The Full Glory and Fury of Nature

It is unimaginable Man can miss out so much on life without communing with nature.

After all, that was where he was born into. The Bible's Garden of Eden and our prehistoric Out of Africa savannahs and highlands

That wonderful yet terrifying naturalistic surrounds must be both a gift and a curse to humankind.

Beginning with the Palaeolithic Age, Man was subjected to all the fury of nature in its climatic elements of thunder, lightning, rainstorms, windstorms and even snowstorms alternating with the scorching searing sun.

Couple all that with cyclical droughts, floods, famines and the seemingly insurmountable physical terrains of mountains, highlands, deserts, glaciation and seas and you can picture how Man bleakly copes amidst this merciless onslaught.

This is when mythology and the early days of paganism rooted. Man cannot explain all of nature's wonders and fury. They could only ascribe this to higher beings living in the cosmos, thus coming to be known as deities and Gods.

They ritualise and sacrifice to appease these Gods. The Egyptians built their pyramids reaching high up to the constellations and prepare themselves for a teletransportational life after death in mummification. So too did the Mayans.

Temples were built with men and women performing the intermediary roles between God and men. That was when paganism (the early form of religion) vaulted.

Back on Earth, early men had to contend with the bigger, stronger and sharper predatory animals and to relentlessly hunt for substenance and life-giving water.

Some of these animals (both predator and prey) were also worshipped as animistic symbols of celestial beings - heathen worship.

Soon however , the savage and barbaric hunters of old learn to agrarise (growing food crops and domesticating animals) and build civilisation and communities near the rivers and seas. All great civilisations begin on fertile ground or near water. Man has tamed and conquered nature to a considerable extent.

Now that we are completely civilised and industrialised, we control food production , work in modern offices to earn our keep and live in modern homes with all the labour-saving conveniences. Nature at best is a leisure pursuit of sorts.

Of course I am only speaking for most parts of the world. There are still pockets of remote places living life as it was in the tribal villages. It is not for us to scorn their way of life.

From them, we should learn the finer craft of living among the rich flora and fauna as we surely must if the life sciences is to proceed on an even keel. After all, there is no micro this or nano that if we do not have a macro-species to begin with, right?

Therefore the microbiologists and geneticists must surely work hand-in-glove with the anthropologists, ecologists and palaeo-anthropologists along with the physicists and biochemists.

When I hike in our reserve, this overwhelming power of a premieval living state failed no end to amaze and astound me.

The olive-backed sunbird chirping as it build its twig-nest. The laughing chest-nut thrush hopping about on the forest floor. The black-naped oriole swooping over the waters. The majestic white-bellied eagle perched atop a stump and soaring magnificiently in the sky. And the antics of a collared kingfisher preening itself upon a tree branch.

The shimmering emerald-green lake teeming with pond skaters, silver-bodied fishes tipped with bright orange fins tinged with black and water hens and jungle fowls pecking away at its fringes.

The fishes' silver-bodied scales remind me of the mirror-reflect tactic in a book I read of using optics to blind its potential predators. And I cannot imagine that the shallow and polluted waters of the reservoir could actually contain such beautiful creatures.

The towering trees, some bearing brightly coloured African-tulip flowers, and many green shrubs just below the forest canopy like the ubiquitous swampy Dillenia, exude greenery and sweet nectar for the birds and bees to feast upon.

Huge carpenter bees buzzed ominously as they flit from flower to flower to succour and feed.

Many of these botanical species hold important lessons for the spice, medicinal, wood-crafting and industrial trades. On an early morning trip, I could smell curry spice and pandan leaves.

Some are our common fruit trees of durians, rambutans, mangoes and jackfruits. The jackfruit tree has all its fruits growing on its trunk, making it a Christmas tree of sort with its fruits hanging layer upon layer of its main stem. And the durian fruit seems so unreachable, mightily aloft the tall branches of its tree while the rambutans hang low among its over-arching arms.

The Shorea, a sub-species of the Meranti, has its wind-dispersed fruit much shaped like the chapteh we heel for play or the shuttlecock of a badminton game. Incidentally the old name for badminton was named battledore and played with a wooden racket.

When I pause to ponder the amazing array of species, I think of Carl Linnaeus, the progenitor of taxonomical classification. However only ten percent of all species has thus been taxonomised.

No wonder a strange insect looking much like the green lace wingfly which crawled up my hand was not be found among the books I consulted. Even the fresh-water fish I mentioned earlier isn't (or so I think).

And it makes sense to learn Greek and Latin as the genus and species in a binomial nomenclature uses those.

The quarry we have in our reserve is the igneous rock of an active volcano which once threw up magma. According to its epigraph, it is filling with rain-water as fast as it can hold till the year 2008 when it will burst its banks. Will Singapore then be another Atlantis? Will it blow up again once its dormant slumber is awakened?

The gigantic Komodo Dragon living on Komodo and Flores Islands Indonesia, is the largest living lizard which can grow up to 3 metres. Flores island , by the way, is also currently abuzz with a recent palaeo-anthropological find of what is believed to be an early hominid - the homo-florensis. And being geographically close to Australia, is it any surprise the scientific discoverers are both Indonesian and Australian?

Here in our reserve, we can have a glimpse of its smaller cousins, the White Water and Clouded Monitor lizards . We can even let our mind run berserk and dream them to be the bigger Komodos by watching them amble on the ground, sticking out their long pitch-forked blue tongue feeling the air. On a hot afternoon, there are many of them basking or slithering away in the waters.

The red-eared sliders in our reserve, unfortunately , are not natives. The reason why they congregate around humans , much like the pair of mute swans at our arboretum along with their companion duck, is the result of conditioning and domestication as animals in captivity. They were waiting to be fed.

I have even been witness to one scene of their ranivorous feeding where they snapped at the neck of a Giant Asian Frog, shredding its body to pieces and dividing this kill among several of them.

Don't forget the reserve we see today is the remnants of a secondary forest with a tiny tract of primary forest only to be found in our central reserve. What this means is that most of what we see are disturbed vegetation and once cultivated for commercial cropping.

If we are ever to see its original masterwork, we probably have to wait several hundred years and I don't think my and my progeny's progenies will live to see this.

Man, heed this. If we care to look carefully around us, some of the flora and fauna abound just right oustide our doorsteps too.

The full glory and fury of Nature. When will Man ever learn?