one mystery resolved, another emerges

Back in January, I wrote about encountering a huge number of egrets in a fish pond that we pass whenever we’re cycling along San Tin Tsuen Road, which circles around San Tin to the north and west (see map below). This is a photo from that earlier post:

At the time, the fish pond appeared to be in the process of being drained—the reason wasn’t obvious—but because we always cycle along this road when we’re heading ‘out west’, we’ve noticed that significant work has been taking place, with trucks on the dried-up pond bed and what appeared to be some kind of structure being built in the middle.

On one occasion, when the pond was filling up with water again, Paula commented that the structure looked like solar panels. Although I agreed with her observation, this did seem to be a highly unlikely location for such an installation. However, work here has now finished, and several notices have appeared around the area recently. This one is located alongside the road to the right of new railings that have replaced the original wire-mesh fence between the pond and the road:

So they are solar panels! When I saw copies of this sign in other locations—some more than 2km away—I wondered why they were trumpeting a stormwater pumping station. I never had time to read the second line as I cycled past. And I didn’t realize until a few days ago that the homunculus on the left of each sign that I passed—a kind of mascot of the Drainage Services Department (DSD)—was pointing out which way to go.

In fact, it isn’t obvious what this pond has to do with pumping stormwater, although the area is flat and is probably prone to flooding. I assume that the solar panels have been installed to power any pumping that needs to be done, but where is the machinery? And where is any floodwater to be pumped to?

Although I can understand the DSD’s involvement in flood control, I fail to comprehend its motive in promoting an ‘ecological floating island’. Leaving aside the misuse of the word ‘ecological’, which I railed against in a recent post, what is the motivation here? And this is a second sign, located to the left of the sign in the above photo:

This sign implies that there is something to see here (although that something doesn’t conform to the conventional definition of a polder). These are photos that I took a few days ago of the ‘floating photovoltaic system’ from different angles:

I’m guessing that the function of the line of buoys is to carry power away from the solar panels. The last photo also shows the ‘ecological floating island’, and you will notice that there is something in the back left-hand corner. Paula reckoned that whatever it was had purple flowers.

This is a photo taken a few days earlier that shows the purple flowers more clearly:

I took the next photo yesterday, and the floating island is now fully stocked with plants, which appear to be in pots:

There are two people on the island, but I was too late to capture a third person who was wading through the water pushing an empty float that had presumably been used to ferry plants to the island. This is a closer view that shows the two workers on the island more clearly:

I don’t know whether there will be anything else to record here, but we cycle past here regularly, so I’ll be on the lookout for more changes. One thing that I can predict with reasonable confidence: we won’t see egrets in this pond again!

Location map: