The avian stars of Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve descend each autumn to the former prawn ponds, where they rest and roost on the grassy knolls abutting the mud and sully the tropical air with the soft, sad cries of paleoarctic moors. Egrets, herons and storks carve mobile territories for themselves in the patchwork of shallow pools that form when the sluice gates drain the raised flats into the big bamboo river. The smaller waders – whimbrels, green- and redshanks, mongolian and golden plovers, curlew sandpipers and the occasional rarity – gather in invisible flocks that stand with their backs to the rain, their winter plumage of mottled greys, whites and browns melting into a sea of silt. Only the common sandpiper, a solitary creature with drab plumage and a jerky rump, deigns to join the resident fowl to probe among the roots of a thin forest.
The bunds and boardwalks that cut through the swamp, however, offer a quite different assembly of birds, one requiring a little more labour than sitting in a sheltered hut and a keener sense of the sounds and shadows that dart through the understorey between the trails. The thickets of talipariti, bruguiera, morinda and barringtonia also hide green whip snakes, shore pit vipers and armies of angry ants that give no quarter to any breach of their foliar nurseries. Fully grown monitor lizards prowl slopes of struggling saplings while their younger siblings lurk in safer heights. Nightjars sit out the day in plain view. Plantain squirrels dash through the middle layers, leaping, twisting and plunging to outpace each other with dismissive derring-do, stopping only to catch their breath before resuming a wild arboreal chase. More considerate individuals merely nibble on bark or descend to investigate marine litter, emitting chirps that many mistake for the calls of small brown birds.
One brownish bird that has colonised parts of the swamp, though it hails originally from paddy fields in Java and southern Sumatra, is a munia with unmistakable features. The genus Lonchura is replete with confusing permutations of black, brown and buff, but Lonchura leucogastroides is easily distinguished by its charred wings, dark head and breast, and white belly and flanks. These Sundanese seedeaters probably feed in the farmland that fringe the northwestern coastline and nest in the security of the reserve. In their native lands, the munias are agricultural pests whose colonies are destroyed at sight; on this land-scarce island, lawn grasses and ornamental canes suffice to support a reportedly abundant but scarcely noticed (perhaps on account of its inconspicious feeding habits) member of the local mannikin community.
Pied fantails readily betray their presence with madcap pursuits of insects in the undergrowth. There is apparently a healthy enough population of these crazy songbirds to beget a handful of rusty-breasted cuckoos, which turn up every season in the boughs by the bunds. Like many of their family, the adults, clad in peachy-rufous and slaty grey, seek out the nests of hardy passerines – fantails, tailorbirds and sunbirds, in which the female cuckoo lays her disguised eggs. The young freeloader evicts its nestmates and taunts its adoptive parents with persistent cries that last until a barred fledgling leaves to continue a cycle of deception with shifting margins of errors in perception between host and parasite.
The visitor centre, too, is a bird park with no cages and few promises. A few water hens, though, haunt the cafeteria with bold stabs at spilled food and fearless stares aimed at encouraging a surfeit of leftovers. The freshwater pond is visited by the odd common kingfisher, while bulbuls, green pigeons, sunbirds and flowerpeckers make regular pitstops at the straits rhododendron and buah cheri trees growing by the paths. Of late, a pair of oriental pied hornbills have also made the facility a node on their feeding rounds. Tailorbirds weave leafy hides in the shrubs outside the gallery and an emerald dove might forage amid droves of blinkered eyes. A yellow bittern has also taken up residence by the berembang across the ticket counter, where it stalks shrimp and small fish from the clutches of low stems and handy pneumatopores.
A species restricted to coastal woods, copper-throated sunbirds are not infrequently encountered patrolling the vegetation by the bund with rapid tweets and flashes of metallic brilliance. But the boardwalk through the mangal on the eastern bank is probably the best place to enter the world of these feathered gems, who seem to tolerate the stomps of heavy footprints, though their nests remain well-hidden, as they navigate a landscape of mangled trees and muddy gaps. Tumu, the giants of Indo-Pacific mangroves, are abundant in this portion of the swamp and the scarlet calyxes of these long-lived trees, which bud profusely near the tips of growing shoots, probably offer a lifeline of energy for these restless birds who receive an explosion of gold whenever they dip into the sugary cups, a powdery shower of blessings for both the pollinators and the plants that have learnt to share in order to seed.
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