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Birding Without Borders

Page 23

by Noah Strycker


  In Manila, warnings remained at Signal 2 throughout the typhoon, predicting only that “some coconut trees may be tilted” and “many banana plants may be downed.” So, while the worst of the storm raged to the north, my plane lit on the runway of Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport on a blustery, wet morning. It was unsettling to think of the chaos so close by, yet so far away. My most stressful moment came when an attendant, citing stingy carry-on restrictions, forced me to check my backpack, from which I had not been separated all year; I actually kissed it upon being reunited in Manila.

  Despite the typhoon, Nicky Icarangal, a veteran Filipino ornithologist, was ready and waiting, to my great relief. Nicky had planned an action-packed week for us—four islands in seven days—but, as our first stop was supposed to be northern Luzon Island, which was now being pummeled by wind and rain, that itinerary was blown away. Nicky shook my hand and marched us over to the domestic terminal. In a few minutes, he explained, we’d take off toward the southern Philippines, where we’d be out of Lando’s grip. Nicky had arranged for us to visit Mindanao, the country’s second-largest island after Luzon, to search for the rare, endangered, and spectacular Great Philippine Eagle.

  Nicky presented a stocky, trim, and tidy figure with dark, close-cropped hair and a patch of stubble on the tip of his chin. He wore hiking boots, a long-sleeved field shirt tucked firmly into khakis, and a watch tightly fitted to his right wrist, and he carried a duffel bag along with a mysterious hard, black, plastic case. He seemed to know everyone in the little domestic terminal, moving effortlessly through crowds at the check-in desks and nodding to acknowledge each acquaintance.

  After checking his duffel, Nicky stopped at another counter, in a quiet corner of the airport, to hand over the plastic case.

  “My toy,” he said, a bit mysteriously, by way of explanation.

  I was already dreaming of what the next days might bring. The Philippine Eagle, by length the largest eagle in the world, tops the most-wanted list for every birder who visits the Philippines. It’s often called the “monkey-eating” eagle for its propensity to prey on macaques, but this predator hunts just about anything; it has been known to take down pigs, dogs, and the occasional deer. The eagle stands more than three feet tall with a light belly and a loose, shaggy crest, and is most often observed soaring above the canopy of unbroken jungle. It is Asia’s counterpart to the Harpy Eagle I’d seen in Brazil eight months before. Finding both species in the same year would be a real coup.

  The Philippine Eagle is rarer than the Harpy, though; with only a few hundred individuals left in the wild, these raptors are critically endangered. They require large tracts of intact forest to survive—each breeding pair is estimated to defend a territory of at least fifty square miles—and, as logging has accelerated in recent years, the eagles have declined. Today they are found in only a few scattered areas, with their last stronghold in the mountain forests of Mindanao Island.

  Nicky and I were headed into the heart of that territory. I was amped to see an eagle, but also slightly concerned about what I might be getting myself into. During my Big Year, Mindanao was in the news for all the wrong reasons: armed guerrillas, militias, Islamic extremists, and outright criminals were active there, vying with each other in a messy and complicated resistance. The Philippine military, quietly backed by the United States, engaged in secretive operations to combat these groups, occasionally boiling into the international spotlight. At one point, CNN reported that 120,000 people had evacuated their homes to flee the fighting in Mindanao. This was nothing new—conflict has been ongoing since the 1970s in the southern Philippines—but it was worrying for a foreigner. Just four days before I arrived on Mindanao, the U.S. State Department issued a stern warning against nonessential travel to the region, citing a long list of terrorist incidents. “Exercise extreme caution,” it read.

  To see the Philippine Eagle, birders have traditionally visited Mount Kitanglad, an inactive 9,500-foot volcano in north-central Mindanao, but in February 2015 a group of birdwatchers got caught in the crossfire there, apparently between government special forces and the New People’s Army, a communist rebel group. The birders managed to escape, but their guide was shot in the arm, and access to Mount Kitanglad had been dicey ever since.

