Some 80 years ago, in the twilight days of a weary empire, a dairy farm was carved out of the forests of Bukit Timah so that milchcows might roam on a tropical slope and produce cream and whey for the colony's white burdens.
By that time, the roar of remnant tigers had been largely silenced, and the grazing herds would have been disturbed primarily by the blasting of quarries south and west of their modest shed. To feed the hunger of a booming harbour, ancient outcrops were shattered and mined for their igneous layers, creating an expanding zone of death and a sleepless hollow of dry air where humid coastal forests once grew.
The old tin hill was sequestered for posterity in the 1951, along with its hinterland of secondary reserves. But the granite still advanced and the encroachment of modern infrastructure chiselled away the fringes of Wallace's fruitful jungle, silencing half the forest's bird species and sending the hill's last leaf monkey into the jaws of feral hounds. In 1986, a new expressway brought joy to transisland commuters but drove a stake through the heart of the hill, turning a teetering habitat into an island of broken links. Besieged by motorised traffic and trampling feet, the reserve continues to wage a war of attrition against the weather makers – the houses and roads that nibble at its fragile foothills and a weekly assault of hikers whose boots wear away the soil, seedlings and wilting spirit of fern-clad vales and formerly crab-filled streams.
The southern reaches of the reserve still scream with the rounds of a shotgun valley. But the quarries that ringed the hill are now silent and succumbing to a slow invasion of botanical pioneers. Degraded they may be, the still pools that formed in the shadow of sliced-up ridges provide a protective buffer for the deeper canopies and support a second life of edge specialists and species adapted to the dry rigour of exposed spaces.
And where the waters are free from the ravages of unwelcome predators, rare beauties find a refuge amid reeds and cattails. Fenced by bamboo orchids and other marshland weeds, a tasteful platform at the newly opened Dairy Farm Nature Park offers fleeting glimpses of lobe-footed swimmers from a discrete distance. The grebes share their wetland with sandpipers that squabble for midwater footholds and kingfishers obsessed with territorial rights. Wild flurries of bulbuls and macaques rustle the shoreline shrubs, while the taller trunks that guard the path ring with the din of barbets, woodpeckers and drongos. Spotted doves coo from favoured perches and a sea eagle monitors the morning's crowd from the safe heights of a mature Albizia tree.
Back at the farm, the cowshed now hosts a gaggle of schoolgirls who have turned it into a laboratory of learning. The adaptive reuse of this cattle ranch as a classroom for natural history accompanies a long overdue pledge to build a bridge that might restore cornered populations and shrinking genepools. It's too soon to tell if the plan will make new monkeys out of manufactured woods, but the surrounds of the park still stir with a faint trace of the biodiversity that bewildered early beetle hunters; a squat weevil cringed in the gentleman's water closet, and on the porch of an abandoned hut, there lurked a giant ant-mimicking Cicindelid and bronze winged bark mantid.
Other bugs and spiders haunt the unmanicured clearing before the shed, where swifts and Pacific swallows dart about a nursery of experimental saplings. And beyond the figs and cocoa trees that may be old enough to recall dairy days, fresh trails of litter and earth wind through a forest still too young to forget the wounds of a world where trees burn in vain and fall before the twin machinations of cheap timber and free trade.
Reference: Lum, Shawn & Ilsa Sharp (eds.), 1996. A View from the Summit: The Story of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore.
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