‘Do you see a lot of colorful birds in the Philippines?’

Social gatherings can be minefields of awkwardness for a Filipino birder because such occasions give rise to queries like “So what do you do on your spare time?” The trapped Filipino birder throws caution to the wind when he opts to respond: “That’s nice of you to ask. I look for forest birds.” To [...]

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Looking for the Whiskered Pitta on Mt. Polis

It’s been more than an hour into our birding group’s foray into Mt. Polis. We had clambered past the crumbly soil of the potato fields, to enter the ever-receding tree-line. Every year, the tree-line feels more distant as the vegetable patchwork creep up the mountain. Once past the vegetable patches, we followed a narrow wood-cutter’s [...]

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Fascinated by hornbills, yet again

I was commissioned to draw the maps for a Philippine biodiversity handbook earlier this year. One set of maps intended to show the distribution of the different species of hornbills in the country. Since the time my fascination for those birds began, this was the first time I had truly realized that there were indeed [...]

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How many Philippine Eagles are there in the wild?

As an ordinary bloke with no formal training in biology, I’ve always wanted—perhaps unreasonably—a clear answer to this question.
But it seems that no one knows—or at least, no one is reckless enough to hazard an answer. Why is this? I figured the history of the struggle to conserve the Philippine Eagle has its fair share [...]

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“Philippine Eagle feeding its young.” Oil on canvas. 24” x 36”

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from wildlife illustrator Oscar Figuracion Jr. saying that he had just finished an oil painting of a Philippine Eagle and was looking for buyers. I came to know Oscar a few years ago when his illustrations had graced a series of NGO-produced species-identification guides meant for DENR [...]

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