Fuyang EcoPark - 富陽自然生態公園

This week the nature class brought us to Fuyang EcoPark 富陽自然生態公園 . This park is famous for frogs, butterflies and flying squirrels. Unfortunately the rainy weather has partially ruined our walk. I am sure we will have to visit Fuyang Park again to fully enjoy the animals living there and it's nature. Because it rained on us twice throughout the afternoon, I didn't take too many pictures as I was trying to hide under the umbrella trying to stay dry.

The hill that the park is located on used to be an ammunition warehouse space. In the 1970th due to expansion of the Taipei city and the residential building being build close by, the depot was moved, but the hill still remained under military control and was closed to public.

Situation has changed in 1990th when the plans for a park started to take shape. But only in 2006 the park was officially opened. One can say that thanks to the many years that the area was closed to the public, now we can enjoy the almost unspoiled beauty of nature. There is not much concrete used in the park as to let the rain water soak into the ground. Some areas are off limits and look like a real jungle.

The stairs are very simple (and slippery when wet as we could find out during our walk).

There is also a small pond where we could observe dragonflies laying eggs.

Many frogs also lay eggs in this pond and live around it. but afternoon was not a good time to observe them.

The only frog that we saw this time was this little black thing:

We did see some butterflies (before it started to rain):

There were also many caterpillars. 

The one below is of a moth found only in Taiwan Chrysaeglia magnifica taiwana (閃光苔蛾):

The caterpillar below looks like larve of Casuarina moth (木毒蛾 - Lymantria xylina) which is constidered a forest pest.

And a very interesting bug, which the teacher called garbage bug 垃圾蟲. It's a camouflaged larva of a lacewing (草蛉 - Chrysopidae - złotookowate). The camouflage looks like pieces of tissue paper, but these are corpses of it's prey (aphids, ants etc) or sometimes sand grains.

There were also a few plants we stopped to explore.

One of them was alpinia (大輪月桃 - Alpinia - alpinia) which young leaves can be eaten or used to wrap rice for steaming.

This giant taro has a lot of pollen:

We also met some spiders, moths and snails:

Two little explorers, one is Ania and the other is N from Gagatki Trzy / Three Little Rascals, with their teacher: 

That's all from Fuyang EcoPark. 

Remember to come back soon for more information on Taiwanese fauna and flora.