Beauties Of The Sky On Print
By Ignatius Stephen

Bandar Seri Begawan - You just have to look around and notice how beautiful the world is. No one knows that better than Dr Robert Bush of Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD).

He like a selected few in Brunei - has been watching birds and he is amazed by the variety and colour of these creatures of the sky over Brunei and elsewhere in the region.

He is so fascinated that he has published a calendar for next year - containing the various bird pictures he took - distributing it to friends.

The bird photos in the calendar come from the 2007 Bush Bird Calendar. The calendar celebrates the diversity of birds in Borneo, the Asia-Pacific, Europe and Australia. See more at http://picasaweb.google.com/cpherobert/ 2007BirdCalendar Looking up at the sky what do you see? Nothing? But for a man like him there is plenty.

For example, he says, an eagle that usually lives deep in the forest has been circling high above Bandar and Kiulap these last 10 days. "From the ground it looks large and black against the - blue sky. But close up it's brown with small white speckles," he notes.

It has one telltale feature you can easily see from the ground - a bright white stripe along the under-edge of its wings. Its eyesight is many times sharper than ours. It can spot a camouflaged tree-snake more than two hundred metres away.

It's a female Crested Serpent-Eagle. It usually lives in the mature secondary growth forests of Southeast Asia. It is hungry and has moved out of the forest in search of snakes and small mammals.

Down on the mudflats of Brunei Bay there are a small number of visitors from the far north. They are a group of birds known as Waders. They use their long bills to probe the mud searching for small creatures to eat.

Next April, they will be joined by quite a few more that have flown up from Australia. They will stay a few days in Brunei Bay to build up their strength.

Then they will all head north, some as far as Siberia, where they will nest and raise their young. If you miss them in April you can catch up with them again next October when they head back this way to avoid the northern winter snows. The next time you leave home take 30 seconds to listen for bird song. Then run your eyes along the flower bushes close by. There's a good chance you will see some small very beautiful Sunbirds.

They might be olive-green and yellow, or perhaps bright blue or if you are very lucky you might just see one or two with deep crimson heads.

Everywhere you look in Brunei you will see birds of many kinds. There are more than 250 species living in the country, some very rare and hard to find but most living right next to us every day.- We seem to have lost the ability to notice them about us. Birds tell us a lot about the state of our environment.

Cut down old local trees with nesting holes and the Hornbills that fly over Jerudong late every afternoon may leave and never return. Change what is planted along the roadway and around the house and the bird life will also change. Over fish the rivers and the bays and the fish eagles, kites and Ospreys that fly above them will disappear.

You don't need to go deep into the forest to see birds. They are around us every day and often just a few metres away.

Learning to look out for them can be part of beginning to understand what an amazingly diverse world we live in - something well worth caring about. Noticing the birds about us is one way to understand the environment we exist in. And, it's surprisingly easy to do once you start. Beware! It could become a life-long habit, he said.

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