Bird and Butterfly Race

NSS Butterfly Guide App

Last month, on the 26 May, Shayna, Zek Min and I went to participate in the Mini Bird and Butterfly Race organised by Nature Society (Singapore) (NSS) to celebrate the launch of the NSS Bird and Butterfly iPhone App during the Biodiversity Festival and to trail run these applications. These iPad/iPhone applications developed by the NSS aid users in identifying bird and butterfly species and also keeping records of sightings.

The race was held in conjunction with the Festival of Biodiversity

Shayna

One of the butterflies (Rustic Butterfly) we spotted during the race! 

We had a jolly good time, made loads of delightful new friends and grew to appreciate the stunning beauty Mother Nature has bestowed upon us.

We did not win, but it was an enjoyable experience and although we are still a little iffy on the use of binoculars, we did learn a fair bit about identifying birds and butterflies.

We would like to express our gratitude toward the Nature Society for organizing the race and giving us the oppurtunity to participate, and for creating the apps which will be a tremendous help to the public in identifying butterflies and so doing spread awareness about them.  Especial thanks goes out to the representatives of the Nature Society who facilitated the race and who managed to put up with us and who, more importantly, pulled the entire event off beautifully.

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 The next day, Zek Min and Yuexin went to help out @ the booth at Botanic Garden to promote the application (and teach them how to use it) to the public:

 Tags!

Students from River Valley High School helping out with the booth as part of their CCA activities

Yuexin

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Inter-House Games

On the 25th of May, 2012, CmPS Project WISH organized an Inter-House Game within our school.

A peak at the initial planning stage!

The Inter-House Games are essentially a series of games students can participate in to win points for their house.  Individual games are each organized separately by a select number of student groups—this year, however, we were the only CmPS group granted permission to organize an IHG. We opted for a popular favourite- an Amazing Race style IHG.

Our aim in organizing it was to spread awareness about butterflies within the school population, and to promote our butterfly garden in school.  

And so the Amazing Race became a Butterfly-Themed-Amazing-Race. Our tactical approach to this conundrum was to make the each station related to butterflies.  For those of you unfamiliar with modern-day television, an Amazing Race is basically a race in which there are a number of teams with a series of stations to complete.  Only upon each station’s completion are the teams given a clue, which once solved will direct them to the next station.

However given a number of constraints, we devised a points system so as to allow the game to suit the House system. So, a simplified explanation on the operation of our IHG:  there are five teams, each representing the five houses.  There are a number of stations, each staffed by a station manager.  Each station houses a game or task, and teams are assigned points by the station manager based on their performance.  It is only upon completion of each separate game/task by the teams to the station managers’ satisfaction that they are given a clue directing them to the next station.

And that’s the logistical side of it.

Our purpose in organising this IHG was to raise awareness about butterflies. 

Pre-IHG briefing

In the pre-IHG briefing, we gave them a presentation about the importance of urban nature in Singapore, as well as the role butterflies play. They then went on to prove their newly-earned knowledge in various games and challenges.
  

 The stations:

Kate's and Zek Min's station: the Koi Pond

Each group started from a different station. Kate's station was called 'Rapid Fire' where participants would have to answer as many questions as possible within the time limit of 10 minutes. We were glad to observe that most of them had absorbed the content of the briefing.  

Zhang Xuan's and Beverley's station was titled 'Caterpillar Games' and served to evaluate the teams on their teamwork.  The station was set up such that there were thirty individually numbered leaves placed around a given area in a random order.  The participants formed a line before being blindfolded and left in the hands of a selected team leader, whose job it was to direct the group in completing a circuit of fifteen leaves in as little time as possible.  This circuit was determined by the station mistress, who would call out a number and wait for the group to travel to the corresponding leaf before calling out the next number.  Teams were assessed based on station mistresses' observations regarding their team work as well as on the time it took for them to complete the activity.

