Night of the Marauding Musangs

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Having complained in a recent post of the absence of wildlife in our local area, I was surprised by news tonight of an incident involving binturongs (or musangs as they're known locally). I was aware of the existence of these animals in the local area and that they prowl around of a night. I had even caught a glimpse of one maybe a year or so ago but I'd never thought too much about them. However, yesterday evening, our neighbours (father, mother and adolescent son) were sitting in the front of their house when they noticed two musangs descend from a nearby tree. Suddenly, the animals charged toward them and the family retreated. This was only a ploy however, because the musangs turned and carried off the family cat that had been relaxing out front as well.

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I've never heard of musangs killing cats and there is nothing in the literature about such attacks. They regularly attack chickens, rats and birds but not cats. This cat wasn't a kitten. It was a fully grown female. The recent cull of poultry in the area (to reduce the risk of bird flu) and the fact that fruit is currently out-of-season suggests that they may have been driven by hunger to launch this audacious attack. The photo in this post is not one of the said miscreants but instead is a photo taken from a very interesting blog called The Voltage Gate at:

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http://thevoltagegate.blogspot.com/search/label/Binturong

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There is some fascinating information there about these animals. The binturong can grow to a metre in length and weigh 15 kg. It is also known as a bearcat and is one of several species of civet whose anal gland secretions can be used to make perfume. Interestingly:

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The binturong is the only Old World mammal to evolve a fully prehensile tail, meaning the tail is dexterous enough to be used to manipulate objects, like food items. The rest of the mammals possessing a fully prehensile tail are only found in North and South America (monkeys, opossums).

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So I'm reading up on this little known but most interesting animal, partly out of curiosity and partly out of apprehension because we have recently acquired a small, white dog by the name of Gromit who is not much larger than the ill-fated white cat that was carried off. We normally leave her outside of a night but tonight we have brought her inside just in case the musangs strike again.

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Sabina, our resident four year old, had been maddenly insistent for several months that we purchase a dog. Her constant whine was "beli anjing" (buy dog) and eventually resistance crumbled. The catalyst was an ill-advised visit by her grandmother to the pet shop a couple of hundred metres away. Sabina spied a white toy poodle, about three months old, and there was an air of inevitability to the purchase after that. I was consulted as the final arbiter in the matter but because I had once owned a toy poodle by the name of Chloe, I felt it was a case of kismet.

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It would be difficult explaining to Sabina that her beloved Gromit had been carried off in the night by marauding musangs.

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The Wall

Welcome to the wall. The nature strip with its trees, bushes and grass is no more. I have just learned of the probable reason for its erection. A reliable source has told me that during the recent floods, the kampung or village at the back of the Japanese International School was flooded and some of the residents sought temporary refuge on the green fringe. This occupation couldn't have been for very long because I never noticed anybody there at all. However, the School felt that this occupation might become permanent and compromise security.

The school owned the land and had set the area aside as parkland in accordance with local government regulations that require a certain percentage of green space to be made available as part of any development project. All that seems to have swept aside with the supposed threat of a refugee camp developing and the area has now been thoroughly bulldozed and the concrete wall now abuts the footpath. It's comforting to know that there is a logical reason for this environmental vandalism. Extending this logic further, perhaps all green spaces in Bintaro should be bulldozed and walled off from the general public because of the risk of conversion to refugee camps.

Why not just move the fence and leave the trees in place? Why bulldoze everything? At least people inside the school could have enjoyed some shade and a little slice of nature. This construction has certainly added to the uglification of Bintaro. The graffiti has already begun and will continue because there is such an impressive expanse of wall.

Wildlife

This is a photograph that I took at school yesterday. I just happened to have my camera on me when this moth, about the size of a dinner plate, landed near to me. I was the only one who saw it, there was no one else around. I've edited the background of the photograph to enhance its shape. It was the first moth of this size that I'd seen in Jakarta and it reminded me of the general disregard for nature that exists here in Indonesia. It's rare to see a natural creature apart from ants.

Progress seems to be measured by the extent to which humans can impose themselves on the natural environment with little thought to the environmental consequences. Most of the aquifer in Jakarta is contaminated by E-coli because septic tanks leach their contents into the ground. Jakarta has no sewerage system. There is so much water being pumped out of the aquifer by high rise buildings and malls that ground levels have subsided by a metre or more in places. Salt water has begun to penetrate further into the aquifer so that areas near the harbour cannot use the groundwater because of its salinity. Most of the population is reliant on groundwater because the reticulated water system is very limited.

The rivers are convenient places to dispose of household and industrial waste. They are clogged with rubbish and are uniformly putrid. They get flushed out in the rainy season and then the cycle of pollution starts all over again. Residences are kept clean but what happens to the rubbish that is removed is apparently of no concern. It's OK to toss it into a vacant lot, sweep it into the gutter, dump it in a river. Ecological awareness doesn't extend past the boundary of the property. There is no sustained educational initiative to change these attitudes and so Indonesian children are destined to be as ecologically ignorant as their parents. The future can only be worse because there is limited awareness that anything is even wrong and certainly no willingness to do anything about it.

The Degreening of Indonesia

No sooner do I mention the degreening of Indonesia than an example of it appears in my own backyard. On the way to school today, I noticed that a long strip of land that runs adjacent to a perimeter boundary of the Japanese International School is being stripped of trees. It is doubtless being made ready for some development and the formerly green and grassy area will be replaced with buildings and Bintaro's catchment area will shrink a little more. Amusingly, Bintaro is marketed as the garden suburb but its greenery is rapidly disappearing in the face of rampant greed. Land developers of course are the same the world over but in some countries there are constraints placed on them. Not here. It's a pity that I don't have a before as well as an after photo. The difference is quite dramatic.

Disaster Management

The photo is taken from today's Jakarta Post. To continue from my previous post, my Second Life adventures were brutally interrupted by widespread flooding in Jakarta. The flooding was so severe that it inundated the building that my ISP used to house its telecommunications equipment. My Internet connection has been out from Friday to Tuesday and was only reconnected tonight. Most reputable companies have a disaster management plan that they can put to work in cases like this but not my ISP. They obviously got out the mops and buckets and went to work mopping up for a few days. I have a CDMA card that I can insert into my laptop and this enables me to use the mobile phone network. Unfortunately, that was knocked out as well. It was only my PDA with its GPRS connection to the competing mobile phone network that held up and I was at least able to check my email.

I shouldn't complain I guess because there are still many people homeless as a result of the flooding. There are actually only a couple of million people who even use the Internet regularly in Indonesia. That translates to about 1% of the population. The rest have other priorities, like not getting washed away by floods. The flooding has been exacerbated by an alarming decline in green space within Jakarta and its environs. Parks and recreational areas do not make any money and are sold to developers who build housing estates and luxury shopping malls. This is what masquerades as urban planning here. Increasingly, the rainwater has nowhere to go but into the gutters that are already choked with garbage. The gutters carry the water into creeks and rivers that are also full of rubbish. When you have a lot of rain, you have a big flood. It's as simple as that.

Before the flooding and the cessation of my Internet connection, my adventures in Second Life took me to an orientation island where you were prepared for interaction with others in the larger virtual world. However, things went wrong from the start. I wandered into the ocean and spent most of my time walking along what seemed a biologically dead ocean floor. When I finally activated my flying ability, I was above water but zooming over miles and miles of trackless ocean. The island was nowhere to found and then the program crashed. Hopefully, I'll have a more auspicious experience next time. I notice a lot of the large IT companies, like Microsoft and Dell, have a virtual presence in Second Life and Sweden has even opened an embassy there. The Australian government is active as well and has established some sites.