Two Big Days

 

After a fairly quiet September, October was a much, much busier month for me. The biggest reason for this was that Nikki and I were getting married on October 14! A week before that, however, was a much more bird-related engagement: eBird's fall Global Big Day. After being rather disappointed by the lack of migrants on the spring Big Day, I decided to give this one a proper try to at least beat my (not very impressive) personal record. To that end, I rented a car for a day to get me around to distant spots much easier than my motorbike, and contacted kuya Noel at Bulusan Lake for the first birding stop of the day.

Nikki and I met kuya Noel at the Bulusan Volcano Natural Park headquarters at 5 in the morning, and started the walk up to the park in the dark. We managed to get the two realistic local owls out of the way just before sunrise, with both Philippine Scops-owl and Luzon Hawk-owl by the side of the entrance road (I only managed one, awful picture of the hawk-owl). Otherwise the walk up to the lake was disappointingly quiet even by Bulusan standards, with none of the usual doves calling and only a distant heard-only Philippine Trogon. On the other hand we (or, well Nikki, since my hearing isn't getting any better) heard the call of a Bicol Ground-warbler, which was a nice overdue record for the site. Up at the lake, we were forced to take shelter from a sudden tropical downpour before we could start on the trail.

Luzon Hawk-owl (apologies for the awful picture)

Asian Hermit Spider near the edge of the lake

Things picked up a little bit along the path around the lake, where we had lots of calling White-eared Brown Doves and Amethyst Brown Doves, including one male displaying for a female very dramatically, perching on a branch and flapping his wings as if he was pretending to fly. In a nearby fruiting tree we also had a single Cream-bellied Fruit Dove, always nice to reconnect with.

Displaying male Amethyst Brown Dove

Cream-bellied Fruit Dove

Further along the path we had close encounters with both Scale-feathered Malkohas and Rough-crested Malkohas, although never any great photo ops. There were lots of Balicassiaos and Philippine Bulbuls around, and we managed to add at least a couple other birds to the Big Day list, including Spotted Wood Kingfisher, Philippine Fairy-bluebird, Elegant Tit, and Flaming Sunbird. On the road back down to the rental car we had decent looks at Stripe-headed Rhabdornis, Yellowish White-eye, and a juvenile Orange-bellied Flowerpecker.

My awful record shot of a Scale-feathered Malkoha

Immature Orange-bellied Flowerpecker

Asota heliconia

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

Thelasis carinata, an endemic orchid

Plocoglottis plicata, another cool orchid

On the way down I asked kuya Noel what was going on with the local birds, and he confirmed my suspicion that Bulusan is much quieter now than it was in years past. He said that it had been like that ever since a recent typhoon (I assume either Typhoon Tisoy or 2019 or Typhoon Rolly of 2020- Sorsogon gets so many typhoons it's hard to be sure) the birds have been fewer in number. I assume that's because of habitat damage, although the forest around Bulusan still seems to be very good quality. Sorsogon gets bad typhoons every few years so I'm hoping things will bounce back, preferably before I leave. It's a damn shame, because my earliest experiences of birding Mount Bulusan in 2017 and 2018 included many, many more birds, including proper mixed flocks that I haven't seen at all in the past year here.

After we paid kuya Noel and packed up the rental car, we headed back home to Sorsogon City where I dropped of Nikki and had a quick lunch. Normally the middle of the day is nap time, not birding time, but this was Big Day, so I immediately went out once more, this time to the nearby Cabid-an fishponds. It was mercifully cloudy, so birding out in the open in the middle of the day wasn't nearly of an experience as it could have been. I started at the rice fields, where I saw the resident pair of Little Ringed Plovers, as well as some of the usual like Brown Shrike, Paddyfield Pipit, and Cattle Egret. A surprise was a Slaty-breasted Rail that darted across the road, an unusual time of day for a rail to be active and an unexpectedly good bird for my Big Day list.

