First peregrine falcon chicks hatch and fledge in Singapore after efforts to help breeding
The older chick fledged on May 18, while its sibling fledged on May 21, said NParks. This refers to young birds growing feathers and learning how to fly.
However, both birds were found on the ground floor shortly after they each fledged and were brought to NParks' Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation for health assessments.
'X-rays for both chicks showed no fracture, and the first fledgling was released back to its nest on May 20 and the younger one on May 23,' said NParks.
The older fledgling has shown that it is now capable of stronger flight and gaining elevation.
On May 23, it was spotted with its parents, perched on the nearby One Raffles Place. The next day, it was seen on the building again, but at a higher spot.
'While the fledglings are gaining strength and confidence in flying, they may accidentally find themselves on the ground again,' said NParks.
It advised the public to contact NParks' Animal Response Centre at 1800 476 1600 if any of the fledglings are seen on the ground.
FUTURE PLANS
The research team placed temperature and humidity sensors in both recesses on the sides of the OCBC Centre on Apr 30.
'This can help determine if there are microclimatic preferences in nest site selection, based on the prevailing temperature or humidity, which would vary at different times of the year,' explained NParks.
'As Singapore's only known breeding pair of peregrine falcons, these birds provide invaluable research opportunities,' said Dr Malcolm Soh, the principal researcher on NParks' wildlife management research team.
'Their presence allows us to gather crucial data about peregrine falcon breeding biology in tropical regions, where their ecology remains poorly understood.'
One particular area of interest is learning what nesting conditions, such as temperature and nesting substrates, are suited for peregrine falcons to breed in urban areas, he said.
NParks said that the team will also be reviewing CCTV footage to determine the types of prey caught by the falcons, with Dr Soh adding that the prey species captured by the falcons are expected to be different from those caught by birds nesting in natural habitats.
'By studying their breeding patterns and foraging preferences, we can develop more effective conservation strategies to support their successful adaptation to Singapore's urban landscape,' Dr Soh said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNA
an hour ago
- CNA
SAF regular serviceman dies after being found unconscious at Hendon Camp swimming pool
SINGAPORE: A Singapore Armed Forces regular serviceman has died after he was found unconscious at Hendon Camp swimming pool, said the Ministry of Defence (Mindef) in a news release on Saturday (Aug 9). He was discovered at 7.15am on Saturday, and appeared to have been training on his own, added Mindef. "CPR and AED were administered immediately. The Singapore Police Force and Singapore Civil Defence Force were activated, and the serviceman was evacuated to Changi General Hospital via SCDF ambulance," the release read. "Resuscitation continued on route and upon arrival at Changi General Hospital. Despite resuscitation efforts, he was pronounced dead at 7.44am. "The Ministry of Defence and the SAF extend their deepest condolences to the family of the late serviceman." Mindef said it is providing assistance to the family.
