John and Mary Kormendy: Singapore 2025

This web site contains the pictures from our 11-day stop in Singapore as part of our 4-month summer/fall 2025 trip. Thursday, July 24 was our one day of sightseeing, as organized by Raffles hotel. From July 25 - August 1 inclusive, John and (sometimes) Mary birded, guided by Mr. Kim Seng Lim, who wrote the book on The Birds of Singapore. Birding with him was a special privilege, and Singapore was essentially "virgin territory" between places where we have birded in India and China to the north and west and in Papua New Guinea and Australia to the south and east.

This is a dummy placeholder web site: Pictures will be added as I have time through the rest of the trip. Birds come first; sightseeing pictures are at the end.

The purpose of this web site is to catalog our memories, not to showcase the trip for public readers. So I include pictures that are not very good when they document sightings that are important to us.

Trip Birds

Choosing a trip bird is difficult, because so many birds were wonderful. In the end, two birds are tied as my most precious sightings:

Straw-headed bulbul -- nemesis bird for much of the trip; seen well enough several times to be counted, but seen this well only once, near the end.

Mangrove pitta -- This is my life bird on Palau Ubin Island. How could I not pick a pitta, especially when we saw it this well?

The Birds

Blue-crowned hanging parrot (This female is part of a small flock of males and females that were my life birds. I never photographed a male and we never saw them again.)

Ornate sunbird (This female is my life bird at Dairy Farm Nature Park.)

Ornate sunbird (This is a male, seen a bit later, just after the Crimson sunbird, below.)

Pink-necked green-pigeon (Again a female, although note the white edging on the wing -- this is my life bird.)

Stork-billed kingfisher

Olive-winged bulbul (These are my life birds.)

Crimson sunbird -- gorgeous male

Buffy fish-owl adult male, female, and fledgling. I suspect that the male is with the chick. These are our life birds at Hampstead Wetlands Park.

Javan myna (Earlier today, this species was my first life bird of the Singapore trip, back at Dairy Farm Nature Reserve. This bird was at Hampstead Wetlands.)

Spotted wood owl (sleeping life bird at Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park)

Spotted wood owl (Adult bird with eyes open ... but bad viewing angle)

Savanna nightjar (This is my life bird, one of 6 seen in the paved back-yard parking area of a commercial building.)

Savanna nightjar -- another bird in the same parking area

Asian openbill in Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve

Malayan pied fantail (very bad picture of first life bird of Singapore day 2 = 2025 July 26 in the abandoned quarry of Butit Batok Nature Park)

Malaysian pied fantail, a little better a few minutes later. This may be a different bird.

Male pink-necked green-pigeon, recognizable and proud but not exactly spiffy in the rain

Yellow-vented bulbul (This is my life bird. With characteristic luck, none of my pictures of this bird -- all of acceptable quality otherwise -- show the yellow vent. All other features of the bird are of course well captured.)

Large-tailed nightjar (This is my life bird, sitting in his habitual spot on a low post hidden in thick bushes near the entrance to the Singapore Botanical Gardens.)

Ashy tailorbird (The gray -- not white -- throat identifies this as a male. It is my life bird.)

Malaysian pied fantail -- not the sharpest picture, but a good pose

Oriental magpie-robin (immature in Changi Bay Park ... to escape localized rain to the west)

Black-naped oriole

red-breasted parakeet (male)

Common flameback (I got my life bird earlier today. This was a much better look, later, at Pasir Ris Park.)

Zebra doves courting

Tanimbar corella, looking decidedly pink just moments after sunrise (This is my life bird in Changi Village.)

Red-breasted parakeet

Asian glossy starling (This is my life bird.)

House crow (common, but like all crows: intelligent and worthy of respect)

Straw-headed bulbul (This is my life bird, on Palau Ubin Island. Straw-headed bulbul was a "nemesis bird" on this trip, always rare and always hard to see. It is critically endangered, with a world population estimated to be 600 - 1700 mature birds. About 600 of them live in the relatively protected world of Singapore. This bird shows the defining features -- a thin black eye stripe and a much more prominent black "moustache". By the end of the trip, I will have seen and photographed it better, but this was the first success after a lot of intense trying.)

