Saturday CJ walk with NIE Green Club

The January walk took place last Saturday on 23 Jan 2010. As we are in the process of changing our schedule, we did not give enough time to advertise our walk and we had zero visitors! I'm sorry if some of you were planning to attend our January walk and missed it. Please do join us at the next one on 27 Feb (Sat).


Luckily for us, we had our friends from the NIE Green Club join us on a training outing.


We were able to focus on training Shirin, Amanda and Daniel, and they, on their part, asked lots of questions and took careful notes of their own observations. We're so glad to share our knowledge with the three of them. We do hope that they have benefited from the sharing session and perhaps be able to guide in the near future.

The tide on Saturday morning reached a low of 1.2m, not too high and not too low. At this level, it was just perfect for viewing inter-tidal marine life from the boardwalk. And we were certainly not disappointed!

In my opinion, the best sighting we had on Saturday was the pair of Great-Billed Herons (Ardea sumatrana) which were seen fishing on the mudflats. They are rarely sighted and so, seeing a pair of them on Saturday was extra special. The Great-Billed Heron stands at about 1.2 metre tall and is one of the tallest birds observed in Singapore. Hopefully this is a breeding pair.

We had to go to the soft mud area again to look at the Bearded Mudskipper (Scartelaos histophorus). They are such a delight to observe with their madcap acrobatic acts. Here is a picture of one of them flipping and leaping into an almost vertical position. This cute little fish is now becoming a favourite with us.

Another pretty fish made its appearance on Saturday. It was the Blue-Spotted Mudskipper (Boleophthalmus boddarti) found in the back mangroves. If you look closely, you can see lots of tiny blue spots on its cheeks, along the sides of the body and even some on the dorsal fin.

It was such a perfect blue-sky day, perfect for spending outdoors. Enjoy the rest of the photos.



We hope to see many of you join us at our free Chek Jawa Boardwalk trips in future. Here's the drawing by Ivan advertising our FREE walk!

The next trip will be on...
Date: 27-Feb 2010 (Saturday)
Time: 9:30 am
Meeting place: Chek Jawa Information Kiosk.

Thanks to Ria, Ivan and LK for volunteering their time on Saturday. A shout-out to all the members of the NIE Green Club too. We hope to see you again in February.

Read Ria's blog post titled "Chek Jawa with the Naked Hermit Crabs" for more information about this trip.