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 trail, where we looked on despondently around us as patches of scorched earth showed where “gardeners” burnt the forest. Such a waste, and all for a measly few pesos worth since the forest soil isn’t very suitable for cultivation once the thin topsoil has been washed away by rains. Below us in the valley, the chainsaws have begun their remorseless work. Along the trail, we counted at least four active snares. We proceeded uphill wordlessly, trying to put the scenes of desecration and waste out of our minds and focus on the object of our quest: an encounter with the Whiskered Pitta (Pitta kochi), the country’s largest pitta.

The group leader and Rockjumper tour guide, 27-year-old David Shackelford, had been careful to prep the birders prior to our hike to Mt. Polis. “Due to the ongoing human disturbances on the mountain,” he had intoned to the group the night before, “our chances of seeing the pitta is very low.” But we’ll try anyway. Hoping against hope. What else can we do as birders?

I myself had been very pessimistic about the pitta given the numerous snares that I had encountered on the mountain trail over the years. In fact, Mt. Polis must be one of the most depressing places to bird in Luzon, and if it weren’t the most accessible spot on Earth to try for the Whiskered Pitta, I wouldn’t go near the place.

I had been lost in reverie when Shackelford whispers that he hears the Whiskered Pitta calling farther up the mountain. A surge of energy goes through everyone! Excitement and electric possibility hung in the air. Less than 200 birders have ever seen the Whiskered Pitta in its natural habitat. Everyone knows how tough it is to see the pitta so the rewards are very high. To be able to say that one has seen the elusive Whiskered Pitta is comparable to having seen the Philippine Eagle in Mindanao.

“I think I know where it is,” said Shackelford, cupping his ears to better focus his hearing on the faint call. “It’s near the shed.” He bounded upward and forward.

With Shackelford hearing the call, the chances of our seeing the pitta grows. It’s a delightful prospect given that so few birders have managed to get a glimpse of this mysterious species. The group, composed of six American birders in their 70s and 80s, plus Shackelford and me, scrambled uphill, our shirts sticking to our bodies in the muggy air. Within minutes, out of breath, we reached the grubby wood-cutter’s shed—and to my surprise, the area around it has been cleared despite it on a rather steep slope. The scorched earth has been planted with yams, obliterating the old trail that moved up and to the right of the shed. I had been on this trail before but the presence of the yam patch this high up the mountain threw me off my bearings.

Shackelford raced up the slope, all senses tuned to the pitta. This was a great chance—our only chance—and he knew it. Less than half the birders who travel to Mt. Polis successfully tick off the pitta.

The rest of the group thrashed uphill, and in the process, trampling on one or two of the delicately-limbed yams. This is going to be trouble, I told myself, surveying the trodden-on patch. But everyone was totally focused on the bird, which I could hear very clearly calling from behind and under a heavy tangle of tree-falls, ferns and leaf-litter.

After crossing the yam patch, we re-connected with a remnant of the old trail and collapsed in a heap among the litter. We positioned ourselves in a gully trail-side and, holding our breaths, waited for the bird to somehow step into view and say “Ta-dah!” Fat chance. It had stopped calling. “It must be moving that’s why its silent,” someone whispered. Then nothing. Eight pairs of eyes peeled. All I could see was moss-draped branches and leaf-litter. No movement. Silence except for the chainsaw in the distance.

“Give me the tape,” barked Shackelford. Everyone hunkered down in the rut as Shackelford played Tim Fisher’s recording of the Whiskered Pitta in an attempt to draw it out in the open. After a single try, the bird called back much closer to us this time, but no one had noticed any movement. Where is it! At this point, I estimated the bird to be within 20 meters from where we hugged the ground breathlessly, gobbling the area with our wide-open eyes.

About the Whiskered Pitta call: According to “A Guide to the Birds of the Philippines” by Kennedy et al. (Oxford Press, 2000), the bird calls most often in April and June. The call itself is described as a series of deep whistles (or for others, “booming calls”): haaaawww haaawww haawww haw, the first note longer and higher and each succeeding note descending. According to Collar et al. (Haribon Foundation, 1999) calling birds have been reported in late April to mid-May. Although they are quick to note that singing pittas have also been reported in February and March which leads to the possibility that singing intensity may have to do with other factors aside from territoriality.

