Jejawi Tower on the mangrove loop of the Chek Jawa boardwalk offers a duck's bird's eye view of the Chek Jawa Wetlands seven storeys above the mud. The tower is named after the Malay term for the nearby Ficus microcarpa fig tree that more than matches its 21 m height. When the tree is figging, it becomes a hive of activity as birds, monkeys and insects throng the branches to savour the sweet bounty pollinated by tiny wasps just a few millimetres long.
During our walk earlier, we stopped by Pekan Quarry and its colony of herons and egrets guarded by the eyrie of a white-bellied sea eagle. Few riders paused though to do more than glance at the expanse of water and sheer cliffs that shelter a deep harbour of birds. Above a village garden overgrown with vivid Clitoria, a dollarbird perched on the topmost branches of a bare trunk. The fence surrounding the quarry boasts an added perimeter of tall grasses. Brown munias with scaly breasts flocked within the seedy reeds, allowing me to enter their comfort zone before a wild cyclist flushed them away in his passing.
In the nearby cluster of Albizia trees and their attendant undergrowth, dozens of little birds – flycatchers, bulbuls, tailorbirds, woodpeckers and sunbirds – darted about in brown and blurry waves. We saw a lone hornbill land on the topmost layer, a giant above gangs of tiny twittering creatures. It dallied not, taking off in a minute like a black arrow, straight and true with strong downbeats in broad intervals. By the clearing ahead, a pair of black bazas hawked without the noisy fuss of neighbouring red-breasted parakeets.
From the tower, the retreating tide of gruesome green revealed a dirty rainbow of blues, browns, emerald and ultramarine shades that quickly drew the spears of egrets and herons which stalked the mudflat for scales and shells. On the sandbar that protects the seagrass lagoon, sandpipers, whimbrels and plovers would probe their bills at varying depths into the substrate, plucking out worms, shrimp, shellfish and the juicy spawn of smaller creatures. A forest of Nipah palms protrude between the tower and the outlying mangroves, their bases bursting with the subterranean toil of mud lobsters. Across the water, a recently erected wall of pale strength forms a moat that defends Pulau Tekong. Lonely mountains in miniature loom from the hinterland of the horizon.
Later, on the mangrove line west of the chief surveyor's house, a great-billed heron waved over our huffing and puffing to drag driftnets from the shore before landing a little distance away, the only legal hunter in a no-fish zone, besides the haul of porcelain crabs that clung to my pants. For some of these anglers, the catch of the day may well prove a painful one...
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