Stunning sunset with critters of St. John's Island

While exploring the shores of St. John's Island, everyone suddenly paused at where they were and started admiring the beautiful sunset, bidding goodbye to the second day of the lunar new year.

Sunset at St. John's Island

We were lucky to be on the outer edge of the water snake that visited from the northeastern side and turned in the clockwise direction on the boundary of mainland Singapore. At the beginning part of the trip, we experienced mild drizzle.

Big Sisters in the year of the water snake

Today is the first day of the Lunar New Year, the year of the water snake. It has been raining for the whole day and the team was worried it will continue to rain during our fieldtrip session in the evening.

I started out the fieldtrip slightly different today. Instead of heading straight to the lagoon, I went to check out the crinoids with Kok Sheng first. We saw many pretty crinoids of various size and colours.

Red crinoid

Lontong and Mangrove tree at P.Ubin

I always wonder what the hype is about with the Sunday-only lontong at Pak Ali's shop on Pulau Ubin until I tried it today.

Image from Pulau Ubin Stories

Checking out marine life of Chek Jawa with TeamSeagrass

Today is my first trip with other members of TeamSeagrass and we are doing monitoring at Chek Jawa.  I helped to guide two new teamseagrass members with the monitoring session.

It was a hot day but thank goodness, the wind helped to ease the heat a bit. After the monitoring, we all had some time to check out the shore of Chek Jawa.

Upon arrival at Chek Jawa, we were greeted with the sight of mama pig and her piglet feeding on food she pushed off from the bicycle basket. The wild boars are able to smell food kept high above ground, like a bicycle basket, and they are smart enough to knock off the bicycle in order to get the food. From the image below, this pair of wild boar even tore the packaging of the can drinks.

Wild boars helping themselves to human food by knocking them off bicycle baskets.

Giant octopus on a busy Changi shore

On this short window of low tides for January, I made my last trip for the month yesterday to a shore at Changi. This shore is packed with human activities, from visitors to the coastal boardwalk, fishermen netting in the shallow waters to ordinary visitors digging the substrate for clams. Despite the heavy rained that happened just minutes ago, there are still many visitors to the shore.

The weather changed very quickly. After the heavy shower, it drizzled for a while before the sun came out.

What makes this shore special is the sea fan sticking out from the shallow murky water during low tide. They come in a variety of colour and sizes.

Bending orange sea fan, probably dur to its weight with low tide.