SINGAPORE: On the way to dinner one Sunday evening, this journalist spotted five hornbills flitting across a road junction to rest in some trees - as much a part of the city landscape as the Velocity@Novena Square mall behind them and the lanes of traffic below.
By installing nest boxes in trees for the birds to breed in, the Singapore Hornbill Project’s collaborators, who include the National Parks Board , Wildlife Reserves Singapore and researchers, got visiting birds from neighbouring countries to settle here and raise their babies. Dr Yong added: “I think there's a role that greening has played in allowing hornbills to recolonise the main island. Now the interesting thing is that on mainland Singapore, the hornbills are largely not in our central nature reserves.
Asian small-clawed otters, part of the 14 birthed at the Singapore Zoo and Night Safari, gather during feeding time during a media tour to showcase newborn animals at the Singapore Zoo January 11, 2018. REUTERS/Edgar Su “What happens is the urban adapted species are prominent but the ones that cannot hack it, you don't see,” said Mr Sivasothi.
A network of buffer parks has already been added to Singapore’s Central Catchment and Bukit Timah Nature Reserves. These buffers protect the central nature reserves from developments that abut them and give the public alternative green spaces to visit so as to ease pressure on the reserves. A female Singapore freshwater crab carrying a brood of crablets. The species is critically endangered.
The crab, described by Assoc Prof Yeo as a “little brown thing” more comfortable scuttling under rocks than being the centre of the media spotlight, is one of the lucky ones.A 2003 study found that Singapore had already lost about 28 per cent, or 881 of 3,196 recorded species, in 200 years without much fanfare. The main reason was habitat loss, after more than 95 per cent of the island’s forest cover was lost to agriculture and later, urban development.
Then, the 2003 study’s authors called some surviving species the “living dead” - including the white-bellied woodpecker, the cream-coloured giant squirrel and the banded leaf monkey - as their numbers were deemed too small to be viable in the long term.
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