The annotated budak

Starstruck on Sekudu

An ungainly cluster of weatherworn boulders and straggly trees surrounded by a broad flat of seagrass and rubble, Pulau Sekudu is the third rock of the mythical menagerie that make up the island of Ubin. Fittingly, an amphibious landing involving a creaking bumboat and handheld step ladder is the only way to reach this islet southwest of Chek Jawa, on which sits an anuran chunk of granite bearing a bemused smile and two beady eyes.

The falling tide has left a body, bloated and battered, on a sand bar. It's impossible to tell if it was the victim of kind souls with no clue and even less sense who sought merit by unleashing a wave of fatal karma. Or if the creature had fled the comfort of nearby fish farms only to flounder when forced to survive without a daily feed of meal or succumb to lice its wild kin would simply shrug off. Our faint taste for captive flesh is shared by those who had left a sprinkling of traps along the shore. But these men profess a different, more dynamic faith, one that refuses to give their appetites a chance to rest and recover even when these waters show signs of exhaustion and threaten to give up and run dry.

For now, Sekudu still stirs with a ghost of the bewildering abundance that once infested local shores. A lush, loose bed of sea lettuce and spoon seagrass provides shelter and sustenance for hordes of spiny sand stars. Hasty and hungry, these fossorial predators are fond of prowling with the foremost arm raised, as if they dread the notion of failing to snare every shellfish in their path. The stars move with a speed that discourages contemplation of the kolam-like pattern of pigments on their aboral surface that darken with age and confuse with beguiling symmetry. 

Sea stars in the form of biscuits and cakes, which probably feed mainly on sessile life, forage at a more leisurely pace. The former taunt with bite-size bodies in the shape of cacao-flavoured confections. Some are little bigger than fragments of extruded cereals and cling to green ribbons that shield them from strong-jawed fish but not the crunch of bootied feet. The size of a single-serve pizza, full grown Anthenea aspera are no sweet treats but savoury crusts that bite back with a barrage of tiny pincers. Young specimens can be mistaken for another unhurried asteroid but told apart by the latter's spiny arms.

Adult cakes were noticeably absent this time, but an annual survey of three times sixty minutes is hardly enough to intercept all the stellar residents of Sekudu. There were no eight-armed giants, nor any lanky asterinids with fish-scale plates. But the dying night revealed what is now an increasingly scarce giant on Singapore's northern shores as well as a pale juvenile with a basic array of training knobs. Once said to be so abundant on Chek Jawa villagers would ground them up for fertiliser, Protoreaster nodosus is now a rare sight on Ubin's coast and common only on more distant reefs.

For once, I had the presence of mind to prise myself away from your beloved flat and nurse a crush for the stars that hug the rocks and hide in hard-to-reach places. It was not as difficult as imagined, for my eyes are already calibrated to detect anomalies on the encrusted surfaces and a number of the animals came in a cheerful shade of orange. Mottled brown was the norm, however, and unlike the asteroids of flatter substrates, the little rock stars pay scant heed to personal hygiene, allowing debris to fester on their body. Neither do they care much about their dignity, for they only have to hold their pose and wait a while before the tide returns to quench their thirst and sweep away my sanity while you pine for hopeless dreams.

Only mad dogs...

... and Englishwomen go out in the midday sun. The only sensible creature one scorching April morning at the village on Pulau Ubin was a threadbare cat who wrapped herself around a makeshift table as we sipped on green coconuts and pondered the wisdom of walking to the eastern end.  

Now, the rains have returned, though the hail and fury of morning Sumatras have yet to arrive. Instead of cold marble, she now curls on warm blue and forces me to skirt her pointed hugs. And as long as your heart burns cold, that, too, will be the shade of each night of longing and all the letters of hopeful desperation you read and ignore at my peril. 

Grey havens

On quiet days when the canoes dry, a lone grey heron can often be spotted on a small jetty by the Kallang Basin as the Nicoll Highway passes the Sea Sports Club. Elsewhere on the island, a few individuals may share an overgrown, waterlogged field with cattle egrets and pond herons. But by and large, Ardea cinerea is a solitary creature that commandeers a great deal of personal space and is happiest when given a wide berth by both other birds and human beings. But even these assured hunters prefer not to sleep alone, staking out familiar stomping grounds by day and making high beelines to traditional roosts before last light.