  To be on the safe side, Nicky decided we would try a different site, the Cinchona Forest Reserve, on the other side of the mountain’s summit, where a pair of Philippine Eagles had recently nested.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We will stay with a park guard who is friendly with the rebels, so they won’t mess with us.”

  I tried not to dwell on the many recent kidnappings in the south Philippines, including a pair of Swiss and Dutch birders who were abducted on the nearby island of Tawi-Tawi in 2012. The Swiss man escaped in 2014 during a shootout, but the Dutch birder was still being held captive, more than three years later. The U.S. State Department had listed at least fifteen separate kidnappings during the first nine months of my Big Year, including four tourists abducted from a Mindanao resort a couple of weeks before I arrived. One of them, a Canadian, was beheaded several months later after a failed ransom effort.

  We landed in Davao City, the bustling metropolitan center of Mindanao, in bright sunshine. Nicky picked up his luggage, then walked to a counter near the airport exit, where a uniformed man handed him the black plastic case. With precise, practiced movements, Nicky opened the case, took out a handgun, loaded it, and tucked the weapon under his waistband.

  “Okay, let’s go!” he said.

  Mindanao offers a birder’s paradise, not just for the eagle but for a host of other endemic species such as the Mindanao Bleeding-heart, a reclusive forest dove that looks like it’s been stabbed in the chest, and the Black-and-cinnamon Fantail, a charismatic little songbird that sounds like a squeeze toy. Of nearly two hundred birds endemic to the Philippines, more than one hundred can be seen on Mindanao, and about fifty are restricted to this island and its outliers, making this area one of the world’s richest for endemism. My skin prickled to get into it.

  After driving for a couple of hours into Mindanao’s rugged interior, we stopped along a muddy road where a house in a state of disrepair stood alone in a small clearing. I assumed the building had been abandoned until Nicky announced brightly, “Welcome to the Cinchona Forest Reserve headquarters!” Two men emerged to greet our arrival, and I was soon introduced to Emiliano “Blackie” Lumiston, the park’s guard and caretaker, and his son, Ramil. Emiliano wore camouflage, sported a crewcut dyed blazing pumpkin orange, and smoked while we talked. He didn’t speak English, so Nicky translated.

  “Blackie is part of the Kitanglad Guard Volunteers,” Nicky explained. “It’s an indigenous organization that patrols the forest, helping protect this area against intrusions. Mount Kitanglad was declared a protected area in 2000, but it’s under pressure from illegal logging and exploitation. The KGV has stopped a lot of development here in recent years.”

  Emiliano smiled warmly when I shook his hand.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “The birds need all the help they can get!”

  “For the indigenous people, Kitanglad is a sacred site,” Nicky said. “They know this place better than anyone. Even though they are poor, they are the forest’s best protectors.”

  As a full-time guard, Emiliano was also an expert on the Philippine Eagle, my most-wanted bird in these parts. He told us that the local pair of eagles had finished nesting a couple of months before, but they were still hanging around. Our best chance would be to watch the skies from a nearby overlook where the birds could often be seen soaring over the forest canopy.

  The four of us—Emiliano, Ramil, Nicky, and I—mounted two motorbikes to climb a narrow dirt track that no car could follow. Several miles above the headquarters, we reached a spot with a magnificent view: from a bare hilltop, the forest spread out like a flowing green carpet, with tendrils of mist swirling above it. Emiliano made a sweeping gesture toward the landscape u
nder our feet, and Nicky said, “We will wait here all afternoon, if necessary. The eagles like to fly over this valley.”

  I checked my watch. It was just before noon, which meant we had about seven hours of daylight. With patience and luck, sometime before dusk I’d have an eagle in my sights.

  We cheerfully settled into our vigil. Each of us remained mostly silent, lost in our own thoughts, while we continuously scanned the horizon. My mind drifted as an hour passed, then two hours, and I found myself daydreaming about the end of my journey. After ten months on the road, I was nearing the home stretch, but somehow I wasn’t quite ready to be done.