Zhang Xuan and Beverley's station: outside the KS Chee Theatre

For Yuexin's station, the participants were given a map and tasked to identify the locations of the butterfly plants in our school within a given time frame. This activity aimed to promote awareness of the different types of butterfly plants, especially so in our school community itself. 

Yuexin's station: on the track

Shayna's station is called 'Matching'. The participants have to match the names of the butterflies to the respective pictures. 

And finally, our IHG was set apart from past years’ by a very special touch—a last combined station.  No points, no death and glory and honour for your house—just a last station where all the teams gathered together in harmony to...

Richardson house planting their own plant

Do gardening!

Ownership is tremendously important for urban nature to be fully integrated by individuals into modern society.  It’s much easier to do something when you care about it.  On a smaller scale, ownership is key for our butterfly garden to continue to thrive in our absence in about two years’ time.

Gardening under the hot sun

                                                         

The idea was to have students of the school be part of the little urban nature/butterfly awareness project we have going on here.  That they be made aware of the importance of urban nature and the importance of butterflies in urban nature, and care about it.  And so the finishing line of the race was our school butterfly garden.  Each team planted a butterfly plant in representation of their house.  Each plant stands there as something that each house has done, has helped happen, and we hope that this has instilled a sense of ownership in the students. 

                                     

 

 

The main goal of our project can be summarised in five simple words: we want people to care.  And hopefully we’ll have accomplished that with this group of seventy or so students; yes, it’s not a lot of people, but it’s still seventy more people than there was before.  Seventy more people spreading the gospel.

Wang You giving the post-IHG debrief

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Updates

Recently, our schoolmates spotted a rather interesting scene at our school butterfly garden and one of them has kindly taken a photo of the cute scene (see below):  

A lizard sunbathing on the signs we put up at our school butterfly garden! Isn't it cute?

We have also finished designing our shirt and poster for a programme we're organising in collaboration with the Singapore Science Centre (credit goes to Kate).

The front and back designs of our shirt respectively. We have chosen the colour maroon as the T-shirt will be used for slightly more formal occasions. Poster to promote our workshop we are conducting @ Science Centre this June! Now we will be waiting for our designs to be approved by the school before further negotiating with the supplier. More updates soon!

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Meeting People. (Well, person.)

So we met up with the wonderful Mrs. Edith Flores Wolff from Germany. She has given us a good many ideas on how we can raise greater awareness of our project through creative means. 

But first, a little background information (or promotion, if you will) on/for Mrs. Wolff and her project (or what we can make of it).  It's called The Asia Europe Classroom Network, but we're involved in an aspect of it that concerns butterflies. Mrs. Wolff has worked with schools all across the globe, literally, and through this and her passion for butterflies she has amassed and shared with us a generous wealth of ideas which we are considering for our project.

These ideas include but are definitely not limited to:
- Colourful signs with butterfly pictures/quotes around the school to catch people's attention and raise awareness.  This is mostly to raise awareness about and expand out butterfly garden in school.
- Something about mandelas-- which are something like stained glass designs on paper.  We're considering incorporating this into our Science Centre programme.
- Butterfly puppets.  Glow in the dark puppets.

Also, she clarified the issue about the consolidation of butterfly species in a book.  There seems to be an issue regarding the translation of the scientific names of butterflies into Singapore's native languages, Chinese and Malay.  She brought to our attention a group of students in Germany who managed to translate the butterfly names into German.  Collation of host plants and teaching students how to identify them through books also came up.

She very kindly brought us gifts from the Philippines: these handmade key chains which are really pretty:

And we gave her this shirt that was very kindly prepared by a previous member of the group:

We gave her a tour of our butterfly garden, and she pointed out several other butterfly host plants scattered around the school.  She pointed out several other areas where our butterfly garden could potentially be expanded to.

