S'pore icons

Sunday 30 April 2006

What places do people/tourists think of when the word 'Singapore' comes up? Am glad to say Singapore Zoological Gardens is one of them, and even happier that I'm part of such an institution in the annals of S'pore history (and future)...

The duty at zoo turned out fine....though I was late by one minute.... no thanks to the long bus wait and the ominous decision to take a route I don't usually use....only to find that the path was closed as the zoo has finally decided to spuce up the home of our komodo dragons. But I won't begrudge that. Surely, they deserve an upgraded enclosure to befit their status as the largest of all lizards.

Duty went well. Kym turned up, unexpectedly for I thought all that email exchanges had only one conclusion - for me to do duty alone. Anyway, it was quite a memorable duty for me. I almost exhausted my knowledge of King Cobras while doing the feeding commentary, as the zookeepers were no where in sight five minutes after the scheduled time, leaving me to face a rather disgruntled Indian tourist grumbling about the feeding not starting.... My attempts to engage him in talking about snake-charming in India fell rather flat, and he left just before the keepers appeared to dangle a delicious but small piece of retic that one of the ravenous KC lapped it up greedily...

I think it's time to revisit my wishlist of books ...... an encyclodepic volume on KCs alone
... just in case such a situation arises again....

In between showing visitors our (rather-morbid) dead exhibits (stuffed iguana, whom we affectionately call 'Iggy' , stuffed baby croc, dead baby king cobras....), we enjoyed ourselves with chatting about her binoculars, bird haunts to visit our local feathered friends and even amused ourselves by tracing the incessant calls by an unidentified 'bird' . This fellow turned out to be a squirrel scuttling up and down a tree... reminds me of the 'squirrel tree' in Sri Lanka when I went hunting for Indian ethnic with L and my beloved T....

Anyway, I have set my sights on the Nikon Monarch model. Will throw in a stabiliser as well so that any shakes of my butter fingers, magnified a million times in a lower-grade model, will not make birdwatching a dizzying affair...