White-rumped shama (female)

Mangrove pitta (This is my life bird on Palau Ubin Island.)

Long-tailed shrike at Lorong Halus Wetland

Golden-backed weaver (Introduced from Africa but well established here: The male is my life bird.)

Gray-headed fish-eagle

Golden-bellied gerygone (This is my life bird still in Lorong Halus Wetland.)

Copper-throated sunbird (This male is my life bird. Like all sunbirds, it does not pose readily for pictures. Moreover, the color of its irridescence varies with viewing and illumination angle in ways that here make it hard to see why the bird is called "copper-throated". Moreover, strong backlighting and intervening branches don't help. Still, these (all bad) pictures give some feeling for how the bird looks from various angles. What's not shown well is the "view that counts", which is the view that is flashed straight ahead to a potential mate or a rival.)

Straw-headed bulbul (Finally an essentially perfect view in the early morning of 2025 July 28, along Wallace Trail at Dairy Farm Nature Park.)

Greater racket-tailed drongo ... albeit a less than perfect view

Red-eyed bulbul (This is my life bird -- not cooperative)

Greater green lefbird (This is my very brief, poor look at my life bird.)

Straw-necked bulbul (After all the trouble we had for days even seeing this bird, I somehow managed to get a picture -- not exactly wonderful in quality but precious nevertheless -- of the bird -- including definitive field marks -- flying right toward me!)

Ornate sunbird (male, amid a riot of flowers in the Botanical Gardens)

Ornate sunbird (female; Botanical Gardens)

Brown-throated sunbird (male: wet and bedraggled but still spiffy)

Oriental magpie-robin drying out and sunning himself

Pink-necked green-pigeon

Gray-headed fish-eagle

Colugo or Sunda flying lemur (Galeopterus variegatus) Quoting Wikipedia, the colugo "cannot fly but glides among trees and is strictly arboreal. It is active at night, and feeds on soft plant parts such as young leaves, shoots, flowers, and fruits. It is a forest-dependent species ... a skillful climber, but nearly helpless when on the ground. Its gliding membrane connects from the neck, extending along the limbs to the tips of the fingers, toes, and nails." Seeing it was a surprise: this is not a species that I knew about. This one was in Hindhede Nature Park, where I did not record any bird species.

Dark-necked tailorbird (This female is my life bird, in the Central Catchment Nature Reserve: first bird of the day on 2025 July 29.)

Thick-billed green-pigeon (This is a female -- greenish all over, not with a red back.)

Asian glossy starling

Malaysian plover (This is my life bird along the shore of Marina East.)

Shells in morning sunslight

Pacific reef heron (white morph)

White-headed munia (This is my life bird, in grasses along the beach.)

Paddyfield pipit in grasses just inland from the beach

Collared kingfisher

Common myna (They are very intelligent and resourceful, and we like their chutzpah. Here, they are still in their primary range, but whenever they are introduced to a gentler environment than the one that bred them, they outcompete the local birds. So it was fine to see them here but less fine to see them in (e. g.) Fiji and Tahiti ... as we had seen them all around Hawaii and much of Australia.)

Oriental pied hornbill

Blue-eared kingfisher (This jewel is my life bird. We came to Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve to see this bird. It required some anxious waiting ... but suddenly, the bird landed right in front of me, and I got a perfect look.)

Milky stork (This is my life bird.)

Movie of jumping fish. We did not know why.

Female crimson sunbird gathering food ...

... to feed hungry chicks

The male sunbird was diligent, too

Asian koel (Jurong Lake Gardens South)

Slaty-breasted rail (This is one of several rails and several Ruddy-breasted crakes, including chicks and juveniles of both, that foraged together in the grass of Jurong Lake Gardens and that were my life birds. That was one seriously remarkable field!)

