You’re not seeing things – his face really is bright blue. This is an asian version of a grouse, in mating plumage. I went back a few weeks later and his face wasn’t as brightly colored. The speckles are beautiful, too, but may be hard for you to see – this guy liked to lurk […]
Are these birds beautiful, or what? Highly sociable, too – there are about 35 of them in the exhibit, and all of them have all their feathers – a less punishing hierarchy than among chickens, I guess.
Back to the Bird Park. I’m proud of this picture because it’s one of the few I managed to take that really focuses on the detail of the bird’s features. I like the scratches on the bill and the single eyelash going off to the left – yes, these birds have eyelashes. African hornbills are […]
Last weekend we went walking up and around Mount Faber. This is a centrally located park in south central Singapore. You can take a taxi there, or you could go to the Harbourfront MRT station and take the cable car (gondola) that connects that station both to the top of Mount Faber and down to […]
A good thing about early morning walks is the bird life you can see around campus. There’s a surprising amount, considering the amount of early-morning gunfire from the adjacent military firing range, which you’d think would scare them off. This morning I saw a nice Oriental (crested) Honey Buzzard overhead – very big and impressive. […]
It’s examination time at the university, and the students are extremely quiet. But today on our morning walk around the campus, we were passing a dormitory when we heard a peculiar, rhythmic knocking sound. Clearly it was not a machine – could it be a really big woodpecker? Well, sort of. As we went by […]
Is this a handsome bird, or what? There’s a pair of them living in some coconut trees in some housing nearby. They lurk high up, where the regular pigeons live, but when they fly around there’s a “fwoop-fwoop” sound from their wings, and a big, bright black-edged shape zipping through the air. I haven’t […]
The Bird Park has an enormous aviary where there are about a thousand lorikeets, of about ten different varieties. Here are the most conspicuously fancy ones who tend to hang out near the entrance. That’s where visitors can buy a little cup of nectar to hold in order to lure them onto your wrist. These […]
These guys are at the Bird Park, where they greet visitors at the tram station, preen on a chalk wall in Parrot Paradise, and engage in formation flying at the Bird Buddies show. That’s really glorious to see. Many of these specimens come not from their native South America, but from New Zealand. They […]
There are several types of kingfishers to be seen on the NTU campus, and this is the most common one: the King White-Throated Kingfisher. If you go for a walk at 7:30 a.m., you can see up to five of them lining the trees and fence along the drainage canal near the National Institute of […]