After nearly five months in Singapore and Malaysia, with our grandson Royce about to enter a long period of hospital isolation in which we could have no part, it was time to go home. I knew, as I prepared to leave Kuching and take Royce's brother Ryan back to Singapore en route to Canada, that it would be many months before we could return. Royce's next journey, too, would be to Canada, for a long bout of treatment at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. On that last day - November 19, 2004 - I made time for a valetudinal stroll at Sama Jaya Park in Kuching.
Sama Jaya, unusually for an in-city park, holds a remnant patch of peat swamp forest. The paved trails running through it are much used by joggers, but a slow walk can turn up (as I have often shown in past posts) quite a bit. For one thing, some of the trees are labelled, which is very helpful for us non-botanists. This one, Macaranga gigantea, is an edge and light-gap colonizer that is one of the first trees to re-occupy degraded areas. Finding it in an urban park should be no surprise.
Parishia maingayi, known as Upi Paya in Sarawak, is an altogether more spectacular tree. besides iits impressive spreading buttress roots, it can grow to over 50 metres in height.
I don't see snakes very often in Same Jaya, and when I do they are usually pretty quick to make themselves scarce. I was only able to get a snap of this Bronzeback (probably Dendrelaphis caudolineatus) as it disappeared into the undergrowth.
I believe that this dragonfly is a teneral, or newly-emerged, Agrionoptera insignis. Like others of this forest-haunting species I have seen here, this one was perching quietly about a metre off the ground on a thin twig beside the trail.
I usually see the Giant Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa latipes), the largest bee in the world, in more open areas. These bees are remarkably cooperative photographic subjects, and reportedly their sting "is a lot less painful than one would expect". I try to be careful with them, though.
The Oakblues (Arhopala) are members of a vast genus of extremely similar butterflies, and without a complete key for Sarawak I am not even going to try to identify this one to species. Oakblues are interesting insects, though. A number of them have taken advantage of symbiotic relationships between stinging ants and Macaranga trees. Their larvae contain chemicals in their skins that mimic chemicals in the plants, and as a result are accepted, and even protected, by the ants.
This lovely little butterfly was a new one for me - a farewell gift from a place I would not see again for many months. It is a Banded Royal (Rachana jalindra), surely one of the prettiest of the hairstreaks.
Away from the forest remnants, the most interesting spot in Sama Jaya is the little artificial pond not far from the parking lot.
Here, among the other water plants, were the delicate fringed blooms of Water Snowflake (Nymphoides indica). It is a member of a family of plants related not to water lilies (as you might expect) but to the very different-looking gentians, flowers I am more used to seeing on an alpine scree than floating in a pond.
The pond attracts a surprising variety of dragonflies, including a few unusual ones. Today, though, the dragonflies were all garden-variety - though attractive - species, including this male Neurothemis terminata.
As I have had cause to mention before, identifyoling Neurothemis dragonflies to species can be very tricky, and this is especially true for females and immature males - so I won't try with these.
Here is another in my seemingly endless series of photos of Orthetrum sabina, probably the commonest dragonfly at Sama Jaya.
And here is a male Rhodothemis rufa, perhaps not the commonest dragonfly at Sama Jaya but certainly the reddest.
Finally, here is a last Malaysian dragonfly (at least for a while), and one of the handsomest and most distinctive of the lot: Rhyothemis phyllis. It would be a year and a half or more before I was to see it again, so it makes a nice species to end on. For now it was time to go home and prepare for Royce’s arrival for the next stage of his treatment and a year in Canada with Grandma and Grandpa.
By November 18, 2014, my time in Sarawak was drawing to a close. I still had time for a last few excursions, sometimes with my grandson Ryan and sometimes when Ryan was in school.
Here are a few common dragonflies, from a brief trip to a grassy area near Kampung Bako; nothing unusual, but as I was about to leave Malaysia for some time I was glad to see them again.
The genus Neurothemis can be extremely frustrating. Neurothemis dragonflies are seemingly everywhere in open country in Sarawak - the ultimate ditch dragonfly, as it were. Finding them is easy; identifying them, though, is another matter. Of the three common species, two - Neurothemis fluctuans and Neurothemis ramburii - are both variable very similar in appearance. Size aside, telling which is which can be something of a guessing game.
I'm not saying this just because I'm an amateur. According to two experts, Malte Seehausen and Rory Dow, "Members of the genus Neurothemis Brauer, 1867 are difficult to identify to species due to the highly variable wing maculation of males and the polymorphism of females." So there.
