4 birders go owling on a little hill and end up with a different creature… RH002 remains a mystery in its own right, just like Cecil’s Oriental Scops…
A bambino stalks the woods noisily somewhere in Singapore (i)
It was a fine evening, clear as gin, moonlit, and more importantly, perfect for owling. The party was organised to track down the elusive Otus sunia, (Cecil had become dead desperate as the northern hemisphere’s summer draw closer, for the owl will soon set off for whatever snowy-then-not-snowy-now regions it came from).
As usual I was very very late.
They told me that I’d just missed out on a civet. But then I had already seen one months before under the full moon, idly dangling a long tail on a neighbour’s zinc roof above the pottering old lady …
After a fruitless ramble around the war memorial, it was time to venture elsewhere. We treaded up a sinewy slip of a road that bordered electric fences guarding TV transmission towers on one side and forest on the other, heading towards an enclave of colonial housing with tall trees promising owl seekers prime owl territory.
Looking back, we did break all the rules by shining our torches (3k lumens and counting) right into foliage, onto trunks and literally everything that every NS recruit knew was torch–haram. And therefore it really shouldn’t be a shock what happened then, happened. And if you must know, it wasn’t the first happening of happenings on this very hill.
Nothing alive came into sight until we passed the security office at the far end. That was when they found a nightjar. Then in the midst of ID-ing the bird, from the far end of the memorial came a wailing….desperate, animal, unyielding…and so very loud that nobody within 500 paces would have missed it.
Buoyed by the fact that whatever it was, was from afar and not about to pounce on us any moment, we shifted their focus to ID-ing the call.
“Mammal.”
“Yes, definitely so.”
“Monkey?”
“Likely.”
“Could be the civet?”
“We should make a recording of this.”
Why did the conversation peter out before we came to any conclusions? I sometimes ask myself that but no answers arrive.
Why did I then decide on the spur of the moment to leave them and hunt down this “civet” myself? I too ask myself that and the answer that comes is oft too idiotic to verbalise.
In any case, whatever was wailing, was still wailing near the memorial. (Deep down, I already knew it was no monkey nor civet)
Occasionally, it would pause, as if tired out from riding the ebbs and flows of its lamentation.
It took me some a few minutes to trace our steps back to the security office. By then, it was silent and I gave pause to my steps to take in the surroundings.
It turned out I didn’t have to wait long.
A wail suddenly erupted right in front of me. My mind raced to contemplate the fact that it reached me in a mere matter of seconds when I was at least 400? 500? metres away. What was stranger was that I could make out a ‘hello’ in the cries…
For about a minute, I confronted this circling howl. The only plausible explanation that came to me in that moment is one that is infinitely improbable. I thought the security officers were trolling us with a voice changer to ward off errant torchy owlers. I know it sounds far more implausible than the parrot option my naturalist friend blithely postulated but I couldn’t imagine any animal being behind this…
On the third or fourth hello, I decided it best to run back to the group. It did not follow …
Nobody was severely shaken when I related my experience but discussion might have been embargoed until we left the place. The call was also somehow not recorded down (much to the recorder’s relief) but it definitely wasn’t a civet, we checked. No conclusive ID could be made (although some other stories are slowly emerging – part ii).
When we were moving out, it was still calling but from deep within the forest. Someone said “See, it’s just a crying baby… from the condos maybe…”
Perhaps…perhaps…indeed… a baby crying hello from the other side…
XO,
XY