In the air, herons are easily distinguished from raptors, even from afar, by their slow, regular wingbeats, gangly feet and long, pointy bits. Amateurs may also confuse them with storks, which fly with necks outstretched and soar with vulture-like grace. Birds sighted at unreasonable heights are probably in transit between heronry and feeding site, while those that patrol their home territories fly low, their wings skimming over craggy treetops or the crests of shallow straits.

Landing is an ungainly affair requiring abashed effort to recover the composure of a graceful stalker. Bothered perhaps by a bout of excess attention just before it set foot on an outcrop at Changi, this non-breeding individual took a little longer than usual to recover its sleekness. But after half-a-minute of fluff, the heron caught the rebound and with unfathomable speed bagged a fish by the rocks to offer a sharp retort to men who employ artificial bursts of power to imagine themselves as masters of a sea untamed in frame.

Wood pecker

I wish you were here. Not but my side, perhaps. But just close enough to feel the raw flurry of song and sudden silences that erupted through the trees in an afternoon wave of feathered wings. The forest seemed to have shrugged off a month of aestivation to revive with a vengeance of drongos, babblers, malkohas, woodpeckers, tailorbirds, bulbuls and flowerpeckers. The birds fling themselves around me but refuse to obey my mental commands to keep still and in touch. You, too, pay no heed to my pleas to let me pin down your thoughts and capture your heart.

A tree that had leaned over the boardwalk is no longer there. Perhaps somebody felt the trunk, a veritable microcosmos of small, frightful creatures, posed an unacceptable hazard to the welfare of wilder children. Not even a stump remained to feed the young of beetles and brood the spores of creeping mycelia. But another, still standing, pole of timber a safer distance from the trail showed the value of letting trees die in place instead of carving up the corpse of every log.

A red-crowned barbet, the sole-surviving member of its family to thrive in local forests, landed on the crumbling bark and began to chip a cavity of sorts, with its tail stiffly spread out as a brace to the pounding of its pick-axe beak. The perch appears too exposed for a nest site and so the bird was probably grubbing for morsels in the dry cambium. After the eternity of a few intense minutes, the barbet moved on to seek other meals or scout out possible nurseries in a forest that is taking a little too long to grow old and release fresh arms of deadwood for creatures who face a crunch in the market for high holes.

Unlit mysteries

Early naturalists believed fulgorids emit light from their frons during mating and so christened these large hoppers Laternaria. Resembling oversized and outrageously adorned versions of the little planthoppers that infest overgrown trails, lantern bugs show no signs of bioluminescence. But these predominantly tropical insects have little need for natural light, for their size, wings and bizarre head processes are enough to make them sights well worth the cost of a ticket to distant woods.

Not all members of the family boast the saif-like extension. One neotropical species bears bulbous projections that recall the profile of large aquatic reptiles. Another, locally extinct, lantern bug has prominent serrations along a long snout with the power to saw through the facades of jaded adventurers. In the wilder corners of Hong Kong, Pyrops candelaria is reported to be common on longan and lychee trees as well as the trunks of mangos and acacias. This genus is known to serve as hosts for the caterpillar of a small brown moth that attaches itself to the wings of the homopteran and feeds on haemolymph. The larva later makes its way to the bug's body, where it chews on abdominal tissue before leaving to pupate. 

Less bothersome associations are reported for a surviving local species, which has been observed to endure the attention of giant forest ants. Various moths, cockroaches and even snails have been seen helping themselves to the bodily fluids of Enchophora sanguinea, a Central American fulgorid with a hook-like rostrum.

Like cicadas, lantern bugs sip the sap of trees with a long proboscis and seem to be creatures of habit that exhibit stubborn attachment to their preferred host plant. Thus, I was able to revisit a small green trio that clustered around a sapling by a large fig at the Danau Girang Field Centre a night after the bugs were flushed in unobservant haste. A larger species with wings of digital green, however, was drawn to the lights of one of the lodges and found itself on unfamiliar ground. Over at Endau-Rompin Nature Reserve, a beauty with a red bulb stayed true to its perch, where it tolerated the stares of wide-open lenses only to flee when its domain was invaded by happy campers who endeavoured to bring the harsh light of town and the shit of the city to a jungle with few defences against the madness of men with no control over their born and battered natures.

Pray tell...

Mantid, Endau-Rompin Nature Reserve, Malaysia

...how can I survive this fascination with your beauty and catch the sharp end of your dark-lined eye? I'd gladly lose my heart to satisfy your hunger, but alas, what you desire mostly is simply to probe my head to sate your curiosity and toy with my affections til these veins run dry from words that stick too deep.