There is no need to spend hours watching nature documentaries on TV if you live in Brunei. Rather than being hard to find nature is very much ‘in your face’ when you live here.
The many jungle remnants that we have all around us provide a wealth of wildlife, some of it unwelcome, but all of it fascinating.
Take our evolutionary cousins the monkeys for example. Gregarious to the point of being annoying at times, they are always happy to root through our rubbish bins for delicacies that the jungle doesn’t provide. No matter how well you have secured the lid on your rubbish bin they seem to be able to devise a way of opening it.
Less intrusive, but still abundant we have a variety of lizards. Some even take up residence in our homes. While they don’t pay rent but they do eat insects, so I suppose we can consider them employees of a sort. Others simply live in our gardens and drains and seem quite happy despite the close proximity of our cat collection.
Cats of course have honoured us with their presence for centuries. We refer to them as ‘domesticated’, which means they permit us to feed them and spend a fortune taking care for them. It makes you wonder who has domesticated who?
Related to the lizards, but perhaps less welcome are snakes. I suspect that there are more snakes around than we realise. They are often about at night when they are difficult to see but occasionally they do pay us a visit during the day. Knowing little about them I treat them all with considerable respect.
Less welcome are the hosts of insects that surround us. I doubt if anyone would welcome a mosquito into their home, or even be near it if it can be avoided. Usually it can’t, despite all the sprays and chemicals that we use to destroy them, they seem to thrive.
But some of our insect neighbours are very colourful. Dragonflies are particularly attractive and they seem to have enough sense to stay outside our homes, which makes them a welcome part of the scenery. Another common insect is the giant grasshopper that I always enjoy photographing. They don’t bite, and they stay still long enough to get a good sharp close-up.
But flies are unwelcome. I don’t like flies. At least in the house, despite the fact that trying to swat them does occasionally provide a welcome distraction from a boring TV show. Some flies have enough good sense to remain outside where they do no harm and cause no annoyance. And one or two are even quite photogenic, although they rarely stay still long enough to get a good photograph.
Some of the larger animals try to avoid humans but they are still quite a common sight. Monitor lizards are often to be seen sauntering across a road. Sadly, their rather leisurely pace isn’t always fast enough to avoid the traffic.
Love it or hate it, nature is here to stay. The concrete jungle will not outlast the rainforest and we are slowly learning that we must accommodate ourselves to it rather than vice-versa. But then, who wouldn’t prefer to have nature on their doorstep rather than just on TV?
Latest by Ron Knox:
- Car servicing-Fact or fiction
- Unfinished citadels
- A step into the past
- Overbudget & overdue
- Jerudong's vanishing pavements
