Abstract
THE war in Malaya is no doubt interfering with the very interesting wild-life of that region, and the observations that have so long centred upon it. Robinson and Chasen's work on the birds of Malaya describes such interesting items as the breeding habits of the edible-nest swiftlets, the gorgeous sunbirds and the spider-hunters. Malaya has some seven hundred birds including about forty game birds and pigeons. An earlier official publication on the birds of Singapore gives a list of more than a hundred species, including eleven of the sixteen Malayan kingfishers and many interesting doves, hornbills, the vividly coloured little red and orange flower-peckers that haunt the tree-tops, the rollers, the bee-eaters and several swifts. Many species well known in Britain are winter visitors or migrants from northern Asia, including snipe, golden plover, redshank, turnstones, greenshank, and grey plover. The roseate and gull-billed terns are regular birds of Singapore island, the Kentish plover nests on the sandy shores and herons and white egrets fish the marshes. The fishing owl is a very common bird. The “Handbook to British Malaya”states that the fauna of British Malaya is excelled in number of species only in parts of South America. The one-horned Javan rhinoceros is almost extinct, and the common rhinoceros, like the Malayan elephant, has been much persecuted for ivory. The ancient Malayan tapir survives, but the Malayan bison or seladand is almost extinct in certain districts. There are several deer, and the curious serow or goat antelope is in the remoter country. The Malaya tiger is smaller than the Indian, while monkeys and apes include the curious nocturnal slow loris and also orangs, which have often been collected for European zoos. Malaya is the metropolis of the squirrels and there are more than sixty bats, including the great flying fox or keluan with a wing span of nearly five feet, which haunts the coastal mangroves.
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Malayan Wild-Life. Nature 149, 17–18 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/149017c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/149017c0