anna_wing

I was in Singapore for a few days for work, was pleased to see that Changi Airport is completely back to normal (though plane-ticket prices, alas, are not).

1 I managed to get a weekday morning to go to see the newly-opened Bird Paradise

https://www.mandai.com/en/bird-paradise.html.

Wow.

This is the new version of the Bird Park, which was a zoo specialising in birds, as the name indicates, in a different location. Instead of individual cages per species, there are now eight gigantic walk-in aviaries/habitats, and the birds of that region are all there together. It's really rather amazing and the birds seem happy (except one pacing cassowary with its own enclosure; hopefully its mood will improve as the vegetation in its new habitat becomes more jungly). In the "Heart of Africa" aviary the tailor-birds had a couple of dozen nests already constructed, and a flock of African Grey parrots was busy chewing on the nice new rain-shelter next to the artificial cliff built for the black ibises. I saw several different pigeons nesting, small finchy things flying around with bits of grass in their beaks, and a Razor-Billed Curassow nesting in an actual Bird's-Nest Fern (Asplenium nidus).

The overhead netting looks sufficiently strong to deter the (wild) Brahminy Kite I saw circling thoughtfully above, doubtless wondering how to get to the buffet...

The only place where there were individual cages was the section for the endangered species in special breeding programmes. The Philippine Eagles, alas, have not yet produced offspring, and since they are monogamous, the zoo can't just introduce a third bird in the hopes that it takes the fancy of one of the pair. I don't think the site is complete yet. There were no raptors on display, and I saw some construction work still ongoing, so that might be for them.

Visitor numbers are controlled, so it's best to book a time-slot for entry on-line before you go. It's absolutely fabulous. You could also do the regular zoo and the Night Safari (night zoo for nocturnal animals), which are on the same site, on the same day (the Night Safari opens from 6pm to midnight), but I didn't have either the time or the stamina for that.

2 And after dinner one evening, while strolling through the shopping-centre where the restaurant was, I found a pop-up stall from a local company called Zotelier selling lovely cotton clothes in traditional indigo Japanese designs.

https://zoteliersg.com/

Styles are Japanese ie straight, loose cuts, with a somewhat 1920s look to the dresses, very good for the straight body type, and BOTH BLOUSES AND DRESSES HAD POCKETS. I am an M in their styles, which is my size in the West (in Uniqlo I'm an XL, for context). The saleswoman said that they had run out of L at the stall but they'd be available on-line. The website gives sizing measurements anyway. I bought several pieces and will buy more. They'll be very handy for informal wear in hot climates and seasons. And anyone who puts pockets into their dresses and their tops deserves my custom.

- The red-whiskered bulbuls appear to have thought better of the Bad Tree (possibly the sight of all three cats taking turns to sit below and look up thoughtfully had its effect). I haven't seen them lately, so they may have gone next door.

- While going home myself one day, I noticed a small, oblong fruit in a fetching shade of deep rose-pink hanging off a vine growing by the side of the road (obviously feral, that side is a clump of random weeds fighting it out on the remains of a fence). My driver said that it was edible while green but only used for seeds while red i.e. ripe. I identified it after a bit of online research as a Coccinia grandis aka ivy gourd, scarlet gourd, kundru or tindora, an edible cucurbit known in India and Southeast Asia. The leaves make soup, and the small fruits (4-5cm long) can be eaten like cucumber when they are green. It grows very fast, so in some places is regarded as an introduced pest.

https://www.naturebring.com/grow-ivy-gourd-growing-coccinia-grandis-tindora/

I have quite a lot of pergolas to cover at the office, so I gave the two fruits (chock-full of seeds) to the garden company that maintains the grounds, and have just been told that they sprouted and are growing nicely. It's locally known to come in either sweet or bitter forms; this particular specimen is luckily sweet. They'll be planted out soon, though it may be a year or so before they fruit. I'll get a plant for my own garden too, if I can find a suitable spot. Perhaps against one of the walls.

