Hard at work at Chek Jawa

Good Morning Mr Hermit Crab! A small team is busy at Chek Jawa today to help Siti with her seagrass experiment.

Working very hard, we managed to get a lot of stuff done!


We started early and arrived at dawn.

Today, we are going to remove Siti's seagrass experiment. Siti begins with a thorough safety briefing. Then we roll down our sleeves (to protect from barnacle cuts) and get to work.

We break up the experimental set up into smaller pieces and cable tie them into smaller piles.

Many hands get it done so rapidly that Siti is giving a very impressed thumbs up to the team.

Fortunately, we have lots of strong young men and women to help with the heavy duty job of hauling angle irons and pipes all the way out to the boardwalk entrance. They have a brainwave and construct a way to carry all this more efficiently.

It's still a long long way to the final destination.

Another job was to collect small samples of seagrasses in the experimental site.

In what seems no time at all, the entire experimental set up is dismantled and removed! Only Chay Hoon is left, patiently sieving out seagrasses from the sampling sites.

Siti and I also collect small amounts of the seagrasses for her upcoming Seagrass Workshop on 2 Jul (Mon). The workshop is FREE! Come and join us if you want to find out more about our seagrasses and how you can make a difference for them.

Bravo to the Team! We got everything out in a nice big pile!

The highlight of any trip to Chek Jawa is a peek at the wild piglets. We didn't meet Mama and her brood in the morning and were a little worried. But on the way home, we looked more carefully, and there she was in the undergrowth, quitely having a snooze with her babies around her. They were so still and well camouflaged, that visitors at the hut didn't even notice them.

One of the piglets is a lot larger than the rest and seems to be losing its 'watermelon' stripes.

Sankar takes a photos of one of the little piglets coming to have a closer look at us.

If we don't threaten these wild beasts, they will not be alarmed and we can quietly observe them.

I was quite surprised to read about a wild boar attacking a child at Bishan recently. The wild boar at Chek Jawa coexist quite peacefully with families and young kids, even though people in large numbers regularly interact with them. Who can forget the very special people-friendly Priscilla the Pig, who used to accompany visitors out on the intertidal walks at Chek Jawa, before she died in 2004.

We are so lucky today that a tame Mama wild boar and her brood are hanging around at Chek Jawa to allow ordinary people the magical experience of a big but gentle wild beast. Here's Mama wild boar with her piglet peacefully crossing in front of a large group of people including young kids, in Dec 2011.

Let's hope these endearing wild boar at Chek Jawa are not affected by recent discussions of plans to control the population of wild boar in Singapore.

Posts by others on this trip

• Pei Yan shares more of the work done and some marine life spotted along the way. 
• Sankar has a new blog! And this trip is featured in his first post!