Little Ringed Plover

Brown Shrike

Cattle Egret on an appropriate perch

Paddyfield Pipit

At the fishponds themselves, there were surprisingly lots of birds around even in the midday heat- lots of Javan Pond Herons and all the usual egrets, Philippine Ducks and Wandering Whistling Ducks flying around, skittish as always, and almost the full suite of shorebirds, including uncommon-for-the-area Pacific Golden Plover and Long-toed Stint. In a couple of hours there I ended up with almost 50 species, most of which were new for the Big Day list. Still, I missed out on a few common birds that would have been good additions to the day list, like Watercock and White-browed Crake, which was a little annoying on a day when every species counts. In retrospect I should have stayed a bit longer to try for those, but I was anxious to move on to other locations.

Male Javan Pond Heron

Pacific Golden Plovers pretending to be Upland Sandpipers

Philippine Ducks

Wandering Whistling Duck

Wood Sandpiper

Collared Kingfisher

Pacific Swallow

Baby Philippine Sailfin Lizard

After the fishponds I made a quick and pleasingly efficient stop at my inland birding site at Baribag, where I quickly snagged my needs of Blue Rock Thrush, White-bellied Munia, and Scaly-breasted Munia, as well as a nice Grey Wagtail. My final stop of the day was the Donsol mudflats, but on the way I took a detour to the BacMan access road in the Pocdol Mountains to see if I could add any forest birds. This proved to be a bad use of my time, as it was almost completely silent in the late afternoon heat, and I managed to add only Philippine Hanging-parrot to the day list. That was a bit annoying as I could have spent that time trying to track down some other needs down near the coast, or at Donsol, but hindsight is 20/20 I suppose. 

Mount Juban from the BacMan access road

I arrived at the Donsol mudflats after a little more than an hour of frustrating driving on winding roads. As expected from my previous visit it was pretty quiet, but there were still a number of new waders, including Great Sand Plover, Lesser Sand Plover, Far Eastern Curlew, Terek Sandpiper, and Great Crested Tern. I was also treated to a gorgeous sunset, with both Mount Mayon and Mount Bulusan lit up in the evening light.

Greater Sand Plover

The Donsol mudflats with Mount Bulusan in the distance

Sunset over Mount Mayon (left) and Mount Bulusan (far right)

Mount Bulusan over the fishing community

Dusk on the mudflats

I ended the evening with 105 species, which at the time I figured was far below the record for the Philippines. It was only when I got home that I realized that it was, in fact, only 2 species behind the all-time record, set in 2021 by the mysterious Kim Cancino who apparently stopped birding altogether shortly after he set the record (Kim, if you're reading this, please start birding again). That's a little annoying, as I could have easily gotten 2 or 3 more species with just a little bit of effort, but that's birding for you. I might try again in next year's spring Big Day, but given just how awful May is for migrants in Sorsogon I'm not sure how effective it would be. Still, it was a success overall- I broke my personal record by quite a bit, had by far the biggest list for the Philippines, and personally added 12 species to the global Big Day list, which wouldn't have been observed otherwise. I'm hoping at some future big day I can have more company to make it a little less of a solo slog during the harder parts of the day.

Now, ordinarily eBird Big Day would be the highlight of the month, but believe it or not it wasn't even the biggest day of the month. That's because Nikki and I got married on October 14! This is a birding blog and almost anyone who reads this will have already seen the pictures on Facebook (the album is here for those who haven't), so all I'll say here is that it was a truly magical day with most of my favorite people in the world- Nikki especially of course. We managed to arrange a wonderful ceremony in a garden on the edge of the Mount Bulusan, and the famously temperamental Sorsogon weather even gave us a break, with clear skies the whole way through. Oh, and Sorsogon's first-ever record of Rufous-bellied Eagle began soaring overhead just as we started to say our vows (thanks to the visiting birders in the audience for picking it up!). If that's not a good omen, I don't know what is. 

Nikki didn't let me do the ceremony with my camera and binoculars, so I'll just close the blog post with these pictures instead: