City wild

The ever-reliable Coconuts Bangkok site reports on attempts to put “Uncle Fatty,” a notoriously chubby suburban monkey, on a diet here.

Meanwhile, a restaurant has been busted serving endangered species to Chinese tourists. The Luang To To restaurant was found to be serving cobras, andangered soft shell turtles and pangolin meat to its guests. This follows on from the revelations of tiger meat being served in the city a few years ago.

Deer tears

Artist Sakarin Krue-On explores the sad true story of the Schomburgk’s deer in his new exhibition at the Tang Gallery, “A Talebearer’s Tale”. The species once ranged throughout central Thailand until it was declared extinct in 1938. Today only one specimen survives, stuffed and mounted in the museum of natural history in Paris.

Day 9 Rot Fai Park 6am

My early morning jogs in Rot Fai park have been one of the revelations of this trip; my run this morning was a virtual safari with a near-attack from a gaggle of over-excited geese, almost tripping over a lumbering monitor lizard and another trip down the “Squirrel avenue” of trees alive with darting furry shapes.

 

Life on the streets

The visitors

Recently I noticed some new faces – a twittering flock of tiny black-winged swallows, perhaps arrived back from the South China Seas from their wintering grounds, circling amid the neon signs of Aberdeen, and nesting under the shophouse eaves.

I also saw a strange creature in the canal – a jellyfish, literally a creature from another world. It was a huge white billowing creature, larger than a human head, pulsing silently upstream at high tide where the canal empties into the sea.

The interlopers

On my way home from work one day this week I heard a raucous, strident noise and looked up to the skies above the Aberdeen harbour where a flock of feral cockatoos were screeching across the straits from Ap Lei Chau, five or six of them. As with the parrots of Kowloon park they are an exotic species, presumably a band of escapees, who have now made themselves firmly at home in Hong Kong.

  

I also noticed another exotic species this week. The city’s “Cotton trees” dropped their seedpods to disperse clouds of snow-like white fluffy material over streets like “Cotton Drive” and “Cotton Tree Road.” Although firmly entrenched in the city, the species (also known as ‘kapok’) is originally from Central America.

New Interpretation of the Paradoxical World

  

Currently on show at Bangkok’s Nova gallery,  Narissara Pianwimungsa’s New Interpretation of the Paradoxical World.

Bird ivory

   

Firebird

 

Blood pheasants

  

Night stirrings

As a child, I remember camping out on our dining room floor on hot Summer nights, the back doors to the garden thrown open, lying in wait for a dim shape to emerge from the backyard foliage: possums on the prowl for food. Both common species of Australian possum are commonplace in Melbourne, from the smelly, hissing larger brushtail possums to the agile little ringtails, often seen scurrying along power lines.

But there are other creatures of the Melbourne night, almost as common, which I have never glimpsed. The city is, surprisingly, sometimes said to be the world’s urban fox capital. Researchers recently discovered that in the suburb of Port Melbourne for instance, the creatures live at a density of up to 20 animals per square kilometre – and yet they are invisible during the day and almost as invisible at night.

Jenny Brompton, Sea Country Spirits at the Ian Potter Centre for Australian Art

Another tribe of foxes is more visible though,  the flying foxes – a colloquial name for the squawking fruit bats with a wingspan of up to one metre – which migrate into the city in the warmer months. They provide a surreal and beautiful spectacle, streaming out of treetops at Studley Park in Kew at sundown to fan out in the search for food, over the river and the inner Eastern suburbs. I loved to watch them. It is a sight both beautiful and awe-inspiring.

Urban invaders

I had a shock encounter at work this week, slipping out for a quick coffee only to be confronted by a stray boar that had wondered down the mountains towards Wong Chuk Hang! The large, placid pig eyed my unconcerned as it rooted around for food by a busy road. Later that night I came across the sad, mangled body of a porcupine by Pok Fu Lam Road – only my second porcupine in five years in Hong Kong – and saw on the news that a three-metre long Burmese python had been captured in Tseun Wan: animal intruders!

 

Strange beasts and where to find them

An undoubted highlight of the trip came while returning to the campsite late at night in a taxi. Suddenly a strange shape appeared in the headlights – a lumbering family of porcupines, surprisingly big, ambling across the road at night, shining brightly in the headlights before slinking off again into the night.

I was amazed. It was such an unexpected encounter with this strange creature – apparently still fairly common in Hong Kong but rarely seen as it forages at night. One specimen was photographed last year outside the Bank of China building in Admiralty.