Ruddy-breasted crake (See above: Crakes and rails are normally both so difficult to see that seeing both together and easily a dozen of each was very surreal. And very gratifyingly rich!)

Collared kingfisher (This is the common kingfisher from extreme eastern India to Indonesian New Guinea and the Philippines. I saw it often.)

Zitting cisticola

Rufous woodpecker (This is my life bird at Jurong Lake Gardens.)

Sunda PygmyWoodpecker (This is my life bird -- the last one of my Singapore tour.)

Common iora (female)

Common waxbill (introduced and established here but much better seen in Hawaii, where it is also introduced. But not in Africa, where it is native.)

Singapore

We stayed at the justly famous Raffles Hotel.

This panorama (scroll right to see it all) gives some impression both of the size of the SuperTrees and of the crowd that assembled on both nights when we were there to see the light show.

The above picture is the start of a 985 Mb movie which records the complete SuperTree light show on the occasion of Singapore's Independence Day celebration. Problem is: Internet aboard the Seabourn Pursuit is flaky enough so that I cannot upload the file. Instead, clicking on the above link brings up a shorter video of shot during the more regular light show several days earlier. When this web site is mature, both light shows will be featured. But this will have to wait until we have better internet, back home in Austin, TX.

Our bird pictures from around the world follow standard ecozones approximately but not exactly:

Birds from the USA and Canada:   our house,   Hornsby Bend and greater Austin,   Texas,   California,   Hawaii,   Canada,

Neotropic birds from Central America and the Caribbean:   Honduras,   Costa Rica,   Panama,   Trinidad and Tobago

Neotropic birds from South America:   Ecuador,   Ecuador 2017,   Brazil.

Western palearctic birds:   Europe: Germany, Finland, Norway,   Europe: United Kingdom,   Europe: Spain,   the Canary Islands,   Europe: Lesbos, Greece,   Israel

Eastern palearctic birds:   China

Birds from Africa:   The Gambia,   South Africa

Indo-Malayan birds from   India: North-west (Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand)   India: North-east (Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya)   India: Central (Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh)

Birds from   Australia,   New Zealand.

For our 2014 December trip to India, see this travelog.

For our 2016 May-June trip to India, see this travelog.

For our 2017 April trip to High Island, Texas, see this web site.

For our 2018 March trip to India, see this travelog.

For our 2018 May trip to China, see this travelog.

For our 2018 October trip from Munich to Budapest, Hungary see this travelog.

For our 2018 November trip to China, see this travelog.

For our 2019 April trip to High Island, Texas, see this web site.

For our 2019 July trip to China, see this travelog.

For our 2021 April trip to High Island, Texas, see this web site.

For the 2021 August 3 & 4 migration of Purple martins through Austin, see this web site.

For our 2021 December trip to Ecuador, see this web site.

For our 2022 January-February trip to Peru, see this web site.

For our 2022 July/August trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea, see this web site.

For our 2022 September trip to Bolivia, see this web site.

For our 2022 November-December pre-trip to Argentina (before our Antarctic cruise), see this web site.

For our 2022 November-December cruise to Antarctica, see this web site.

For our 2023 January birding in Chile, see this web site.

For our 2023 January-March cruise from Chile to Antarctica and around South America to Miami, FL, see this web site.

For our 2023 March-April birding in south Florida (after the Seabourn cruise), see this web site.

For our 2023 November-December birding to Sri Lanka, the Andaman Islands, and South India, see this web site.

For John's 2024 February-March birding in Colombia, see this web site.

For our 2024 May-June cruise from Iceland to Jan Mayen Island to and around the Svalbard Archipelago, see this web site.

For our 2024 June 25-30 stay in Paris, see this web site.

For our 2025 April 21 - May 3 trip to High Island, Texas, see the present web site.

For our 2025 July vacation and birding in Singapore, see this web site.

For our 2025 August birding in north-west Australia, see this web site.

For our 2025 August-October Seabourn cruise from Australia to Chile, see this web site.

For our 2026 January-February trip to New Zealand and 3rd cruise to Antarctica, see this web site.