Fighting Spider Hunting Adventure at Sengkang Forest
Last Saturday, met up with Ken25 and Urahinuk at Anchorvale CC. While waiting for Ah Seng and Edwin, me and Ura decided to proceed to the forested area besides Sengkang Riverside Park to hunt for fighting spiders.
There were some constructions going on at the forested area but since its weekend, the activities had stopped. There's a path leading to the forest. We stopped at a small patch of vegetation (picture 1) along the way and was surprised that area produced quite a nos of fighting spiders. Within 20 mins, I caught one male and several females fighting spiders. While we were searching high and low for more spiders, I spotted a green snake and we immediately left that spot and headed further in to the forest.
Inside the forested area, there's a concrete road used by the construction vehicles and that provided us a path. We need not bashed into the vegetation and that gave us a relief. It was a quiet and hot afternoon. After the hot spot, we arrived at another hot spot that is near to a power or dunno what station. The fighting spiders over here wasn't that big. Most of them were medium - small with occassionally some medium sizes. At one point of time, I thought I spotted a big size spider. That was when I flipped a leaf that was not nested. The spider looked huge for split of a second and it disappeared underneath the leaf. I waited and finally saw that bugger emerged from the undergrowth. Oh mine, its smaller then medium size but how come at that instance when I lifted the leaf over, the size really looked huge ! It must have been my eyes playing tricks on me. Haiz... One thing I noticed that when you saw a fighting spider wandering among the leaves, it looks big and you only realised the actual size when you compared it with your exisiting spiders.
We proceeded further into an area where there were CB trees. To those guys who doesn't know what is a CB tree, it's english name is Dillenia Suffruticosa or Simpoh Air. How does it looked like ? Google it. CB tree derived its name from the shape of its leaves. See the picture http://www.flickr.com/photos/dedamselfly/294174005/in/photostream/ Does the leaf resembles a CB ? LOL ... The CB trees were popular among the fighting spider kakis. They caught most of the good sizes fighting spiders from this type of plant. The leaves are thick and it provides a good shelter for the spiders during rainy seasons. We were quite excited when we saw the CB trees but turned out to be a big disappointment. We only spotted 3 pathetic size females !!!
After the CB trees area, we proceeded deeper and results were poor. The forested area leads to Jalan Kayu but we stopped halfway inbetween as the road ahead is filled with big cylinders and bulldozers. Overall, the hunting adventure at the forested area near Sengkang Riverside Park wasn't fruitful.
*** Contributed by Trevally ***
