[TN-Bird] I'll take Manila

MANILA, PHILIPPINES - If there's one place in the world you want to get to 
quickly before all the endemics are gone, it is the Philippines. Poverty, the 
plundering of natural resources and population pressures are all factors in 
destroying one of the richest assortments of endemic species in the world. 
I was in Manila on business last week, and am happy to report my fiancee Janeth 
is now here with me in Jonesborough and a November wedding is being planned.
While going through the visa process I hooked up with Tim Fisher, co-author of 
"A Guide to the Birds of the Philippines" for two days of birding in the rice 
paddies and on the mountain above the University of the Philippines with 
Nicandro Icarangal, who works as a guide for Ben King's Kingbird Tours. We had 
some amazing good luck when Nicky spotted a Luzon Bleeding Heart (a dove) 
flutter across the road and I was shortly afterwards able to get a glimpse of 
it as it walked between two trees. This bird has not been located on Luzon for 
the past several years by Kingbird. 
Later, below the raptor center we scored on one of those amazing flocks in the 
treetops you sometimes get in tropical forests after a day of hiking. This is 
on the grounds of the botanical gardens on the university campus. In this group 
we had both the Scale-feathered Malkoha and the Red-crested Malkoha, the 
flashiest group in the cuckoo family, and then Nicky spotted a Philippine 
Trogon and while he was getting it in the scope, I saw a Rufous Coucal, the 
first-ever sighting of this bird at the University. With a long tail set off by 
extremely short wings and overall rufous color it was an unmistakable bird to 
call. Then I got a nice scope view of the trogon, which is rarely reported on 
Luzon anymore. 
The next day while walking back to my hotel in one of the scruffiest parts of 
Manila - a block from the US Embassy - a flash of vivid blue dove out of a 
tree, swooped down almost to my ankles to snatch an insect and soared back up 
into the foliage of the only tree for some distance. The vivid color and its 
flycatching made it a flycatcher, and the white I observed in the tail was 
diagnostic for a Blue-and-white Flycatcher, the first seen in many years in 
Luzon, according to Tim. 
I groaned at hearing the news of its rarity. "When a new guy comes into town 
and picks up two first-ever birds, my credibility has to be about zero," I 
laughed. 
"Probably so," Tim said in his Australian brogue, "but there is something to be 
said for the experience birdwatcher in a new area not taking anything for 
granted. We get a lot of sightings that way on my trips. Some I come to expect, 
like mistaking the female of one species for the male of something else again." 
While this is definitely outside the scope of tenn-birds.net, there's a motive 
to my madness. I exhort the readers of my bird column in the Johnson City Press 
to get outside and see other birds than the few species that come to their 
feeders. But those of us who are doing field birding tend to chase the same 
birds year after year in Tennessee, and limiting yourself to a few hundred 
species and there are thousands of other wonders to behold out there may seem 
to be safe. However, if we are so parochial in our interests that we let the 
environment in the rest of the world perish it can only come back to bite us in 
the butt. Birdwatchers are then environmental conscience of the world and it 
becomes our duty whether we will it or not, to bear witness to the loss of that 
environment. 

James Brooks 
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