Going back: after what seemed like an eternity, the pitta called again. This time downhill from us! During the long silent interval, the bird had somehow traveled from 20 meters uphill of us to about 50 meters downhill of us. And none of us noticed. Shackelford hit the play-button again and after a couple of minutes he yelped, “I see it!”

Eight guys huffed and puffed, shimmying for position in the forest floor. Heads bobbed this way and that. Shackelford drew out his laser pointer to pinpoint the well-hid pitta in the undergrowth, flatly stating, “guys, I don’t have time to screw around–the bird is moving about! Focus!” But its everyone for himself as the pitta wouldn’t sit still for an unobstructed view. In a final attempt, Shackelford hustled the six birders further up the slope while I stayed behind and in an attempt to decoy the bird with the recording. We hoped that the bird would move back up the slope and, if we were lucky, it would travel in the space between us. So after getting the group into position, I played the tape and we watched the forest between us for any movement. After a few minutes, the pitta called again in another location up the hill but no one in the group had seen it between us—it had moved up the hill on a roundabout route and had escaped our “trap.” Or maybe it had slipped out while we were re-positioning. My heart sank as the call grew fainter and finally stopped.

In the end, only two birders, aside from Shackelford, had seen glimpses of the pitta in the understorey. I wasn’t one of them. But all in all, it was an excellent chance and we were all in high spirits.

Here’s the description from Kennedy et al. of the male of the species:

Forehead, cheeks and sides of throat dark brown; hind crown orange rufous; back, rump, and lesser wing coverts brownish olive; uppertail coverts, greater coverts, and broad breast band gray blue; flight feathers brownish black, secondaries with blue outer edges, primaries with medial white spots and dusky tips; malar stripe or ‘whisker’ pinkish tan; center of throat pinkish brown becoming redder toward gray blue breast band; belly and undertail coverts scarlet.

It is the pinkish-tan malar stripe or “whiskers” that give the bird its name, although the field marks are the large size (nine inches tall) and the scarlet belly and undertail coverts.

The Whiskered Pitta is endemic to Luzon and confined to forest in the Cordillera Central and the Sierra Madre and Bicol region. According to Collar et al., this species’ habitat varies considerably:

1) Primary lowland evergreen forest with steep slopes, boulders and large areas of open litter-rich understorey; 2) primary montane oak-dominated forest on steep slopes, canopy cover 75-100%; 3) degraded montane forest (<70% canopy cover) with a dense understorey of ferns, grasses and saplings and only small open litter-rich patches; 4) selectively logged lowland evergreen forest with canopy lower than 20 meters and around 70% complete; 5) primary ridge-slope mossy forest with canopy 5-12 meters high, canopy cover 75-100%.

The description of Mt. Polis’s upper slopes matches the Number 3 habitat described above with special emphasis on “degraded.” In fact, days after my trip, Jon Hornbuckle, a keen British birder and frequent visitor to the Philippines, expressed surprise that I went up Mt. Polis to look for the Whiskered Pitta. It seems that Ben King, the U.S.-based birding tour operator and old Philippine hand had told Hornbuckle that the “pitta has been trapped out of Mt. Polis for many years now.”

When I told Hornbuckle that the Rockjumper group heard and saw the pitta calling on the upper slopes of Mt. Polis, he was pleasantly surprised and immediately made plans to fly in to the Philippines to try his hand at the pitta and other montane specialists like the even more rarely-seen Luzon Jungle-Flycatcher (Rhinomyias insignis).

More notes about Mt. Polis: after a 10-hour drive from Manila, one reaches the foot of the trail of Mt. Polis and comes face-to-face with a 30-foot statue of the Virgin Mary.

The facility was set up during the days when restive insurgents were much more active in this part of the Mountain Province—a police detachment that keeps watch over the facility is another relict from those turbulent times. The icon was erected in front of a telecom tower facility to provide divine intercession, to dissuade rebels and other muckrakers from lobbing grenades at the facility. The tactic is working perfectly—the tower still stands and no rebel attack has ever been recorded against the facility. With the Virgin Mary literally shielding the tower with its body, no rebel group conscious of its media-image will risk damaging the religious statue.