Mrs. Lee with Mrs. Wolff

 Following this, we led both Mrs. Lee an Mrs. Wolff to the butterfly garden at Nassim Road and  the butterfly garden at Dhoby Ghaut Green. When we reached the garden, we were pleased to observe a butterfly, a Cruiser butterfly, which we hadn't seen before in the garden during the butterfly surveys. We are pleased to report that the garden is very active, more active than it has been for the past three or so surveys.

And we remain, Mrs. Wolff, most fondly yours,
Project W.I.S.H

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Butterfly Garden updates

The signs for the butterfly garden are up. Hopefully this will raise awareness about the existence of our garden, as well as prevent people from picking the flowers or disturbing the plants.

Zhang Xuan and Yuexin at work in the D&T lab

Our sign (: drawn by our resident artist Wang You!

'Do Not Fog'!

Unfortunately it has come to our attention that recently, our school has hired an external vendor to carry out fogging regularly every week in school. Needless to say, fogging is detrimental to the health of the many caterpillars on our plants.

This was initiated in response to parent/student complaints about the mosquitoes in the area, so we hope that the 'Do Not Fog' sign will keep them away from our butterfly garden.

Ms Tan Beng Chiak, a Biology teacher from our school, has told us about the fogging policy and according to the policy, fogging is meant to be used only in cases of an outbreak. A few cases can hardly be considered 'an outbreak', and weekly fogging will very likely worsen the situation, as:

1. It will pollute the air; the area nearby has many classrooms with many Year 1s and other classes taking place there;
2. It will harm or even kill many plants in the area and there are a lot nearby J-Block;
3. The mosquitoes can simply fly away during the fogging and return after it ends, but sedentary creatures such as caterpillars will be stuck on the plants, unable to escape;
4. The mosquitoes may grow resistant to the fog after prolonged exposure.

Hence we do plan to write to the estate department in our school to see if fogging in the future can be perhaps kept away from the garden. Fogging is a major issue not only with regards to our school garden but also to butterfly populations in Singapore in general, especially in urban areas.  It is impossible to maintain a butterfly garden when any butterflies and caterpillars that manage to be there are systematically and periodically killed off once every week.

Not only that, there must be some other environmentally friendly and more feasible solution to this mosquito issue. Why not launch a campaign to minimize stagnant water around the area to ensure that there are no breeding sites for the mosquitoes? Fogging is merely addressing the problems caused by this issue and not its roots, and is a very short-term solution.

In the meantime it has been suggested that we conduct a, and we quote, "search and rescue", for any caterpillars that might somehow still be alive.

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Roots & Shoots sharing

Vivian and Zek Min went for the Roots & Shoots seminars on Saturday April 21st at the Global Indian International School in Queenstown, a sharing hosted by the Jane Goodall Institute. We were honoured to be invited, and grateful, as this event allowed us to widen our social network and foster contacts with others who share a similar interest in butterflies and urban nature.

Some pictures taken...

There were some speakers who discussed about some environmental projects such as raising awareness about feeding monkeys and water conservation.

                                                 

Afterwards, we had a round table discussion. We split into small groups and discussed various topics. This in particular was interesting as all of us in the group had different backgrounds, ideas and knowledge of the environment, and the discussion allowed us to exchange ideas and learn from each other.

At the end of the gathering, a group of people approached us and asked if we would like to join them on a nature walk for their project. Apparently, they had asked our seniors (Project F.U.N.) last year, however they were not able to sustain their connections with them and they hoped that we would be able to do more with them this year. Something exciting to look forward to!

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Butterfly Survey 8

Today marks a milestone - we spotted a pupa on a plant in Dhoby Ghaut Green, the garden in which we have been conducting our butterfly surveys, and we have (sort of) adopted.

While we have seen many caterpillars in the garden, this is our first pupa so far.

We spotted a pupa on the the Pseuderanthemum reticulum plant!

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Butterfly Survey 6 & 7

Recently, we have spotted the Orange Emigrant butterfly while conducting our survey. The Painted Jezebel butterflies are back too; they have been mysterious absent from our previous few butterfly surveys.

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