Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, Singapore

I spent the morning in glorious sunshine (and the afternoon in a tropical storm!) at the wonderful Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve in northern Singapore (which being a small island isn’t far from southern Singapore in fact which makes access nice and easy…). Sungei Buloh protects one of the last patches of mangroves and tidal mudflat on the Singapore mainland, and as such is both precious and vital. It’s also incredibly hot, steam hangs in the air like an unventilated bathroom, and the keening, piercing noise from the scores of cicadas that live here is almost deafening – scroll down the page a little bit and you can hear a recording I made this very day which proves the point fairly well I think. It’s quite a place.

It’s also rather good for birds (of course) and I took almost two hundred photos in a few hours. Now whilst I might normally stay up all night sorting the images out and posting them, I’d like to go birding again tomorrow, and right now in Singapore (where I am) it’s already tomorrow and I haven’t been to bed yet…which means that what I’m doing is posting a bunch of images to give anyone interested a flavour of this very special site, and I’ll do another post tomorrow or the day after with the bird photos.

I hope that’s a reasonable compromise?

So, here is a taster of the enchanting Sungei Buloh mangrove forest, a place of shadows and shafts of light, darkness and sunshine, a rising and falling tide, and a huge variety of wildlife from fish, to crabs, to cicadas, to dragonflies, butterflies, birds, and the Malayan Water Monitor which grows up to five feet long!