CNA
5 hours ago
- CNA
From her hands to his heart: A son's devotion to preserving the taste of his mother's Peranakan cooking
Arthur Lim still speaks about his mother in the present tense. 'She uses a bit more of lemongrass,' he said, describing how Alice Choo's laksa differs from traditional versions. For a moment, you forget that Alice passed away in 2019 at age 94, her mind sharp until the end. Yet, her memory lives so vividly in Lim's kitchen that she might as well be standing beside him, approving each dish with the exacting standards that once made him nervous as a young cook seeking her blessing. It's this vivid presence that has driven Lim to an unexpected calling that weaves together his mother's culinary legacy with his own journey as a private dining host. His cookbook Tok Panjang: The Evolution of a Peranakan Heritage Feast, first published in late 2023 by Landmark Books Singapore, represents more than a collection of recipes – it's the culmination of years spent preserving a disappearing tradition while building his own reputation among Singapore's most discerning food enthusiasts. The first edition sold out its thousand-copy print run in 18 months, and a second print run has just been released. The path to this preservation mission was hardly direct. After a long career in finance at OCBC and Standard Chartered Merchant Bank, plus managing a Japanese supermarket in London, Lim returned to Singapore in 2000 expecting a quieter chapter. What he found instead was a calling that had been quietly brewing in his mother's kitchen all along. For Alice Choo was no ordinary Peranakan cook. As a fifth-generation Baba, Lim traces both sides of his family to Penang and Melaka, but Choo's lineage was particularly complex, weaving Vietnamese and Thai into the Malaysian influences. Having learned her craft from her own mother, Choo marinated all these influences into something distinctly her own. The Penang heritage brought heavier use of lemongrass and blue ginger to her cooking. The Melaccan tradition contributed more onions and sweetness. Which explains why Choo's versions were a little sweeter and more sour than typical Peranakan dishes. Lim began learning at her side when he was 12, his palate slowly trained to understand not just flavours but the precise ratios that made his mother's food singular. Like Choo, he learned to cook by sight, sound, and smell – watching for the exact colour of cooking meat, listening for the volume of a bubbling stew, waiting for that moment when the fragrance of frying rempah turned just so. Yet for all this technical virtuoso, neither of them considered this food particularly special. This was simply the repast of their daily lives, nothing more remarkable than breathing. So much so that the preservation of Choo's repertoire began almost by accident, years later when Lim lived in London. During Choo's visits, mother and son would find themselves at the kitchen table, chatting over tea, and she would rattle off recipes from memory while Lim, almost absent-mindedly, began jotting them down on scraps of paper. It was painstaking deductive work. Recipes called for '20 cents of grated coconut', say, or required the rempah to be fried till fragrant, with no further elaboration. What started as casual notetaking became something more profound when Lim realised he had accumulated a culinary treasure trove. Back in Singapore, he began hosting dinners at his Joo Chiat home for friends and family. The revelation came through the gratifyingly positive reactions of others even as word spread among Singapore's food-conscious circles, leading to increasingly exclusive gatherings for seasoned epicureans who travelled the world eating at Michelin-starred restaurants as a matter of course. Many even encouraged him to share his mother's recipes more widely. Lim was reluctant. Like Choo, he considered this everyday food, nothing particularly special. 'This is just what I grew up eating,' he explained. One pivotal evening, when Lim was called into his dining room after service, guests spontaneously applauded. The feedback was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. 'People would say, 'I don't like rendang, but why is yours so different?'' he recalled. Another guest couldn't stop eating something she'd never encountered before, despite years of eating Peranakan food elsewhere. 'There were many dishes there that they've never had,' Lim realised. But more than anything, he began to understand his mother's recipes weren't just family comfort food. They represented something genuinely unique in the Peranakan culinary landscape. Two years ago, that realisation was transformed into a 128-page cookbook. No larger than a slim paperback, the volume punches above its weight category, its 25 recipes framed against the story of a dyed-in-the-wool Peranakan family and their distinctive culinary traditions. While familiar dishes like babi assam (belly pork braised in tamarind) and udang masak nanas (prawns cooked with pineapple) make their appearance, the cookbook's real value lies in showcasing recipes that have all but vanished from contemporary Peranakan kitchens. Here you'll find hati babi bungkus (liver and pork balls wrapped in pig's caul), tee hee (stir-fried pig's lungs), and kuah lada (a peppery stew of Spanish mackerel steaks) – dishes that signal to seasoned Peranakans that this represents a kitchen of altogether different standards. These are the recipes you can't find for love or money today, except in family kitchens like Lim's. Today, Lim's monthly tok panjang dinners have become legendary among those fortunate enough to snag a slot. The term tok panjang – 'tok' meaning table in Hokkien, 'Panjang' meaning long in Malay – refers to the traditional Peranakan communal feast. The practice can be traced to the long table placed in front of family altars in Peranakan homes, where lauk sembahyang (prayer food) was offered during rituals. After ceremonies concluded, the same food would be consumed by attending family members, transforming sacred offerings into communal celebration. Lim's elaborate feasts of a dozen or so dishes, each requiring the kind of meticulous preparation that makes more frequent hosting impractical. But what drives Lim isn't nostalgia but urgency. As the youngest of 10 children, he was the one most often in Choo's kitchen, the one whose palate she trained and whose cooking earned her approval. 'After me, there will not be continuity,' he said matter-of-factly even as he casually mentions that the 25 recipes in his book represent only a fraction of Choo's repertoire. He estimates there are hundreds more recipes for daily dishes, material that could well form the basis of future cookbooks. When asked what his mother would think of the book, Lim's face brightens with the same expression he describes seeing on hers when guests enjoyed her cooking. 'The biggest form of appreciation for her is if you truly get pleasure out of her cooking, or even if it was someone else preparing her dishes. You can literally see the light on her face.' Today, Lim continues his mother's tradition of abundance and variety. In preserving her recipes, he has also preserved something else more essential – the warmth and generosity that made Alice Choo's table a place where food became love, and where tradition is finding its way safely into the future. And perhaps, in some way, she's still there in that Joo Chiat kitchen, watching approvingly as her youngest son carries forward everything she taught him, her presence as vivid and enduring as the flavours she perfected over a lifetime of cooking.
