At Buloh, my sis pointed out an Atlas Moth perched right behind me (I was much too engrossed in photographing a tiny juvenile Argiope spider) and according to her, I sprang a little sideways when I came to realise the close proximity of the giant of moths to my head. How I missed it I have no idea, and in her words, it was “noob”ish of me. Other hightlights: Weaver ants tending to young hoppers, hovering d’flies, and a beautiful Gasteracantha.
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We spent almost an entire day around the Butterfly Hill/Jelutong campsite on Pulau Ubin, a shrubbery patch which I doubt was larger than a 100m square but so rich was its arthropod diversity that we took hours just to advance a few metres. The variety of bird songs challenged my meagre birding skills, what with my then-knowledge of the call of the [Singapore] flowerpecker having been replaced with the screeches of the [Australian] galahs, which were in turn truncated to make space in my memory for the chirps of the [British] tits. And so on and so forth. I am in bad need of a refresher. More unforgivable was mistaking the chorus of cicadas for crickets, but it was a tune with which I was not familiar - coming from a striking red-and-black cicada species which I have not encountered before on the mainland and was later identified from photographs I took (not specimens I collected *hrrmph!*) as Huechys sanguinea. There’s also a bizarre-looking spider with a teardrop-shaped abdomen, and that one’s awaiting identification from the experts. A centipede was spotted residing quite cosily in what looked like the rolled-up leaf chamber of a sac spider. So many things to see, to shoot, to be baffled by…!
More photos:
Sungei Buloh, 10 Apr
Pulau Ubin, 11 Apr