All three dragonfruit (mine are supposed to be Hylocerus costaricencis the shocking-pink skinned with dark-pink-fleshed species) are now budding! The first two flowers I mentioned in the previous post finally bloomed gorgeously one night and the fruit set successfully (this species self-pollinates, apparently).

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hylocerus+costaricencis+flowers&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

The smell is strong but rather unpleasant, unfortunately, and the flowers only last one night, but they are incredibly beautiful. Like arboreal waterlilies.


We are buying dried rice sheaves from the market and hanging them from a light bamboo frame, and all manner of small seed-eating birds have shown up. Munias, sparrows, various finch/thrush/bulbul-type things.

The yellow-vented bulbuls have raised one chick to fledgling age! Housekeeper saw it sitting on a branch and got a photo. A major improvement over last year, when they lost an entire clutch, and possibly two. Whichever Vala defends the dim-witted was working overtime this year.

The sparrows managed to get at least a couple to adulthood too, though they lost at least three. The crows (and presumably at least a couple of koels) seem to be fine, but they nest too high up for us to tell.

Some action in the areca palms this morning. The local squirrel showed up to finish the last of the fruit (the cats still there visibly hoping that it will fall, but no luck so far), followed by a pair of crows raiding the stems for nesting material.

Nesting season is starting, so crows are everywhere, flying busily about with twigs in their beaks, and tugging furiously at likely bits of bush in the office garden. The koels aka Asian Cuckoos, are more in evidence too, getting ready to parasitise crow nests. One flew into the glass windows next to my front door (unlike everyone else, who used to fly into the glass patio doors at the back, until I put up the anti-birdstrike decals), but fortunately didn't kill itself the way the smaller birds tend to. Since the cats aren't allowed in the front, it had a bit of time to sit and recover before flying off, without being killed and eaten on the spot.

The sparrows are back in AirBnB. We cleaned out the old nests last year, so they have re-built, this time clearly with the remains of an old string mop.

I have given up on the kaffir lime, since it produces neither fruit nor useable leaves, and isn't that ornamental either. Now thinking what I can replace it with. A different citrus, possibly.

We put the anti-bird decals on the glass door at first, but didn't think of the side glass walls, because they usually have blinds and such behind them so we thought it wouldn't be necessary. But we found a young kingfisher dead in the pool, so the remaining decals have been applied to the side-walls now.

The garden is doing nicely, as the rainy season ends with a bang. Next door's garden was struck by lightning over the weekend. I thought it was my house as first, because I felt the bang, and the long vibration that followed. I was also dazzled by the flash, so I didn't mistake it for an earthquake. Luckily no-one was hurt, but my driver got a mild electric shock from the ground.

We now have some dragonfruit plants growing up concrete posts that have just been installed in the garden., and a couple of pots of Piper sarmentosum, the wild betel, which is an ingredient in mixed-herb rice. I'm wondering whether to get in some Piper nigrum, the culinary black pepper, just for fun. The citron is still fruiting, though this batch are only the size of large lemons, rather than the 1.5kg monsters of last year. More fertiliser and compost have been applied. The kaffir lime continues to disappoint: no fruit and the leaves aren't as fragrant as they should be. It's just not a good variety, understandably so since kaffir lime is not a major culinary herb here the way it is in other countries. I am thinking about whether to cut it down, but the leaves are still usable, I just need more to get the same effect. The calamondin lime continues fruiting to an acceptable degree. I've also noticed a random, unknown citrus in the corner, which I shall have to ask the gardeners about.

I've managed to get some Feliway a week ago, which we are now using. No discernible effect yet on the stress-licking by Lap-Cat and Bus-Stop Cat. Scaredy-Cat, the cattiest, least human-oriented of them, has had no issues, and his fur is fine.

One half-fledged baby sparrow found dead on the ground, a surprising distance from the nest. Probably it fell or was pushed from the nest during the night, and hopped along until dying of hypothermia. At that size, it's very easy, especially if it was caught in the rain...