CNA
14 hours ago
- CNA
With a dream and a dictionary, this nurse left everything behind to start a new life in Singapore
In the depths of Ms Miao Lan's mind, the island of Singapore – some five thousand kilometres south from her birthplace of Henan, China – had always been somewhat of a promised land. The city-state is extremely small compared to the colossal "Middle Kingdom", but her father made sure to point it out every once in a while on the world map that was mounted in her bedroom. "You were both born in August 1965," he would say. "It's a small country but it's a great one." It might have been the littlest connection, but it was all that was needed for the young girl to develop a profound desire to one day step foot on Singapore soil. "(August 1965) is a coincidence but it was a connection with me ... It became one of my dreams since then, (that) maybe in the future, I would search for a better life in Singapore," Ms Miao said. In 2006, at the age of 41, she finally did, to "step out of my comfort zone". She was offered the chance by a recruitment agency – first to study and obtain a nursing board license, then to work as a staff nurse in a community hospital. It was the opportunity of a lifetime for the senior staff nurse who spent more than a decade working for a hospital in Zhengzhou. Nurses in China seldom leave the first establishment that employs them, she said. It was now or never for the woman who dreamt of living and working in the Little Red Dot. Last month, at the modest three-bedroom flat in Clementi where she lives alone, Ms Miao told me that it was one of the hardest decisions she has had to make. "I left everything behind me – my home, my stable job, my family. It was not easy," the 60-year-old said. Her husband – also born in August 1965 – was not able to leave his job as a dentist at the time while their daughter was still in school. "But I felt I needed to step out and challenge myself overseas. Deep down, I knew I didn't want to live the rest of my life wondering, 'What if I didn't do it this way?'" THE LANGUAGE OF THE HEART In 2010, she joined HCA Hospice as a palliative care nurse. It is Singapore's largest home hospice care organisation, which serves thousands of patients each year. Ms Miao's job entails providing specialised care for patients with terminal illnesses, managing their symptoms and providing emotional support during the last journey of their lives. However, she arrived in multiracial Singapore with little to no knowledge of how to speak English or any of the other vernacular languages, so it became quite a challenge when patients mostly understood English, Malay or Hokkien. It was a challenge she embraced, she told me. Over the course of our two-hour-long interview, she spoke slowly in English, paused often and furrowed her brow to find the right words to express herself, but I would not have minded at all if she just spoke in Mandarin. Yet she pressed on to speak in English, even when I posed questions in her mother tongue. She was determined to prove that she could be heard and understood in Singapore's lingua franca. "(There were) many things I needed to learn from my patients and my colleagues," she said of overcoming the language barrier. In her initial years here, Ms Miao's friends were limited to other nurses from China who had come to Singapore for work and she admitted that it often got lonely without the presence of her family. To fill her spare time, she often had a dictionary by her side, looking up words and practising their pronunciations. She had some help, too. "My Malay patients and teammates taught me the Malay language. The older people taught me Hokkien and Teochew," she said. She does not consider herself fluent in these languages, of course, but her working knowledge of key phrases have been invaluable in her job. "I can use some Malay to ask patients (about) their symptoms, like, 'Ada sakit?' (Are you in pain?), 'Banyak sakit?' (Is there a lot of pain?), 'Sini sakit?' (Is the pain here?)," she said. 