Visitors of another kind..

Because of the abundance of plants and fruits (mostly papaya for now, actually) in my dad's garden, lots of small animals like to "hang-out" there.. Other than the bird nests made by burung merbab (Hook-billed Bulbul), there are a few more other types of birds..

This one...


and these...

Not too sure what these birds are called.. but those red eyes do kinda freak me a little.. don't they looked like some mutant birds from those horror shows??

Ya.. even had a sighting of horn bill near by my house.. :)

And even snake!! My dad found this fella curled up nicely among the papayas on one of the papaya trees.. and duely took its head off.. :p

Another "notable visitor" to my dad's garden and even into our house was a musang (or civet cat)! Even our neighbors know that there are 3 civet cats in the neighborhood, most probably "escapees" from the nearby Taiping Zoo.. One of them came into the house a few weeks ago, trying to, and successfully, ate some Del Monte bananas that my mum bought from the local hypermarket..
 Didn't manage to get a picture of the cat as my dad and I was totally surprised by it..

Here was what happened..
We heard some noise in the kitchen in the middle of the night (around 3am) and went to check.. Much to our surprise, we saw this civet cat perched on top of the kitchen cupboard.. instead of running away, it sat there looking at both my dad and I.. It tried to climb down to get to the bananas, but my dad shoo-ed it away with a long stick.. it then reluctantly went out the way it came in.. which was a small gap between the tiled-roof and the bathroom wall.. so my dad and I went back to sleep, thinking that that was it..

Yet less than 20 minutes later, I heard some noise again in the kitchen.. and to my surprise, the civet cat came back! It had climbed down the cupboards and was sitting, very comfortably I must say, on the dinner table, happily eating the bananas!! It barely gave me a glance when I switch the kitchen lights on.. It just sat there, enjoying the banana like it was entitled to.. It even peeled away the skin before eating!! Only when my dad tried to hit it (not really to hit it, more like scaring it) that the civet cat went out, reluctantly (how I know it was reluctant? it jumped to another table and sat there for a while, looking at us and then back to the half-eaten banana, several times).. We decided to throw the bananas out to the backyard to prevent further "food raid" by that greedy civet cat that night..

And the next day, my dad nailed some wooden planks to prevent the civet cat from having another banana plundering.. At times, we can still hear it on the roof, pacing around trying to find a way in... Luckily for the civet cat, we don't really subscribe to the notion of "wild meat".. else it would have long ended in some Chinese herbal soup.. :p