March 2017
Singapore’s water is everywhere, even in the air – it batters you with humidity. Water is never far away as a walking companion either; Singapore is, after all, a small island with a large river. Walk by the coast, and you never know who you’ll meet.
Paradise tree snakes are famous for flying – they can glide 300 feet between trees – but this one was weaving its way along footpath railings. They are mildly venomous but do not really pose a risk.
You may look upwards to detect snakes, but the crash in the undergrowth signals something much bigger…
Malayan water monitors are dragons of the sea: they can reach ten feet in length.
Oriental pied hornbills are giants of the feathered kind.
Their massive bills are surprisingly dextrous in handling fruit.
They share the trees with smaller birds such as bulbuls.
And tropical squirrels.
It’s so easy to forget that the city is just minutes away.
A Walk with Wildlife 
A gliding snake? 300 feet? Amazing. Do they have skin folds that spread out to give them more “lift”?
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Yes, they’re amazing little things 🙂 They sort of flatten their rib cages to gain lift. There’s some nice footage of one in ‘flight’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtlpfTwzziY
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Amazing! What photography — and what a snake. It certainly hit the tree trunk with a thump. I wonder if they injure themselves with some of their “dives”?
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Hopefully they manage to judge how to make a safe landing. I also wonder if they miss their tree sometimes – the one I saw was climbing up some wooden railings beside a footpath in the forest, which is probably not where it wanted to be. Still, an astonishing creature.
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Still more exotica! It’s curious that we nave gliding snakes here in the Southern US … they inhabit swampy forests..
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That’s interesting – clearly it’s a behaviour with significant survival advantages.
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Adele, Great post! Very nice images! Such diversity. I’m not at all sure about Monitor lizards and venomous snakes, but like to look at them in someone else’s photos!
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The lizard was quite a surprise. I’d seen plenty of the juvenile ones up in the forest, and while walking by the sea – crash – this enormous reptile overturned the undergrowth and made its way down to the water. It was at about five feet long and they can get a lot bigger than that! They’re not aggressive though.
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