Leopard tears

 

The Formosa cloud leopard is a sad case, officially declared extinct in 2003. It had once been the second-largest predator to stalk the Taiwan countryside, after the Formosan black bear which still haunts some of the island’s lonelier mountain stretches. The leopard however has been reduced to a single specimen, which sits stuffed, in Taipei’s Taiwan National museum.

Above, a photograph taken in 1900 shows an indigenous Taiwanese person wearing a snow leopard pelt. Below, the stuffed specimen in Taiwan National Museum today.

Taiwan blue magpie

Bangkok round-up

As its rainy season gathers, Bangkok continues to sparkle with its golden lottery-predicting toads, awesome gyms for transgender (female-to-male) men, marauding lizards named after Disney stars and new hipster hangouts.

But my favourite story to come recently out of the effervescent Thai capital was the “Fat Run”, held in the city’s Lumphini Park. Designed to encourage people of all weights to enjoy exercise without shame or embarrassment, it adopted the slogan: “Run 5km – and then eat whatever you want!” Participants received a medal decorated with pictures of pizza and cupcakes.

I love this for two reasons. The first is that it reminds me of my own sweat-drenched communal runs around the park, weaving in and out of a heaving mass of runners of all shapes and sizes including the odd shirtless gym-bod with rock-hard torso. We all ran together, heaving and sweating, dodging bugs, bats and birds. Music blasted, people danced to techno in mass aerobic exercises and in the dry season, the Bangkok Symphony orchestra struck up on the central lawn, as a tropical twilight fell swiftly over the city. It was a great experience.

But other than that I love the sentiment, so different from the exercise cults coming out America and rabidly adopted in HK, with their barely disguised puritan ideology that suffering is what makes you a better person. In the Fat Run, exercise, like food, is something to be celebrated and enjoyed, not a gruelling punishment to prove your self-worth (think: no pain, no gain). It is this pro-exercise, pro-life, pro-joy philosophy that powered me to make the switch into semi-serious running. I couldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it and I think that is a great, powerful message to be sending: exercise can be fun, too!

Nattura!

The mystery of the turtle lake

Hanoi is dotted with lakes, big and small. It’s traditional centre is the Hoan Kiem Lake, circled by trees and colonial buildings, it’s whole circumference joggable in thirty or forty minutes. In the mornings, the lake shores boom with techno music, colour-runs and Herbalife rallies. People take pictures with selfie sticks and practice ballroom dancing under the banyan trees. In the evenings, its banks are partly lit up and given over to strollers and gay cruising. A pleasant cafe sits on a terrace looking over the water. And traffic swirls around it day and night. But even with all of this, the lake maintains an aura of calm – its waters calm, grey and serene.

In a small island in the centre of the lake stands the Turtle tower, commemorating the lake’s greatest mystery, the strange giant creatures which perhaps still inhabit its grey depths.

These turtles became symbols of the city in Vietnamese myth after one of their forebears supposedly retrieved a magical sword lost in the lake. In fact the species, which can weigh up to 250 kg per specimen, was considered a myth itself until a turtle surfaced in the lake – in the very heart of a major city – in 1998.

That specimen has since died, and lies embalmed in pride of place at the Temple of the Jade Mountain, on a small island in the lake’s Northern reaches, connected to the city by  vermillion bridge thronged with local day trippers.

Another specimen was found floating dead earlier this year, leading to an outpouring of grief in the city and speculation as to the meaning of this omen.

Whether there are others in the lake still, or this was the very last of its kind, is not yet clear.

 

Strange beasts

Bangkok this week was surprised by the sight of a roaring T-rex stuck in Sukhumvit traffic – it is to be a star attraction at a new robot-dinosaur park apparently about to open in the latest extension of the Emporium mall, on the former site of Washington Square, home to an entirely different species of dinosaur.

Meanwhile, Shanghai was being terrorised by its own mysterious beast, a stealthy web-footed carnivore leaving a trail of dead poultry in its wake.

I also came across this article on an unlikely intruder in Germany.

Art X Science II

The beautiful anatomical drawings of Albertus Seba, a kind of seventeenth century Dutch Takagi Hauyama  who produced exquisite illustrations of all manner of birds, animals and sea creatures brought to Holland by ships from the newly discovered tropical countries, as well as the Hydra Hamburg (below), a creature on display in the German city later revealed to have been a fake made of weasels’ heads glued into snakes’ skins.

 

Seba’s work has recently returned to popularity with a reprinting of his ilustrations by Taschen.