Anyway, I think that the dragonfly in these photos is a male N. ramburii because of the long, rectangular space at the base of the wings (the cubit-anal space). N. fluctuans, is supposed to have two or three veins crossing this space. However, as Seehausen and Dow note, ramburii is a highly variable species, and I could be wrong.
This male Neurothemis terminata is a lot easier to place, because the hyaline (or clear) area at the tip of the hindwing is cut off squarely rather than tapering back towards the body at its rear edge, as it does in the other two species.
Neurothemis aside, probably the commonest "ditch dragonfly" in Sarawak is Orthetrum sabina, a very wide-ranging insect indeed, ranging from southeastern Europe and North Africa to Australia, Micronesia and Japan.
Another puzzler (at least to me) is Orthetrum glaucum. This, too, is a variable species, with the males differing in the extent and intensity of blue on the abdomen depending on the reach of the powdery covering, or pruinosity, covering it (if the pruinosity is rubbed off what is left is simply a black exoskeleton).
Some males, like this one, can be very light indeed, with strongly blue eyes. In West Malaysia I would have put this down as a related species, Orthetrum luzonicum, but luzonicum is not supposed to occur in Borneo, so glaucum it must be.
Orthetrums come in a variety of designer colours, including red. This one, with an extensively red-orange thorax, is presumably Orthetrum testaceum.
Finally, just to show that I can look at an insect that isn't a dragonfly, here is a handsome wasp: the Lesser banded hornet (Vespa affinis). This is not an animal to be taken lightly; its sting has caused human fatalities.
On Sunday, November 16, 2014, I joined Vincent Wong and his wife for a brief morning birding trip to Kubah National Park. It proved to be a less than bird-laden morning, but as always there are lots of other things to see at Kubah.
A walk up the entrance road will always be enlivened by butterflies of various species feeding at the roadside plants. A stranger to the tropics, though, might well be surprised to find that most of the butterflies you can see here are comparatively small and, as often as not, patterned mostly in shades of brown. Skippers in particular can be rather dull-coloured, though the Bright Red Velvet Bob (Korithaialos sindu) boasts an unusual splash of colour (Borneo lacks the truly brilliant skippers that enliven the tropics in Latin America).
Among the commonest, and plainest, of the roadside butterflies are the members of the genus Ypthima. Thay can be difficult to identify, but I am reasonably confident that this one is a Common Three-Ring (Yphthima pandocus).
Like Yphthima, the genus Eurema - the grass yellows - contains a number of very similar, small butterflies that one frequently finds low in roadside vegetation.
Another basically brown butterfly, with its own pattern of eyespots, is the Brown Pansy (Junonia hedonia). It is one of the plainer members of its genus.
The sexes are pretty much alike, but this male seemed to have no difficulty in identifying a potential mate.
As in many butterflies, pheromones may play a part here.
A rather more striking denizen of the forest edge is the Yellow Glassy Tiger (Parantica aspasia). This butterfly is mimicked by both a related butterfly and a moth, but I believe this, indeed, a Yellow Glassy Tiger and not one of its imitators.
Getting a good photo of a Rustic (Cupha erymanthis) can be tricky; they can be both energetic and flighty.
Tanaecia is a genus of forest-floor butterflies that feed on fallen fruits and rarely, if ever, visit flowers. They can be difficult to identify without detailed examination of their genitalia, but this one may be T. orphne.
Open areas along the roadside may be spanned by the enormous webs of the Golden Orb Weaver (Nephila pilipes).
Dragonflies at Kubah tend to fall into two categories: open-country and edge species, like this Orthetrum chrysis, that you can find along the roadside, and “true” forest species that may bask in patches of sunshine beneath the trees but rarely emerge into larger open areas.
The shadows around the frog pond, for example, are almost always brightened by a glittering, golden-eyed male Cratilla metallica perched over the water, guarding its territory, but I rarely see this common forest species on the roadside edge only a few yards away.
I love the frog pond, whether by night or by day. You never know what you will see from the boardwalk that circles it - perhaps, for example, a Three-keeled Ground Skink (Mabuya rudis) stretched out in a patch of sunlight.
The frog pond often turns up the sighting of the day. In this case it was a lovely little mammal that I do not recall having seen before, the Three-striped Ground Squirrel (Lariscus insignis). This is supposed to be a "shy, nervous" species, and this one lived up to the description. I was only able to get this photo as it streaked off into the forest.
Even if there is little animal life around, Kubah can still delight with its range of plants. As usual, I cannot identify these (though the lower one may be a species of Macaranga, a widespread genus of forest edge trees), but they are lovely all the same.
