After my first trip this year along the Treetop Walk trail on 15 August, I made a second trip a week later, on 22 August which I had yet to share my sightings. There was a plan to do a third trip the week after, but it was postponed till last week.

I made the trip last week (12 September) to follow up on 2 interesting finds from the earlier trip on 22 August. Back then, I came across a fruiting Macaranga species which I first thought was one of the species that I had recorded before. It was a tall tree and there were many 4-lobed green fruits (capsules) littering on the boardwalk beneath the tree. When I did the comparison with the fruit images from the Macaranga species in my website later, none matched the fruit that I saw. I then checked the Macaranga species list in the latest Singapore Flora Checklist published in 2022. There were 11 species listed. The name that looked promising was Macaranga puncticulata. The status of this native species was indicated as presumed nationally extinct ("NEx") in the publication. This species was not list in the earlier checklist published in 2019. There was hardly any images of live specimen of Macaranga puncticulata available online while dried herbarium specimens were available. I had left the name of the tree as Macaranga puncticulata until told otherwise. When I was at the same spot last week, the fruits were all gone.

The second interesting find from the 22 August trip was a few relatively large woody capsules that contained oblong, flat and winged seeds among the leaf litters on the ground. The seeds looked fresh which should have fallen recently. They were likely to be from the Lophopetalum wightianum tree. The capsules were found around a specific spot which prompted me to looked up in search of the tree. It was futile as there were several tall trees at the same spot, and the canopy was way too high and crowded for me to visualize any fruits up on those trees. Unfortunately, I was still not able to locate the tree in my latest trip last week. By then, there was no longer any fruit on the ground. Coincidently, I did take a picture of a leafy branch from a young plant which might be its seedling near the site. That picture was taken as there was a hairy caterpillar on it and the possible link to Lophopetalum wightianum was only established when I was drafting this note. Finally, I was able to locate the tree this week (18 September) and took some pictures of its leaves from far off.

Another new plant added to my website from the current trip was Diospyros oblonga. The identification was based on the clusters of flower buds on one of the branches of the small tree. There was an unknown flowering shrub that I suspected it to be a Syzygium species. The flower buds and clusters looked like those from Syzygium polyanthum. However, its leaves were shorter than that of Syzygium polyanthum. The main difference was the pattern of the leaf veins at the underside of the leaves. A potential suspect was Syzygium glabratum. Speaking of Syzygium species, I did encounter a flowering Syzygium filiforme at the end of the tree-top bridge.

Syzygium species:

Sample of plants seen on 22 August:

Sample of plants seen on 12 September:

Three different types of caterpillars were spotted during the walk. All of them should be moth caterpillars. The first lone caterpillar was spotted on the young seedling of Lophopetalum wightianum (mentioned above) near the entrance of Terentang trail. The second sighting consisted of 3 caterpillars on an Aidia densiflora located after the tree-top bridge. The third sighting was spotted soon after which consisted of a large group of caterpillars gathering on a small twig of an unknown plant.