  And I wasn’t even sure where, exactly, I’d be for New Year’s Eve. For months now I had nurtured a secret plan, hatched with a couple of South African birders, to attempt to beat the world Big Day record on December 31—to try to see more than 350 species of birds in a single day, more than anyone had ever recorded in one twenty-four-hour period. As a grand finale to my Big Year, setting two world records at once would be pretty epic, and we thought it might be possible in South Africa—especially with the help of a friend’s private jet to cover the territory. I could fly from Australia to South Africa on December 30, meet the team, and go hard until the New Year.

  But in early October, another crew of birders in Ecuador stunned the birding world with an announcement: after weeks of careful scouting, they completed a Big Day across the Andes and recorded 431 species of birds in twenty-four hours, smashing the existing single-day record.

  “It’s like beating the world marathon record by an hour!” enthused one of their team.

  The South Africans were so impressed that they gave up—even with the jet, it wouldn’t be possible to surpass the Ecuador tally in South Africa, which has fewer birds—and so, reluctantly, I canceled my New Year’s Eve plans with them. I’d have to finish the year elsewhere.

  “Hey, Noah, do you see that bird?” asked Nicky, and I snapped out of my reverie.

  He was pointing downslope, toward a distant ridge. When I scanned with my binoculars, I quickly picked up what he’d spotted: a speck was rising slowly over the canopy, like a piece of dust floating in a lazy air current.

  “Got it,” I said, not quite sure what I had got.

  All four of us immediately locked on. The bird was far away, at least a mile or two from our position, soaring against a backlit sky. I couldn’t even see it with my naked eye, and the binoculars didn’t help much. It was clearly a raptor, but which species? Nicky and Emiliano held an animated discussion.

  “We think it’s an eagle,” Nicky said, finally, “but it’s so far away that we’re only ninety percent sure. Unfortunately, Emiliano says that it’s in an inaccessible area, so we can’t take the motorbikes any closer. Maybe it will fly over here for a better view.”

  The bird soared in broad circles, giving tantalizing looks as it banked in the thermals. I could make out its flat profile, bulky structure, and powerful flight, but that was about it. After ten long minutes, I watched the speck descend and vanish behind the ridge.

  “I’m confident that was a Philippine Eagle,” Nicky said, “but it was a terrible view.”

  Emiliano spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness: he’d found the bird all right, but today it did not cooperate. We’d waited all afternoon for a circling speck.

  The eagle did not reappear. When night eventually fell without another sighting, the four of us returned to the dilapidated house. I crawled into a sleeping bag on a floor of rotten wood and lay there in the dark, turning over the day’s events in my mind, pondering what I’d seen at the overlook.

  Nicky and Emiliano were probably correct: the distant silhouette was likely a Philippine Eagle. But it had been so far off that I couldn’t catch its field marks, not even the overall brown-and-gray colors. I might never have another chance to observe this bird—by the time I could return to the Philippines, it might be extinct in the wild—and tomorrow we had to look for Mindanao’s many other species, because I’d soon be moving on. My heart ached. I wished, as I had so often lately, for more time.

  When I closed my eyes, I knew that I would always remember exactly how empty it felt, that day on Mindanao Island, not to see a Great Philippine Eagle.

  ✧-✧-✧

  Next morning, Emiliano woke us before dawn. He wanted to show me the Philippine Eagle nest, even though it was no longer in use, which required a short hike through the forest. Nicky agreed—we’d have a chance for a few birds I wouldn’t find anywhere else.

  After a hasty breakfast, we set out on a faintly marked trail leading straight uphill. Emiliano’s son, Ramil, went first, clearing the way with a machete, while Nicky and I hung back, listening for birds. Nicky had an impressive ear, identifying each unseen singer as we walked along, occasionally stopping to zero in on one.

  “Hear that?” he said. “That’s a Stripe-breasted Rhabdornis. And—oh!—a Cinnamon Ibon. That’s a good one, endemic to the mountains of Mindanao.”

  We wangled views of the ibon, a diminutive songbird in its own genus. With this sighting, I realized that I was very close, very close indeed, and my heart beat faster.

  “Hey, Nicky,” I said, after a quick count, “that rhabdornis was number 4,995. Only five more birds to go!”