Very few of our clutches actually raise more than one to adulthood.

The new-season red-whiskered bulbul, now adultish, has been spotted! It's still alive!

Mango season is ending, we are now getting the tail-end varieties. The freezer is being restocked with the makings of the coming year's mango ice-cream supply. The citrons on the tree are getting bigger, and one appears to be ripening, which is several months early, but what with climate change and all, seasons are no longer as regular and predictable as they used to be.

The Default Dog family outside my office building has six puppies, whom we count anxiously every day. The local stray dogs are basically urban dingoes - light brown, medium-sizd, slim, sharp-muzzled, prick-eared, often curly-tailed. What you get when you stop trying to maintain pure breeding types. Similarly, the local stray cats are basically the Default Cat (Oriental Type) - slim, long bodies, legs and tails, sharp muzzled and coat-wise mostly variations on the theme of tabby. Though there's one who looks as if there was some Siamese in its ancestry, apart from a long, ringed tail, and one that has some of the stockier, black-and-white type in him as well.

All the dogs in the city tend to howl in unison at some point between midnight and 1 am every night.

Or alternatively, a case of both triumph and disaster.

The Red-whiskered Bulbuls' nest got raided by a Greater Coucal! Housekeeper saw and screamed, driving it off, but not before it managed to kill one of the fledgelings in the nest. The other fledgeling managed to flutter to safety, and was retrieved by Housekeeper and placed tenderly back in the bush (after the sad remains of its unfortunate sibling had been removed). It is fully fledged, and Housekeeper saw it fluttering about in company with its parents, so hopefully it will survive.

Several people have indicated interest in quinces, so I have informed them of the availability of same, in a few months time, and hopefully we will be able to do a decent bulk order to the farmers ahead of time. Times are very hard, and should get them at least a couple of guaranteed customers. Luckily my predecessor in this office believed in being prepared for anything, so I inherited a quite unreasonable number of freezers...

Housekeeper has been making quince tart from the cut-up fruit that we froze last year. Freezing it makes the fruit a lot less rock-hard and easier to work with when it's thawed: she bakes them with raisins on a very crisp, short pastry base, with a good sprinkling of large-crystal brown sugar on top, for extra crunch and to cut the extreme sourness of the fruit. They come out a beautiful dark golden colour, since it's not in the oven long enough to turn red, like the cotignac. I don't like the emetic quantities of sugar that some recipes call for, so I'd rather leave the tart sour, and let my guests add extra sugar and cream to suit themselves. It's such a fabulous luxury, to have enough quinces to just make them into dessert...

There will be bulbuls and quinces when I commission my own hand-painted Chinese wallpaper (a scroll-length, for framing). Fruit and flowers together, because why not, and the flowers are just as pretty as cherry-blossom.

The latest sparrows have flown.

There was one young sparrow who kept fluttering down to the ground but not being able to fly up again. We suspect that it was pushed, since multiple attempts to return it to its nest (there are two, on either side of the air-conditioning unit) ended up with it back on the ground. It was unfortunately incapable of eating the rice that we offered it, and disappeared overnight, so we suspect that it was eaten by something. We are sad but unsurprised.

Bus-stop cat turns out to have a fungal infection on his skin, which accounts for the over-licking. The vet proffered anti-itch pills, anti-fungal powder, multivitamin pills and salmon oil. We got enough for Lap-cat as well, since his over-licking problem is perennial. Housekeeper's expertise luckily extends to pilling cats, and they are amenable to being powdered and brushed, so hopefully this will solve everyone's problems. Scaredy-cat appears to be asthmatic, which is incurable, but it doesn't appear to inconvenience him too much beyond alarming hacking-cough noises a couple of times a day.

We have acquired some pots of mint for tea, and are making sure to harvest the leaves regularly so that the plants don't suddenly bloom and die. I was used to mint being perennial (which it is, near the equator, I used to use it as a ground cover), and this unexpected turn to its life-cycle took me completely by surprise the first time.