Nature Around Us

We live in a very pretty part of Hong Kong with a lot of relatively exotic birds and tropical trees around the apartment.

This picture is from the Internet of a crested myna - acridotheres cristatellus - perched on the blossoms of a cotton tree, or bombax ceiba.

We don't have any cotton trees near us but there are several along the road to the Aberdeen tunnel. Photographers gather for weeks to take pictures of the blossoms in the early spring.

There are, however, many crested mynas living around our apartment.

Crested myna song.

They visit the Norfolk Island pine outside our bedroom window.

This is a picture of Norfolk Island pines as Captain Cook found them on the South Pacific's Norfolk Island, for which they were named. The picture came from this Wikipedia entry on the tree.

Cook thought the straight trunk would make excellent masts and had many of them cut down for that purpose. The wood proved to be too soft for masts or any kind of building, however.

There are a lot of black-collared starlings - sturnus nigricollis in Latin - in the neighborhood. They have a very distinctive call in the mornings.

Black-collared starling song.

We also have a lot of red-whiskered bulbuls - pycnonotus jocosus - which also have a cheerful morning song. They are popular songbirds sold in bird markets in Asia.

Red-whiskered bulbul song.

There is a big royal poinciana - delonix regia - in front of our building, though it was butchered rather badly in a crude pruning exercise last year.

The tree was named for Philippe de Longvilliers de Poincy, a French colonial governor of Saint Kitts in the Caribbean. Poincy introduced the tree there from its native habitat in Madagascar and it has since spread all over the tropical and sub-tropical world.

When in bloom, it is dusted with brilliant orange flowers, which give the tree its other popular names: Flamboyant or Flame Tree.

There are many Chinese banyans - ficus microcarpa - growing in the neighborhood, as they do all over Hong Kong. They are a kind of strangler fig whose seeds germinate in the tops of other trees and drop aerial roots that eventually wrap around the host and kill it. Their phantasmagoric roots often look like they melted into place.

True's bedroom looks out at a weeping ficus - ficus benjamina - which is pretty but less dramatic.

Ficus leaves.

Another common bird around the apartment is the Chinese spotted dove - spilopelia chinensis.

Chinese spotted dove song.

And there are a lot of wispy casuarinas around - also known as Australian pines.