AFN: Tempering Tempinis Ecogreen (Tampines Ecogreen)

24th Jul 202224th Jul 2022 ~ Yi Fong LOH ~ Leave a comment

It is easiest to take for granted the places (and the lives!) the closest to us. For my Act For Nature – I gave a walking tour with my family of Tempinis Ecogreen – a natural and historical presentation of Tampines Ecogreen which is “an eco-friendly park that offers a sanctuary for flora and fauna and a place for nature recreation” that was opened to the public in April 2011. I’m 25 this year, and we moved into a nearby place here in the late 90s.

Figure: Historical maps of Tampines EcoGreen’s vincinity in 1987, 1998, 2010, 2022 in respective order of bottom right, bottom left, top right, top left. Credits: Historical Maps of Singapore, NUS.

Tampines Ecogreen is a witness to the rapid changes in natural and urban geography. Through much of the 19th century with the history of colonisation, most of Singapore’s primary forest had become secondary forests by the 1880s due to economic pressures that are intertwined with Britain imperial needs, of which much of the island had transformed into plantations, kampung settlements, or colonial configurations of various kinds (O’Dempsey 2021).. Even a hundred years later, this legacy of resource extraction is witnessed by the quarry as marked in the map above of 1987 – where the Ecogreen stands in the present. A quary is a site of hard labour where locals extract valued rocks like granite, and the story of Tampines Quarry is thus intertwined with the rest of Singapore’s, such as the nearby Pulau Batu Ubin, or “Granite Stone Island”.

In a secondary school essay – I remember reflecting upon how I saw in the distance, from the 11th floor of my flat, a fire engulfing nature in the darkness of night. It was a Saturday night after visiting grandma. Now a memory of a memory, I’ve learned to find these maps myself (try it! libmaps.nus.edu.sg is very accessible) and know that it was not a dream – despite my teacher being amazed and unsure if I could have mis-remembered what should have been around 2003. The Ecogreen was only finalised by 2011 – this transformation of nature into parks is something that is real, and could be foreseen in the coming years too in other places such as near Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. Places are being marked for recreation, and as nature advocates we should also be interested in land use and for instance, arguing that existing parks could be put into better use and mitigating Environmental Impact such as through Environmental Impact Assessments.

From then till now, Tempinis Ecogreen, weathered from a time when it was nameless, to when it was a quarry, when to its current name and site, the enthroned Tampines Ecogreen is a great place for beginning birders (NParks version) to learn about biodiversity! I am not much of a photographer, and here are some of the sights we saw 🙂

Genus Amata (still figuring out what species on iNaturalist)

As mentioned in my previous posts – I happen to have a camera which has a “Micro-lens” function, and I am thus only able to take good photographs of insects or plants! Of birds, we saw the Oriental Magpie Robin (and here’s another Natural Heritage essay on this written by me and a friend!), White-breasted Waterhen, Black-naped Oriole and other relatively common sights. A group of kingfishers repeatedly dived for prey at the pond – here’s another among many things I was not able to capture on camera or video. To me – the greatest joy has been to hear a beautiful chorus of birds in the forests (not common!) and the echo of cicada through the enclosure of canopy. Sound than the sight of the creatures telling of the interconnections of life is a topic I’m passionate about!

My family was quite amazed at our little walk! Our little tour through the biodiversity here was interesting to them, as I shared with them the skills and knowledge from what I learned through becoming a Biodiversity Friend. Perhaps surprisingly, my greatest personal takeaway was observing that the Waterhen has multiple different calls which are interestingly varied – some of which are much lower-pitched than most birds. My uneducated guess is this makes sense given their ecological niche. To visit and re-think the tempinis (an old alternative name, before it was decided that “Tampines” was the better transliteration across languages in early 20th century print culture) was an Act For Nature because it was nature itself which bridged my parent’s own pasts at kampung jalan lempeng or kampung changi with a better climate-resilient future that we citizens must imagine together and continue to be watchful of.

3 June 2022 – Night walk at Bukit Batok Nature Park

22nd Jul 2022 ~ Yi Fong LOH ~ Leave a comment

BBNP (Bukit Batok Nature Park) – alongside Pasir Ris Park and others – is an excellent place for a nature walk at night! For BBNP, Tony shared that this was because of its ecological connectivity with the nearby Bukit Timah Nature Reserve.

We learnt many things about how to do a night walk. First, bring a torch light!

Spotted Colugo! You need a torchlight and a good photograph. Credits: Alopias.

Regarding the use of a torch – it depends on the intensity but there are two rules of thumb. First, always use it such that the base and back of the torchlight is parallel to your forehead – this enables you to see the reflection of an animals’ eye with lower intensity. Second, use it sparingly with the knowledge of which species are more sensitive.

Tony shared with us so many things within and beyond BNNP. Beginning from the edges of the forest, we tried to spot snakes, only finding a snake moult later on – underneath park pavilions are a good place to spot them. Amidst the mixture of common names and scientific ones, we saw: Fishtail palm, Birds nest fern, Colugo, Breadfruit leaf, Syzygium grande; Sea Apple, Ten men tree leaves, Koster’s curse, Macaranga bancana, Baby rubber, Cinnamon.

Tony taught us the importance of common trees in setting up an ecosystem, and we were taught to identify trees holistically as well from a mixture of its features and characteristics – smell, sight, and different parts! When walking at night, it is even more useful to attempt identifying a tree from the leaf from the forest ground.

I didn’t have too many photographs – it is nice to be able to share, and I hope to be able to share my lessons from/of nature with others as well :).

