Smelly lotus pond in AMK park

Even though my secondary and JC were in Ang Mo Kio, I have never gone to the AMK West Town Park in my entire life. Luckily my friend who lived nearby kindly showed me around the park today. :)

I knew that there was a lotus pond there but I didn’t know that it was in such an unkempt state! A foul smell lingered from it and weeds were covering over the surface. There were a few people cleaning up the pond though, and this guy above tried pulling up a clump of grass that had covered part of the water.

There was a long climb up the park, guarded by these tall majestic cabbage palms, Roystonea oleracea.

My friend pointed out that we can sometimes find bats roosting under the folded leaves of Livistona chinensis. Sure enough, she managed to find one dog-faced fruit bat, Cynopterus brachyotis hiding at a palm leaf.

The Tembusu, Fagraea fragrans, is flowering everywhere now and we saw a bunch of small birds, like the white-eye above, feeding on the nectar.

At one end of the park, there was a big area for people who kept cage birds to let them enjoy the sunday morning. Who knows what the birds really felt though.

Most of the birds under the shelter are white-rumped shama, which is also a native bird.

Isn’t this a paddyfield pipit (another native)? What this ground dwelling bird doing it a cage? :s

I loved this park because it has a mixture of natural secondary forest (albeit a low quality one) and open spaces. Anyway, this tree with a large girth stood out among all the thin trees.

Looks like it is an Alstonia species, probably Alstonia angustiloba?

This bug looked like a hybrid of cockroach and wasp with centipede antennae. Creepy…

My friend pointed out this jackfruit tree, Artocarpus heterophyllus and we saw two plantain squirrels nibbling on the fruits. Cutez :)

After a loop, we were back to the lotus pond where the cleaners were still removing the weeds from the pond.

The pond is not entirely deprived of life though. We saw a lot of frogs inside it!

Awesome park for wildlife appreciation. I wish my neighbourhood park, Punggol Park can be half as nice as this…