Sorsogon September

After nearly a month traveling through Mindanao, Panay and Quezon, we finally returned to Sorsogon in early September, where we had a much-needed month of working at home (and preparing for our wedding in October). It also, of course, meant I had a chance to get back into local birding, visiting all my favorite sites.

I've mentioned this before, but I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with birding in Sorsogon. On the one hand, I'm surrounded by amazing habitats of many different types: several wetlands and fishponds, hundreds of square kilometers of mudflats in Sorsogon Bay, some incredibly pristine and extensive mangrove forests, and of course the good-quality tropical rainforest of Mount Bulusan and the Pocdol Mountains. There are very few places in the country that have this much good habitat so easily accessible from a very nice and reasonably-developed city. Some birds are seemingly more abundant here than anywhere else in the country, and that includes good ones like Luzon Bleeding-heart, Cream-bellied Fruit Dove, and Spotted Wood Kingfisher.

On the other hand, while the bird habitats are there, the birds just... aren't. The mudflats are huge and extensive, but there are barely any shorebirds to be found there, and while the fishponds are great there's enough hunting of wild ducks and rails that bird photography is a challenge. Meanwhile, there's more primary lowland rainforest in Sorsogon than just about anywhere else in southern Luzon, the forest is remarkably quiet, even by Philippines standards. But there are many, many Luzon endemics that are mysteriously missing from the good-quality forests- not poachable birds like hornbills or fruit doves (which seem to be present in good numbers), but other birds like cuckooshrikes, minivets, and large woodpeckers. Good migrants are also scarce, and I have to deal with the constant flood of notifications from Manila birders seeing things like Ruddy Kingfishers, Narcissus Flycatchers, or Forest Wagtails that I simply haven't found here. Honestly it's a little insulting seeing the vast numbers of waterbirds playing around in toxic waste in Manila Bay while there's a vast amount of coastal habitat waiting for them here in Sorsogon they just don't bother to visit.

Part of the challenge, of course, is that Nikki and I are more or less the only birders in the province, and we're only able to cover so much ground on our own with full time jobs and just a small motorbike for transportation. It could be that there's a migrant trap somewhere near us with flocks of Ferruginous Flycatchers and Chestnut-winged Cuckoos fluttering around the treetops, but we just haven't found it yet.

Challenges aside, we do our best to cover what ground we can here, and I try not to forget how lucky I am to have the spots I have found so far. For instance, just a 5-minute drive down the road from me is a great little set of fishponds where I've managed to record 100-plus species over a few-dozen visits. September proved to be great for the first pulse of shorebird migration there, and in a couple visits early in the month I managed to add Long-toed Stint, Sharp-tailed Sandpiper, and Broad-billed Sandpiper to my Sorsogon list, all of which were first provincial records on eBird. While mid-winter and spring seem to be fairly quiet there, waders were all over during November, including some other reasonably good ones like Marsh Sandpiper and both Common and Swinhoe's Snipe, the latter of which I was able to confirm through tail-spread photos (the only way to distinguish them from vagrant Pin-tailed Snipe).

Common Redshank

Six species of sandpiper in one picture! Common Greenshank, Common Redshank, Black-winged Stilt, Grey-tailed Tattler, Common Sandpiper, and Wood Sandpiper

Snipe sp. in flight- probably a Swinhoe's Snipe

Swinhoe's Snipe

Spread-tail shots like this are the only way to positively ID Swinhoe's and Pin-tailed Snipes

Long-toed Stint

Common Redshank

Black-winged Stilt, certainly one of the most striking waders in the Philippines

This part of Sorsogon doesn't really get many of the interesting terns, so a flock of Common Terns flying across the fishponds was a nice surprise. Other than that it was all Whiskered Terns, by far the mots common tern in the country and one I tend to ignore. First-year birds, however, have a beautiful checkerboard pattern on their backs, which made them lots more fun to photograph in September.

Whiskered Tern

The usual residents and common migrants were also around, including crowd-pleasers like Common Kingfisher, Javan Pond-heron and Cinnamon Bittern, and surprisingly an uncommon-for-Sorsogon Ameline Swiftlet.