  As Emiliano led us deeper into the forest, approaching the eagle nest, we added several birds in quick succession: Island Flycatcher, Mountain White-eye, and, in a clearing, a noisy Tawny Grassbird. When a dull-green Mountain Warbler flitted in the midcanopy, Nicky slapped me on the back.

  “That’s number 4,999,” he said. “Next one is the big five-K! Let’s hope it’s not some drab flycatcher . . .”

  A mixed flock of birds moved into the branches above us, and Nicky and I craned our necks to look straight up.

  “I see flowerpeckers,” he said. “Are you looking at the one with red undertail coverts?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Glossy black above, white below, dark face, and a red cap.”

  “It’s a Flame-crowned Flowerpecker!” Nicky exclaimed.

  “Number five thousand!” I said.

  We watched for a minute until the bird had flitted away.

  “That’s a great milestone bird,” Nicky said. “Endemic to the Philippines, and a tough one. Congratulations!”

  “A Flame . . . crowned . . . Flowerpecker,” I repeated, slowly emphasizing the syllables as I considered the bird’s name.

  Nicky, Emiliano, Ramil, and I took a triumphal selfie, each of us with five fingers raised, one digit for every thousand birds. The stress of 299 days in thirty countries lifted: whatever happened now, I’d reached my mark. For me, accomplishing this personal objective was the sweetest feeling, better even than passing the world record in India. The number of birds mattered less than the satisfaction of achieving what I had set out to do—a task that ten months ago had seemed almost too overwhelming to contemplate.

  Emiliano stopped at the end of the trail and pointed up into a large tree.

  “That,” he announced, “is the old Philippine Eagle nest.”

  I carefully climbed a viewing platform that been built in an adjacent tree. It was a rickety structure of tied-together branches now beginning to decompose, but it afforded a point-blank view of the nest, wedged solidly into a fork. The photographers must have had a field day when the eagles were here, I thought, burning with envy.

  As I stood there, pondering the ghost of eagles past, Nicky’s voice called up from below.

  “Hey, weren’t you going to get a tattoo of your five-thousandth bird?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I think it’s best if we forget all about it.”

  “Why?” said Nicky.

  “There’s only one place for a Flame-crowned Flowerpecker tattoo,” I said. “And I just don’t think I’m man enough.”

  15

  Birds in Paradise

  AS NOVEMBER CAME and went, I had the eerie feeling of time accelerating—the days rushed by too quickly, like living in fast-forward. Th
e end of the year, which for so long had extended into the distant horizon, suddenly loomed large. I swept through Southeast Asia in what seemed like the blink of an eye, hurtling toward a finish line that appeared disconcertingly close. I wanted to put on the brakes, but my internal clock had other ideas.

  Since the beginning of the year, my sense of time had veered all over the map, literally and figuratively. At the start, way back in Antarctica, the days passed so slowly that I hardly thought about the future. Toward the middle, time seemed to crest a rise, then to hasten downhill, relentlessly picking up momentum into the home stretch.

  We all feel the steady acceleration of time as we age, partly because each passing season becomes a smaller proportion of our lives (which explains why a summer in college feels as long as a whole year at age 75), and partly because we experience fewer new things as we get older and therefore generate fewer vivid memories to mark the time. People often experience this effect on a more compressed scale when they are on vacation. The so-called “holiday paradox” can be explained in terms of novelty: the more new experiences we have, the denser the timeline becomes.

  During my Big Year, I experienced the holiday paradox in a big way. As I developed routines, each new month moved faster than the last. Time also sped up because I had so little to spare; it really does fly when you’re having fun, and I was so busy that, every time I glanced at a clock, the minutes and hours leapt forward. But at the same time, looking back, the beginning of the year seemed like an eon in the past.

  Time melted in my grasp and fled before I could touch it, “gone in the instant of becoming,” as the psychologist William James said more than a hundred years ago. I wanted to savor every moment, but found my own consciousness too slippery to hold. And so, as time flew like a bullet train, I hung on to my binocs as tightly as I could, enjoyed each fresh memory, and began to look ahead toward the New Year.

 

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