Not being in possession of an adequate photographic collection of the plants, a cursory search for the mistletoes of Singapore on flickr led to a lass of festive latitudes. It was not an entirely inappropriate result, for the European mistletoe, like holly, ivy and yew, has attained seasonal celebrity and imbibed the televised magic of globalised folklore. The hemi-parasite, whose perennial foliage defi(l)es the bare boughs of dormant apples, poplars and lime, embodies the promise of life in the dead of winter, while its habit of berrying close to Yuletide has been regarded as a portent of romance and fertility.
The order Santalales is much less feted in Singapore, however, for in the tropics there are few deciduous trees on which a sprig of evergreen might seed a myth of immortal proportions. Native mistletoes usually have simple (in the botanical sense), leathery foliage and delicate blooms that burst open with the peck of a beak or the wave of a butterfly, but at least one species has no leaves and is a parasite of other mistletoes. Like many other taxa, the 16 or so mistletoes recorded from the island have fared poorly; half are nationally extinct, perhaps as their host trees dwindled to isolated stumps or their agents of dispersal fell prey to guns and economic growth. Some of the survivors are able to colonise widespread plants such as Acacia, Cassia, wild cinnamon and the Benjamin fig. But the mistletoes' fondness for common roadside trees such as mango, rose of India and mempat also condems them in the eyes of horticulturalists with a remit to keep the streets clean, green and free of visual anomalies.
A few deviants, however, defend the arborist's bane, seeing in these woody sapsuckers a tolerable source of diversity for the island's treetops. The Malayan mistletoe (Dendrophthoe pentandra) sustains the caterpillars of a lowland Delias and an uncommon blue. Bats and civets may also nibble on the fruit. But by far the most significant colluders are frugivorous birds: bulbuls, parrots, sunbirds and flowerpeckers which pollinate the flowers and devour the resulting berries as a year-round source of food. In doing so, the birds wipe off the sticky rinds on tree branches and sow the seeds of their future sustenance.
Flowerpeckers, in particular, have gained the nickname mistletoebirds for their rude habit of swallowing the fruit whole and passing out a string of viable seeds. These tiny birds, it seems, tend to perch on favoured twigs slender enough to give the mistletoe seedlings a foothold in foreign xylem. The metallic 'ticks' of the scarlet-backed flowerpecker are also said to be a more reliable indicator of a mistletoe in the canopy than visual clues. The relationship is one of unequal needs, though, as these stubby little birds also feed on insects as well as the fruit of Straits rhododendron and Indian cherry. But surely it's possible to regard the island's wayside trees as a church broad enough to handle the weight of an arboreal shrub that more than pays it back with a regular feast in the form of a piping ball of feathers with a fiery streak and a bold tolerance for observers in close promixity.
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