Quiet May

 I've been trying my best to pull myself out of the month-long lag in making blog posts, mostly because my June is shaping up to be a very exciting month of birding, which means I'm excited to post about it. May, on the other hand, was much more low-key, as I focused on work and other hobbies. As much as I love birding, it can be exhausting sometimes and I need a few weeks to recharge before getting back into adventure mode. 

Despite taking things a bit easier, I still got out several times for some birding fun. The evening of May 6, I visited the local fishponds at Cabid-an to try and get some sunset bird pictures. It ended up being a beautiful evening, and I was able to get some decent pictures as well, including my first decent pics from Sorsogon of Grey Heron. I've been doing my best to photograph every species of bird in the province I see just to add to the local eBird data, so it's always nice to make some good additions. The heron population was as always very diverse: along with the Grey Heron, lots of Purple Herons, Javan Pond Herons, Rufous Night Herons, Yellow Bitterns, Cinnamon Bitterns, Great Egrets, and Intermediate Egrets. In fact, I'm not sure there's anywhere else in the world with more diversity of Ardeidae; on a good day you could probably get a solid 12-15 species on one checklist. In addition to the herons, I was able to get some decent pictures of the local White-breasted Woodswallows and Striated Grassbirds, as well as a well-hidden male Watercock.

Grey Heron

Yellow Bittern

Spot the Watercock!

Javan Pond Heron

Rufous Night Heron

Striated Grassbird

White-breasted Woodswallow

Some kind of geometrid moth (Scopula sp.)

I believe this is Phytomyia errans, a Southeast Asian drone fly

Sunset near the fishponds

That weekend, we made a trip to Legazpi City in neighboring Albay to see a movie with some friends (no cinema in Sorsogon City!), and Nikki and I chose to spend the night there and visit Mount Mayon the next morning. Easily one of the best-looking volcanoes in the world, Mount Mayon looms over Legazpi City like some restless sentinel god, maintaining its perfect shape despite frequent huge eruptions. Mayon has been fairly quiet since its period of unrest back in 2018, and hosts a nice little bit of high-elevation forest on its north flanks, some of the only such forest in the Bicol peninsula. I'd been there once before and had a calling Bicol Ground Warbler and some other good birds like Chestnut-faced Babbler and Olive-backed Pipit, so I was excited to visit again. In particular, it has also had records of hard-to-find residents such as Tawny-breasted Parrotfinch, Furtive Flycatcher, and Island Thrush, which would be a new subspecies for me. 

Mayon as seen from the Legazpi airport last April

We rented a car from Legazpi City and made the drive over on the morning of May 8. We arrived a little later than I'd hoped (mostly my fault for missing my alarm and sleeping in until almost sunrise), and thus missed the Island Thrush that apparently feed near the road in the early morning and move upslope soon after. Our destination was the Mount Mayon "observatory", a former planetarium that's now turned into somewhat of a generic tourist trap where people can get selfies next to the obligatory concrete sign and buy vegetables from the local farmers. The first time I'd visited, way back in 2017, the area was more or less closed, and I'd had the whole place to myself to walk up a little two-track and find birds. This time, it was clearly back on the tourist radar, and the parking area was full of vendors and stalls. 

I tried to find the entrance to the road I had taken last time but found it completely blocked off. After some asking around, we learned that that road had been ruined in a recent typhoon, and going on any of the trails required a guide (of course). We asked around for a guide and found absolutely no-one who could actually do it, but eventually some locals pointed us to a trail we could use to get some distance up the mountain. Nikki unfortunately had to stay at the trailhead and bird from there as she was feeling a little bit faint, which was probably the better decision anyway as it ended up being a steep, tough hike with more bushwhacking than I like. 

As it had been on my last experience, it was very low density and diversity of birds. There were some good ones, though: the endemic subspecies of Chestnut-crowned Babbler and White-browed Shortwing, and a new Bicol bird for me, Turquoise Flycatcher. This was my first time seeing the Luzon subspecies, which has a very distinct black mask that the birds in Mindanao and further south lack. I also happened on some cool bugs and a couple species of endemic begonia, which partially made up for the lack of most of my target birds.

Turquoise Flycatcher

Chestnut-faced Babbler

Philippine Hanging Parrot

Some kind of weevil

Common Banded Demon

An insane-looking rove beetle (Hesperus sp.) that I thought was an earwig when I first saw it

Begonia pseudolateralis

Begonia lagunensis

The view from the Mayon viewdeck

The second half of May (after Global Big Day) was pretty quiet, but in the evening of May 21 I dragged myself out of the house again to do some late afternoon and evening up on my usual patch in the Pocdol Mountains. I got to the site about an hour before sunset, and had enough light to enjoy watching a pair of Yellow-breasted Fruit Doves feeding on ficus fruits and chasing each other around the branches. Sorsogon for whatever reason is somewhat lower-diversity than the rest of Luzon, but I very much appreciate the high density of fruit doves in many spots.

