City Critters

As urbanites, these sightings stir up our collective imagination. They shatter the illusion that nature has been banished from our modern metropolises, that we live in completely human-constructed environments. On our commutes, as we trundle through (or under) our cities, it's easy to feel like we're a million miles from the natural world. This intruding wildlife transports us away from that reality, romantically reminding us of the existence of nature just beyond the city limits.

Singapore is perhaps one of the most unlikely cities you'd expect to come across wild animals. When outsiders think about the densely populated city-state, they tend to conjure up images of skyscrapers housing global financial firms, sprawling shopping malls, and high-rise residential blocks. Indeed, a large swathe of the city – as much as a quarter of its total area, by some calculations – has been built on land that was reclaimed from the sea. It's an entirely artificial landscape; not to mention a marvel of modern engineering.

And yet, visitors will be surprised to see – sometimes within mere hours of stepping off the plane – wild otters frolicking in the ponds of public parks, giant hornbills soaring high above the city's tallest buildings, and chickens ambling across the road (don't ask why) and blocking the traffic.

While Singapore is undeniably a manmade environment, at least for the most part, it's been made to accommodate a surprising number of wild animals and habitats.

This is no accident. Way back in 1967, Singapore's first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, introduced the "Garden City" vision, a series of policies designed to transform the city into a clean, lush and verdant environment. Ten years later, the government launched the Clean River Campaign to clean up the city's previously filthy rivers. Within two decades, wild otters – once on the cusp of extinction locally – had begun to return to the island.

"We greenified all our surroundings and it looked really aesthetically pleasing," says Man Jing, a nature-focused educational content creator, who previously worked at Singapore Zoo and NParks, the national parks board, and as a school science teacher. The policies were of course designed to improve the lives of Singaporeans, but they also "showed Singapore as a clean and well-kept country for foreign investment," says Man Jing. George Wong, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Singapore Management University, believes this policy has become central to the Singaporean identity. "There is always this consistent narrative of how we're both urban but also green at the same time," he says. "This idea is very much encoded into the psyche."

However, in recent times, the city-state's leaders have realised that a "garden" is perhaps not the ideal metaphor for their vision. "A garden is very manicured, well-kept and well-pruned," says Man Jing. Dr Wong – who works across areas such as political ecology, community development and urban sociology – agrees that the idea of a garden "felt a little bit too static, too constructed or manufactured." So, in 2020, Singapore's national parks board, NParks, decided to evolve the name of its flagship initiative, so that it is now: "City in Nature."

Unlike a perfectly pruned and meticulously manicured garden, "nature" is wild, free, perhaps even a bit dangerous. And, crucially, whereas nobody really wants animals in their garden (apart from maybe the odd tiny bird), "nature" comes with creatures and critters of all kinds. (Incidentally, Dr Wong is the author of an academic paper entitled "Urban crittizenship in biophilic Singapore," and I defy anyone not to delight in saying the word "crittizenship".) "Some people, when they think of nature, think of gardens, of manicured greenery. But that's not really nature," says Man Jing. "Nature is also the messy side and the wild side of things. To us nature lovers, that is true nature."

The shift from "Garden City" to "City in Nature," though perhaps subtle, has not been totally smooth over the past five or six years. Not everyone has proved to be quite as receptive as Man Jing to the messy and the wild side of nature. "There are some condominiums and new apartments being built very near to forest areas, but most people are not prepared to live near the animals," says Kerry Pereira, Members and Outreach Manager at the Nature Society Singapore, a conservation and advocacy organisation. According to Man Jing, there is also a generational divide here. She notes that "it's still pretty much the older generation" that complains most about the intrusions of wildlife, whereas "the younger generation grew up knowing about the environment, knowing a little bit more about wildlife." They are, she adds, "more open to the idea of what nature is all about."