30 May 2022 – Rail Corridor

22nd Jul 2022 ~ Yi Fong LOH ~ Leave a comment

As my luck would have it – in my previous entomology walk the guides mentioned they weren’t too good with butterflies, and here we have Rachel from NParks – who is super nice and super knowledgeable + interested in butterflies!

The Rail Corridor necessarily brings into conversation nature and society. We walked from Rail Corridor Central to Rail Corridor North – these terms can be found on NPark’s website. Its story is of the previous KTM Rail turned Rail Corridor (anchored by the state’s current focus on nature corridors and ecological connectivity) – tying heritage and nature causes together. It was fascinating to hear about how the Rail Corridor has been planned through public consultation and it would be interesting to interrogate the extent which this project has and would serve the broadest possible public. Like nature itself – railways, kampung culture – through attention to details of particular flowering plants being planned – the project speaks to national as well as transnational and regional interests, of which interesting papers have been written, and our a little walk was a great introduction to both its historic past and its growing natural heritage.

In this walk, with a little help from my friends, I learned that my phone already had a “Micro-Lens” setting that is especially useful in taking photographs of insects and plants. Finding the right focal length makes a world of difference in holding up nature into scientific understanding – which I learned belatedly after our entomology (study of insect walk)! I also started an iNaturalist account and thus knew scientific names better, alongside my introductory readings into the Tree of Life – the inter-species genealogies that bring us food and ourselves into being.

My new inaturalist account, documenting our Rail Corridor walk! 🙂

A larger album of photographs I took that day can be found here. Credits to our team, especially Eugene – a partial list of the species we saw were: Pin-striped Tit Babbler, Simpoh Air, Common Blue Skimmer, Malayan Eggfly, Chinese Fountain Grass Cenchrus purpurascens Thunb., Chinese Violet Asystasia gangetica (L.) T. Anderson, Golden Orb Weaver, Yellow Vein Lancer, Scarlet Flash (On Leea indica), Horsefields Baron , Senduduk Melastoma malabathricum, Elbowed Pierrot, Yellow Assassin Bug, Ixora Hybrid, Clouded Monitor Juvenile, White Wing Pseudomussaenda flava, Common Grass Yellow (On Leea Rubra), Pin-striped Tit Babbler, Tapioca Manihot sp., Monkeys Potato Coleus monostachyus (P.Beauv.) A.J.Paton, Long Brand Bush Brown, Lantana camara L. (Flowers and Leaves), Common Parasol, Elephant_s Ear Colocasia esculenta sp.

This was a really enjoyable walk! Most of our group went for lunch after at Springleaf – where some of us shared that the walks give us a tangible sense of what goes into our plate – from an appreciations ecosystems to food supply – that discussions about the climate, biodiversity, and societal priorities are interlinked – of which everyone should play a part in being a Biodiversity Friend! Learning is a never-ending journey, and it begins with the tangible experience of how nature underpins so much of what we value as a society.

15 May 2022 – Windsor Nature Park Insect Walk

22nd Jul 2022 ~ Yi Fong LOH ~ Leave a comment

My first BFF nature walk is with these creepy critters! It was an absolute pleasure to have had this entomological walk as our first, with so many guides and excited participants.

The world of insects – small, tiny, diverse, understudied, and misunderstood by the public – is full of rich ecosystems in which scientists are far from mustering. What is thus interesting for an insect walk is that observation comes first – and in that sense, the beginner to biodiversity is in equally immersed in the action-packed, minuscule world as the nature guides leading us. Two themes thus framed my reflection about our walk – the insect world itself, and our crew’s access to it.

Firstly, insects are the foundation for many ecosystems. We began seeing how many elements of the natural environment around us were in interaction with different insects – of ecosystems within ecosystems. We started off with an understanding of how Fig Trees are keystone species in the forests – one study reveals that as many as 1,270 species of mammals and birds feed on different parts of fig trees. Within this enormous importance of fig trees – their different species could have exactly one kind of wasp which is the only pollinator of its fruit – they enter from the bottom and pollinate. Such relationships illustrate the importance of insects to ecosystems, of which they are many!

When you see something, tell us! The walk was full of many pauses like these, with our large enthusiastic group split from the front and the back, looking onto the expected and unexpected details, with our differing photography equipment enabling resolution into what we saw.

Photocredits for right and bottom-left: James Khoo. Top-left, license under creative commons by myself.

Secondly, as suggested by the photographed resolution into the same group of little insects in the left column of the above gallery, the limits of our knowledge describe the limits of our world. This is especially the case for an insect walk – different people come in with different blindspots, and in our case there were no butterfly experts, .. and even when there are experts: the fancies of the imagination range from well-known descriptions of particular creatures to the peculiar behaviour of species that we know that we don’t know.

Thus, in this dialogue of knowing and self-knowing – we arrived at a range of information from facts, to informed interpretations, to science fiction, to pure imagination. First, we encountered termite trails, plant hoppers, beetles, assassin flies, caterpillars, beetles, green tree snails. Second, we learned to guess from the remains of various insects in various parts of their lifecycle – from caterpillar poop to the underleaf of a symbiotic leaf to certain kinds of ants and more. Third, we frequently drew on pokemon references when we reached further into the realm of observation and a lack of understanding (perhaps mine! as a newb), especially in reference to specific interesting behaviours – ladybug mimics, parasitic behaviours, secretions, “abilities”, and betrayals. In the last category where imagination outran understanding, we had to further dispel many myths, especially for the public: the over-prizing of honeybees relative to other bees, the emphases on true bugs or misnomers.

Overall, we learnt so much from our trip and were very thankful! Certain themes were to recur throughout my later nature trips – of which the next that I went to was on the Rail Corridor!