An awesome day out at Chek Jawa with families during the school holidays! For the free monthly walk by the
Naked Hermit Crabs.
It was a hot hot day but we saw jellyfishes, monitor lizards, lots of crabs and mudskippers and more!
For the first time, I started our walk from the Coastal Boardwalk. It was a hot morning!
The Coastal Boardwalk gives us a good look at the coastal forest and rocky shore. As well as at the Chek Jawa Beacon, which comes in two parts - the Front Beacon and Rear Beacon.
The seagrass meadows were lush and looking well, and the sand bar out at the low tide. With several herons hunting in the low water.
Along the boardwalk I notice a layer of 'crispy' vegetation at the coastal forest. The area affected by the East Johor oil spill that happened in Jan 2017? See my
recent oil spill survey at Changi a week earlier.
It was lovely to get back under the shade of the mangrove trees! Besides cool shade, mangrove trees also provide a lot of other ecosystem services such as supporting a population of bats that pollinates our durian trees!
As we get to the back mangroves, we get a closer look at wildlife among the dense growths of mangrove plants such as the Nipah palm. A young Water monitor lizard is a bit hit!
All too soon, we are back at House No. 1, also the Chek Jawa Visitor Centre. Where participants share what they saw in lovely drawings.
Thanks to Dayna for bringing her fellow students along to learn about Chek Jawa so they could do a guided walk for Secondary students.
Although my groups missed seeing this, other groups saw a bloom of mangrove jellyfishes. I had seen a similar
bloom at Pasir Ris mangroves a few days earlier.
One of my favourite drawings is of the
Ant-house plant that we often see during our walks.
More photos of our walk by
Mohammad Juhari on facebook.
On the way home, I noticed the water is tea-coloured. A sign of a plankton bloom.
The area next to the Ferry Terminal at Changi is still well used by fish farmers and people at Pulau Ubin for loading and unloading.
This area is not provided with industrial trash collection. They appear to use a small NParks bin for the trash.
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