'Sometimes, I cannot catch the words (they use), but I think when you use your heart and have compassion, the family and patients can understand what you are doing for them. Then they will trust you. "I feel that language is a connection bridge. It's a bridge to connect with the patient and their families." Ms Miao became a Singapore citizen in 2018 and through the years, she has amassed a photo album's worth of thank-you cards. At her home, I looked on as she took them out and perused the contents with a sense of nostalgia. One card from a family read: "Even though palliative care may seem a thankless job, the great compassion you have shown to patients and families will carry them a long way. Thank you for making a difference." Another woman thanked Ms Miao and the hospice in Chinese, informing them that she had donated S$7,500 in support of the centre "to continue serving society". I asked which patient left the most impression on her. Judging by her quick but pensive glance on the floor, I sensed that she knew who it was immediately. Mrs Koh was a home hospice patient in her 90s who lived alone and Ms Miao Lan used to care for her at her residence. One day in 2018, the older woman was hospitalised. "She called me to say, 'Miao Lan, can you come and see me? I know my time is quite short, I probably will be leaving tomorrow'. "I couldn't believe it because she was still able to talk to me, but I still felt that I needed to visit this patient." So she rushed to the hospital the moment her shift at the hospice ended. When she got there, all Mrs Koh asked her to do was to sit beside her and hold her hands. Few words were exchanged. "At the end of the visit, she told me, 'Thank you for coming. I'm not afraid anymore'," Ms Miao recalled. The next morning, Ms Miao received a phone text message from Mrs Koh's sister informing her that she had died. At this point, Ms Miao's voice quivered slightly during our interview: "I know some patients treat me like family … Usually, patients ask their family members to visit them, (so) if they call you, it means you are a very important person to them." EMBRACING ALL THINGS THAT MAKE ONE SINGAPOREAN This year, the management at HCA Hospice promoted Ms Miao to the position of nurse manager – a role she believed would have been "impossible" back in China due to her age. Such leadership roles are normally given to younger nurses, she explained, so she was surprised when the hospice had put its trust in her. It was a show of warmth and recognition for the work she had done for nearly two decades. It felt like the embodiment of the culture of acceptance and harmony that she had come to experience and love about the nation, and that is her favourite thing about Singapore. "People from different cultures, different races, different religions – they can work and live together side by side," she said. She recalled how heartwarming it was when her Muslim neighbours offered her homecooked food to eat during their Hari Raya Puasa celebrations. To her, being "Singaporean" transcends where one was born. "It's about showing your kindness, respecting differences and showing strength in unity. "It's being hardworking, practical … and contributing to society." It is also about a shared language, something she knew intrinsically would be key to her integration into society here. Singlish quips such as "cannot tahan" (cannot bear it) and particles such as "lah" and "lor" now come naturally to her. Then, of course, there is the food culture: growing to love curry puffs, laksa, and chilli crab – dishes she once could not fathom enjoying. On one of his visits to Singapore, when her husband expressed puzzlement at her liking for those dishes, she said to him with amusement: "People can change all the time." Ms Miao will celebrate her 60th birthday just two weeks after Singapore celebrates its 60th year of independence. And to the naturalised citizen, it feels very much like it is a joint celebration of a milestone together. Asked if she has any retirement plans, she said she was hoping that she and her husband would spend the rest of their days in Singapore eventually. Their daughter, now in her early 30s, has started her own family in Australia. For now though, Ms Miao is looking forward to becoming a better nurse and hopes that Singapore retains the modern exuberance that made it the shangri-la of her youth. "We go through the same things, experience all (sorts of) changes and challenges, but it's not too late to keep improving. I'm still growing up with Singapore."
