26 August 2010

Kuala Lumpur Highlights - Wild Wildlife

Early the next morning and I mean early, early the next morning, we woke up to the noise of someone knocking on wood, outside our window. When I first looked out to see what the noise was about, I did not see anything and about that time, the knocking stopped. You have to understand that I wasn't awake yet and our room was on the first floor, so I was expecting to see someone hammering away at something at a neighbour's house, ....further away.

When the knocking happened again, it was Margaret who first saw it and hence the photo. There was a punk looking white and yellow woodpecker with a red Mohican hair-do, "knocking" at a tree, just outside the window. Imagine my surprise. It obviously did not notice us at the window, for it carried on for a good few minutes before it took flight across the field, towards another tree. Could not go back to sleep after that, so "got up" for an early breakfast.

Just after breakfast, my brother called us out to the front of the house and pointed us to some tress at the boundary of the housing estate. There were movement in the tress that he wanted us to capture on video.

Monkeys!

Seems there is a troop of monkeys roaming the area, every morning. They come from an oil palm estate just beyond the fence and railway line. And what was the attraction for them to risk crossing the railway line and into the homes of people in the area; fruit trees like the papaya tree at my brother's garden. It seems like a constant battle to keep the monkeys away. Often half eaten green unripe papaya can be found around the gardens, when they do manage to venture close to the homes.

They are curious of anything lying around the grounds of the houses or the laundry hung out to dry. I heard stories of monkeys entering homes and the kitchen in search of food.


While these cute and playful monkeys are an attraction for people like myself visiting home, "Oh, look at that cute little monkey!" .....they have become .."Those filthy creatures!" .....an annoyance if not, a pest to the people living in the area. It certainly highlights to me how much the jungles where these animal once called home, has shrunk as the country develop. Certainly the oil palm estates have replaced the jungles as their home, but I think it is not the same. Their natural habitat do not consist of neat rows of "trees" appropriately spaced apart.

But this issue is not unique to the city of Kuala Lumpur.

Effects of Wild Animals moving into the city
Wild animals turned to city residents to beat the latest heatwave
Jungle with wild animals in modern city
Wild Animals Displaced by Logging in Cities and Towns
Wildlife - Wikipedia

Video Clip of Monkeys




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