Yellow-breasted Fruit Doves

The real point of visiting was for the nighttime animals, however. There were almost a dozen Luzon Hawk-owls calling all along the road after dark, another bird that seems far more common in Bicol than elsewhere on the island. A single Philippine Scops Owl also called near the side of the road, but never showed itself. More exciting was an amazing view of a Southern Luzon Giant Cloud Rat, a very poorly-known species that I'd only seen once before, also in this spot. Cloud rats as a whole are fascinating and poorly-known endemic rodents (I have the only records of this species on iNaturalist), and definitely some of my favorite mammals as a whole. There were lots of insectivorous bats flying around, a Greater Musky Fruit Bat that I was able to photograph as it fed on ficus fruits, and some cool frogs that I'm still working on IDing.

Southern Luzon Giant Cloud Rat!

Greater Musky Fruit Bat (Ptenochirus jagori)

Common Forest Frog (Platymantis dorsalis)

Woodworth's Frog (Limnonectes woodworthi)

Some kind of endemic cockroach (Rhabdoblatta sp.)

Malaysian Bush-cricket (Mecopoda elongata)

The last week of May, I made a couple trips up to Mount Bulusan to explore the Nagsipit Falls trail once again. It's always been shockingly low-density for birds despite being a beautiful trail through gorgeous pristine rainforest, but it seems like the sort of place where something good should turn up. My suspicions were (almost) proved correct when I visited in the early morning of May 28 and heard an unknown flycatcher of some sort singing near the waterfall. The bird of course moved away and stopped singing as soon as I got out my phone to record, but I strongly suspect that it was a Rufous-breasted Blue Flycatcher, the only "true" Bicol endemic bird and one for which no photographs or recordings exist online, which of course makes finding it a bit difficult. Missing the flycatcher was annoying, but I had some other good birds, including nesting White-eared Brown Dove and Balicassiao, and a pair of Scale-feathered Malkohas with a tiny, fuzzy fledgling.

Adult Scale-feathered Malkoha

Barely-visible baby Scale-feathered Malkoha

Balicassiao sitting on a nest

Some kind of endemic tiger beetle (Heptodonta sp.)

Risiocnemis serrata, a beautiful endemic damselfly

Bactrocera umbrosa, a cool Southeast Asian fruit fly

Eager to try again for the flycatcher, I returned on June 2 for one more go at it before I had to leave Sorsogon for work. I tried to leave a bit earlier to be there for sunrise, getting a gorgeous view of Mount Bulusan on the way. Sadly, I missed the flycatcher, not hearing a peep of any song despite lots of speculative playback of the calls of the closely-related Blue-breasted Blue Flycatcher. There were some other birds however, including a mixed flock with Blue-headed Fantail, Elegant Tit, and Lemon-throated Leaf-warbler, which let me get what I later found out was perhaps the first-ever picture of the endemic sorsogonensis subspecies. 

Blue-headed Fantail

As far as I know the only picture online of the sorsogonensis subspecies of Lemon-throated Leaf-warbler; apparently it has a brighter-yellow throat and face than others on Luzon, though the distinction isn't super clear to me..

Elegant Tit

Balicassiao

Igneocnemis odobeni, a gorgeous endemic damselfly that was a lifer for me

Some kind of endemic weevil (Pachyrhynchus sp. I think)

Giant Luzon Skink (Otosaurus cumingii)

A pretty little swallowtail moth (Dysaethris sp.)

Narrow-banded Velvet Bob

On the way down the road to the falls, I stopped by another patch of forest where I got good views of a small flock of Rufous-crowned Bee-eaters and a very vocal Stripe-headed Rhabdornis. In a nearby tree were a few sunbirds, and I was able to get my first decent pics in a long time of Flaming Sunbird and Purple-throated Sunbirds; two territorial males that were aggressively chasing each other around as I watched.

Rufous-crowned Bee-eaters

Flaming Sunbird

Purple-throated Sunbird

It was a bit annoying to miss out on what would have been a potential mega lifer, especially since Mount Bulusan blew its top just a few days later and I'm not sure when I'll be able to revisit the site. I also left Sorsogon soon after for a work trip to Panay, but that's a subject for a whole new blog post.