The city's non-human residents have created even more surprising tensions, however. Take the otters. Yes, they look adorable and cute. But they've also been known to bite people (particularly when those people get a bit too close in an attempt to get a selfie with them). They've also been known to kill the expensive pet koi carps of some of Singapore's wealthier residents, fishing them straight out of garden ponds and water features in the city's more salubrious neighbourhoods.

While this might not seem especially noteworthy, the saga around the otters and the koi has recently ended up becoming an emotionally charged hot-button issue in Singapore. Those wealthy residents whose koi had been eaten complained noisily to the authorities and, according to Dr Wong, expected their compatriots to be sympathetic. Instead, he says, it led to "a discussion around inequality in Singapore, and how the wealthy are getting wealthier. People looked at it as divine justice, ecological justice at its best. 'The otters are helping us literally eat the rich.'"

Dr. Wong describes Singaporeans' attitudes towards animals as "in some ways very schizophrenic". On the one hand, he notes, they want wildlife to be protected. However, on the other hand, when those animals "cross certain lines or territories, they automatically become a nuisance or pests, and no longer deserve those protections." Man Jing sees this, too, in how certain "charismatic" animals, like otters, are treated with far more leniency than the city's more "uncharismatic" creatures, like its wild boars.

What's easily forgotten in all of this is how it's not only the humans who are having to adapt to this new "City in Nature". The animals are also forever being forced to find new ways of living alongside their human neighbours. Dr Wong has a favourite story about Singapore's macaques, a native monkey species. "The way they forage for food has become very urbanised," he explains. Instead of foraging in the forest for fruits and seeds, they now enter the suburbs to raid residents' shopping bags. "Over time, the monkeys have actually learned how to monitor people and pick the right time," he says. Not only that – they can even spot, by looking at the colour of a person's plastic shopping bags, which are most likely to hold fruit from the local market. "They've learned how to live alongside human beings," says Dr Wong.

Searching for a solution, the government installed a number of municipal bins with heavy lids that (it was thought) the macaques couldn't open. However, the monkeys found a workaround for this, too. "It required three or four monkeys to actually work collaboratively together," says Dr Wong. "One of them would step on this handle at the bottom, and then the other three would lift the lid. Over time, I think NParks just gave up. Whatever technology we come up with, they'll just figure it out."

For Man Jing, this is one of the most miraculous things about Singapore's wildlife. "I'm so amazed at how the animals have adapted to live in our surroundings as well," she says. She points to the white-collared kingfisher, which is fairly common in the city. She once saw one of these birds building a nest in the wall of one of the city's many canals. "I was like, wow, those holes in the concrete canal have become a makeshift home for these kingfishers, which traditionally build their nests in mudbanks or within trees," she says. "It's not just us trying to coexist with them, they are evolving to coexist with us."

And perhaps this is the wider point in all of this.

Living alongside animals in our densely congested cities can be a way to build empathy and a sense of commonality. "It's not just about tolerance; we have to live harmoniously," says Pereira.

"In our consumerist time, people don't seem to realise that we get a lot from nature. They tend to think of nature as something to be used. But we're not apart from nature, we're a part of it." For him, how we treat our non-human neighbours reveals who we are as people and as societies: "It shows the maturity of the people, that they're not all about themselves, but they're thinking about others, about the weak. And the weak doesn't have to mean people – the environment is under your stewardship, too."

Dr Wong goes further, suggesting that urban animals can actually hold the key to bigger, more thorny conversations around inclusion, rights and justice. His latest piece of research is focused on Singapore's "community cats", cats that often roam around particular neighbourhoods and are cared for by local volunteers. He is studying these volunteers' attempts to think about such cats "beyond a pet or stray or pest dimension," he explains. "By calling them 'community cats' it creates a kind of denizenship that cannot be taken away. They have the right to exist in the city as well." The implications go far beyond a few tabbies, though. "It's so interesting how this conversation around allowing a different life the right to exist in the community also becomes a conversation around what the community includes and excludes," says Dr Wong. "It opens up wider conversations around how we treat different classes and different ethnicities as well as how we coexist ethically together."