A friend had posted on facebook that there were a whole lot of starlings at Chong Pang just a few days ago. I had not expected to see a horde of starlings at the Seletar Link mangroves seeing that it was a mangrove area and thinking that the starlings would prefer trees in the heart of a bustling city neighbourhood.
I was surprised to see a swarm of birds flying in the skies over Seletar. it was only when I got directly below the roosting trees that I could see exactly what they were when they took their turn to set foot on the muddy ground.
This exercise to get close to where the birds were resting saw some gymnastics over pudgy mangrove mud. The ground was however heavily littered with aged plastic bags and this provided sufficient footing without that 'sinking feeling'.
The birds were not concerned with me being below the clump of trees. I guess the 'safety in numbers' psychology was at work.
Waves of birds flew to a tree close to the edge of the mangrove and then proceeded down to the mangrove mud. Strangely, the water the birds seemed to be drinking and getting themselves wet in was actually seawater. It was a low tide and therefore the little mangrove puddles were filled up residual salt water which got left behind when the tide receded. The green on the ground was algae. I wondered how the birds could tolerate the salty water.
There was a mix of both Daurian Starlings (aka Purple-backed Starlings) and Asian Glossy Starlings (adults and juveniles) in the swarm...freely mingling about with no perceptible indifferences.
Time : between 6 to 7 pm
Date : 16 September 2012
Further away from the mangrove, i saw two dead birds about two meters apart. Both were easily identified as adult Asian Glossy Starlings due to their red eyes and glossy green plumage. Was this a mere coincidence ... or were they being poisoned? Starlings are unfortunately sometimes seen as pests by many people who live or work too close to the roost trees. The Seletar Link mangrove is just beside the Seletar airfield. The birds do seem to be well able to steer clear of obstacles and it seems unlikely that they would pose any danger to the aircraft in the area.
The Seletar Link mangrove has its own set of problems as the resident jetty operators (squatters until mid-2012) have had no trash disposal service nor hygenic sanitary arrangements. (They do not have an address). Human waste has been (and will probably continue to be) disposed off via the direct 'gravity-assisted' plomp method straight into the mangrove from the outhouses strategically lining the jetties. Other unwanted trash (plastic etc) is simply burnt openly although open burning was outlawed in Singapore many years ago. The resulting ash and bits are then dumped into the mangrove. When I first visited the mangrove about 3 years ago, there were giant mudskippers to be seen all over the mangrove at low tide. I did not see one this evening and I hope there is still a healthy population at the site.
Sad that this persists in 21st century Singapore.
It can take just a few hands to destroy a rare coastal habitat and some apathy on the part of lazy ostriches practising selective amnesia.
Find out more about these swarming starlings :