Common Kingfisher

Javan Pond Heron- some males maintain their breeding plumage into September and beyond

We're blessed with not one but three different Ixobrychus bitterns in the Philippines, and Cinnamon Bittern is probably my favorite

Ameline Swiftlet- uncommon in Sorsogon for reasons I don't fully understand

Before I found the fishponds in Cabid-an, my go-to birding spot in Sorsogon was the much-more-extensive fishpond complex in Buhatan, 15 minutes away from our house. It's larger and has a bigger array of habitats, including access to some nice mudflats, but it's more difficult to access, requiring some slogging through muddy rice paddies and an ever-changing labyrinth of fishpond dikes. It also frequently gets bloody hot. For these reasons I prefer to spend time in Cabid-an, but I did make one trip to Buhatan. It was nice birding but without anything particularly interesting- a small group of Red-necked Stints were new birds for the site, and I had good looks at a big flock of Common Redshank. In general it's always cool to see how much biodiversity can thrive in areas like fishponds that still have very heavy human activity- an example of how economic activity and nature can coexist up to a point. Not that I wouldn't prefer a nice, big wildlife refuge with boardwalks and a nature trail, but those won't be coming to the Philippines anytime soon.

Chestnut Munia

Olive-backed Sunbird

White-breasted Woodswallow

Grey-tailed Tattler

Common Redshanks

Greater Sand Plover

Local woman hauling her nets back to shore in the rising tide

Grizzled Pintail

Some kind of scoliid wasp

Luzon Grass Dart

Sugarcane Looper

Peacock Pansy

A visit out to the road to nowhere near the Sorsogon Rural Health Unit brought me a long-overdue Blue Rock Thrush, a year bird and a new Sorsogon bird. A surprise was a Stripe-headed Rhabdornis, far outside the primary forests where they're usually found, hanging out on a telephone wire with Asian Glossy Starlings.

Immature Blue Rock Thrush

Stripe-headed Rhabdornis

A cute little group of White-breasted Woodswallows

I spent disappointingly little time up in the forest during September, with the only exception being a trip to Nagsipit Falls on the north side of Mount Bulusan on my quixotic quest to find Rufous-breasted Blue Flycatcher, the only Bicol-endemic bird and one of the least known Philippine endemics. I have heard an unknown flycatcher singing that was most likely this species exactly once, at this site, but I have never heard it again and no-one is aware of what its song sounds like, so it remains one of my most frustrating misses. True to form, I didn't see it this time either, and it was yet another very quiet morning at that side, despite the extremely good forest. I did get good looks at a beautiful Spotted Wood Kingfisher on the lower part of the trail, and I had a great look (and bad photos) of a tiny electric-blue Indigo-banded Kingfisher further up, my first time seeing them at that location. There was also some cool invertebrate life such as a huge Palm King butterfly, and a strangely-shaped whip spider, a creature I had no idea even existed.

Spotted Wood Kingfisher

Indigo-banded Kingfisher

Palm King

Some kind of bee-mimic robber fly

Believe it or not this is actually a spider- I had no idea whip spiders (Ariamnes sp.) were a thing...

Some kind of impressive pygmy grasshopper (Hymenotes sp.)

Some kind of forest frog- Platymantis dorsalis I think

Igneocnemis haematopus, a beautiful endemic damselfly

On a later visit to the Cabid-an fishponds, I was pleased to discover a pair of Little Ringed Plovers, a resident that I annoyingly still needed for my year list. They were hanging out in a little rice field near the fish ponds, which also proved to be a good spot for lots of snipe (unidentified as usual), and photographing the passing Grey-rumped Swiftlets and Asian Palm Swifts. At the fishponds themselves the shorebird numbers were much decreased from the previous week, but I still had good looks at some Marsh Sandpipers.

Little Ringed Plover

Either Swinhoe's or Pin-tailed Snipe

Paddyfield Pipit in its natural environment (cow poop)

Asian Palm Swift

Grey-rumped Swiftlet

Brown Shrike with a photobombing Zebra Dove

Marsh Sandpiper

Whiskered Tern

At the end of the month I finally made my way to the famed mudflats of Donsol, a butt-numbing 2-hour motorbike ride away from Sorsogon City. Annoyingly enough the usually-fruitful mudflats were shockingly quiet, with only a couple dozen waders in total. That still included several species that are near impossible to see elsewhere in the province though, including a mixed flock of Great Crested Terns, Common Terns, and Little Terns, a couple Ruddy Turnstones, and a distant Far Eastern Curlew. More common but still nice were several Terek Sandpipers, Grey Plovers, and Grey-tailed Tattlers.