Pajareo sin fronteras

Even though I do a fair amount of DIY birding travel, I've avoided making proper trip reports, mostly because my travel is generally broken up into short weekend trips when I can take the time off of work, rather than "proper" multi-week expeditions of the sort that usually get reports. Still, I've been to enough new or under-birded spots in the Philippines that I figure it's worth providing some more details for other birders wishing to visit. This is perhaps especially the case as many of the best-known birding reports from the country are well out-of-date by now, and international birders are starting to trickle back into the country. My trip reports are now in the creatively-named " Trip Reports " page of this blog, which is located at the very top of my home page. So far I only have reports from my recent trips to Panay and Samar , but if I have time I hope to fill in some more from older trips as well. If there are any details that would be helpfu...

EDIT: Trip report for Samar with more details on logistics and specific sites can now be found on my Trip Reports page. Birding is, if nothing else, guaranteed to be a mixed bag. You can have a great time seeing great birds, and a bad time not seeing any good birds. It's also not uncommon to have a great time while not really seeing any good birds, because birding is just generally a fun thing to be doing. Much more rarely, you can have a rather unpleasant time while also seeing some very good birds. That was my trip to Samar Island Natural Park. But first, some context. After my week-long trip to Panay , I would have liked nothing better than to have a few weeks back home in Sorsogon to process pictures and catch up on work and sleep. However, that was not to be, thankfully for exciting reasons: my friend Paul, who I got to know remotely during the pandemic through the Birding Co-op , was visiting the island of Samar and invited me to join him for some birding during the few days...