This is the type of ingenuity that people—when they put their heads together—are capable of. Unluckily, all the apparent ingenuity has not extended towards protecting the environment. On the contrary, nary a thought seems to have been given to the ongoing destruction of Mt. Polis’s natural habitats. One of the most frustrating aspects of traveling from Manila to Banaue and Mt. Polis is to see the rapidly-dwindling natural forest. The denuded areas—where the slope is such that logging is impractical—are being slowly colonized by stands of Benguet Pine (Pinus kesiga=P. insularis), which many visitors are fond of due to aesthetic reasons. Unfortunately, pine trees don’t hold in soil and water too well, so they’re practically useless to prevents erosion and landslides—of which, the area is prone to. The ecological functions of the original forest will not be magically taken up by the pine forest, no matter how pretty the pines are to look at. The pine forest is mainly a result of human disturbance because pine seeds germinate only in full light and in contact with bare soil. No matter how many pine trees colonize the denuded slopes in and around Mt. Polis, they will never supplant or replace the key functions of the original montane forest.

The main road is pocked with haphazardly-made shoulders, dikes and other concatenations meant to protect traffic from erosion or being swept away during intense rainfall. One can imagine the millions and millions of pesos spent to maintain the roads and gird it from the constant threat of landslides—and yet the deforestation and habitat destruction goes on with impunity on the hillsides and roadsides. This is what happens when engineers are left to solve a problem.

Another unintended consequence of solving everything by engineering: the big fog lights that illumine the Virgin Mary cause dozens of bird deaths—primarily of the beautiful and endemic Flame-breasted Fruit-dove (Ptilinopus marchei)—a creature found only in Luzon. When our birding group was on its way to Mt. Polis, our driver related that up to six Fruit-doves died after hitting the fog lamps the previous days. Given that this is a hazard that bedevils large pigeons anywhere around the world, we’ll just have to hope that the population is robust enough to absorb such high mortalities. Chalk it up to experience and hope against hope that somehow, the birds will learn. It’s heart-breaking how no one cares enough to preserve these creatures that can only be found in these parts—the level of ignorance and indifference is astounding. Meanwhile, a ballooning population exerts more and more pressure on the environment.

Given the dire situation in Mt. Polis, why do birders continue to go there? Why expose oneself needlessly to so much thoughtlessness, so much heartbreak. The Whiskered Pitta is why–a bird that holds so much cache because of its elusive, secretive nature. Tim Fisher, the Philippines’ premier bird expert estimates that, despite the bird’s large size—nine inches—less than 200 birders have ever laid eyes on this beautiful forest jewel. That makes it so attractive to birdwatchers who want to test their skills and patience.

So they go to Mt. Polis to try their luck. Other alternatives are not so palatable: Camp Hamut in the Sierra Madre requires a mid-sized expedition just to reach the camp; Mt. Pulog has no available lodging and one has to bring all the food with him, besides, the park authorities on Mt. Pulog restrict movements of visitors to the approved trails; Mt. Isarog is iffy in the sense that no one has gone up and looked for the Whiskered Pitta there for years now.

So for practical sense, Mt. Polis—despite the 10-hour drive from Manila—remains the most accessible choice given the options.

While the pitta was a bust for me—I didn’t feel the trip was a total loss. My view has always been that the act of searching is far more rewarding than finding. It would have been excellent if I had seen the Whiskered Pitta but it would have also meant an end to a special quest.

There is so little that we know about this endemic species. In a study done in Mt. Pulog by a group of Danish ornithologists, the movements of Whiskered Pittas seem to be associated with wild pigs, whose own foraging probably makes its easier for the pittas to uncover bits of food from the forest floor. On Mt. Polis, the seasonal movements of the pittas are as mysterious as the rest of their life cycle, although Tim Fisher hypothesizes that there is a post-breeding movement to lowland areas during the rainy season. It is during these dispersals that the pitta is very vulnerable to snares and traps.

So much to know, and yet we may lose this magnificent creature before we could gather enough data to help it survive.