to them for meeting and putting up with a rather jet-lagged (and vegetarian) birder who - as usual - asked far more questions than was probably polite…

I’ll be back in Singapore in a day or two and hopefully getting out again, by the way, so if you like photos of birds like these please check 10,000 Birds again soon…

All photos copyright Charlie Moores 2008