Big Day Mega Bird

 

Among my birder peers, I'm a little unusual in that I've been a dedicated user of eBird practically since my first days of birding. That's partly because I started embarrassingly late in life, but discovering eBird was also one of the things that got me properly into birding as a serious hobby. It's mostly about enjoying being in the presence of birds and trying for good looks and pictures, but there's something about tracking my life list (and country list and province list and county list and year list) that my lizard brain finds deeply satisfying. As I get older I find my birding philosophy increasingly evolving toward "I just want to have a good time and see some cool birds" rather than obsessive listing, but the act of filling in the little polygons on my eBird map will never not be illogically rewarding. 

One extremely list-y thing that I do take somewhat seriously is eBird's Global Big Day, where birders worldwide try and see as many species of bird as possible in a single day. Since 2022 I've made it a point to spend all or most of Big Day out birding, and to add as many Philippine birds as I can to the global list. Even though I've technically been based in the US for over a year now I've still managed to find myself in country for Big Day, and every year I've somehow ended up as top in the Philippines (a very low bar as I'm usually the only birder in the country who makes a serious effort). I'm not generally as hardcore as I could be, and I'm still going to spend quality time if I see any good birds rather than rushing on to the next thing, but it's fun to compete against myself and hit as many habitats as I can in a day. 

On May 11th of this year I somehow once again found myself in the Philippines for the 5th Big Day in a row, having just returned from Vietnam the night before. The week before I reached out on the group chats to see if anyone else wanted to make an effort, and my birding friends Bambi and Bom were the only ones who wanted to go out on a Saturday morning. Bambi also invited Michaël, a Dutch birder who was doing a solo biking/birding trip around the country, and it turned out that Raphaël, a visiting birder from France, was planning to go out the same day. We decided to bird the Palo Alto subdivision in Rizal, a popular birding spot in the foothills of the Sierra Madre that's unique for its combination of forest and grassland habitats, as well as for turning up some ludicrously rare birds. My past experiences there have ranged from excellent to terrible, but it seemed like the perfect spot to accumulate a decent list and look for some of the local specialties. This visit went far, far better than I ever would have predicted. 

When the morning of May 11 rolled around I was still recovering from a bout of some sort of illness I'd picked up in Vietnam, but I wasn't about to let that stop me from doing my Big Day. I stumbled out of bed at 4 in the morning and caught a Grab to eastern Manila, where I met up with Bambi, Bom and Michaël and we kept going to Palo Alto. We arrived just after sunrise, and met up with Raphaël inside the subdivision. Things were rather quiet as we started out birding along the road, but we did see a pair of Brown-breasted Kingfishers, and had brief looks at a Scale-feathered Malkoha high in a tree. There were several White-browed Shamas calling from deep in the undergrowth near the road, and Spotted Wood Kingfishers were calling inside the forest. Along the way we ended up running into Timmy, another Manila-based birder who had coincidentally also decided to spend that morning in Palo Alto.

Scale-feathered Malkoha

We decided to take a trail that led off the road toward a small waterfall. Others had seen Ashy Thrush (which Nikki and I discovered in Palo Alto back in 2022) there recently, which would be a nice Big Day bird, and it was a known spot for Indigo-banded Kingfisher. The forest was rather quiet as we walked up the trail to the waterfall, which was almost completely dry thanks to this year's record-breaking hot weather. Raphaël spotted a Spotted Wood Kingfisher perched quietly next to the trail, and we got surprisingly good looks at a Philippine Pitta that was scratching around in the leaf litter. This was actually my first time getting decent looks at that species, which I've seen many times but almost never very well. We also had quick looks at a pair of Mangrove Blue Flycatchers, and there were several Philippine Hawk-Cuckoos calling from high above us. The local Indigo-banded Kingfisher made a brief appearance, but didn't perch long enough for a photo.

Female Spotted Wood Kingfisher

Philippine Pitta

The "waterfall" trail, sans waterfall

We spent a while at the top of the trail as that was where Ashy Thrush had been seen recently, but although I did hear one singing very far away we didn't see any. Eventually we started to head down, with Raphaël in the lead. As the rest of us were stopping to try and get pictures of another pitta, we heard some commotion from down below, as it seemed Raphaël had seen something good. We rushed down to where he was, arriving just in time to see a small bird fly up from a hidden pool of standing water. After some confusion, he told us what he had seen- a parrotfinch!

Now, in Luzon there are two possibilities for a parrotfinch. The first is Tawny-breasted Parrotfinch, which can be found throughout Southeast Asia and is extremely uncommon throughout most of its range, although I've seen it in Java. It's mainly seen up in the mountains although it wanders quite a bit, and would be a very good bird. The second is Green-faced Parrotfinch, which is endemic to Luzon and the Western Visayas and is entirely dependent on flowering bamboo, which bloom once every several decades. They're highly irruptive and mobile, and the last time they were reliably seen anywhere was in 2015. That would be mind-blowing. Fortunately, Raphaël had managed a record shot, and from what we could see, that's exactly what it was. Ridiculous. 

Feelings were a bit mixed for the rest of us: while we had seen a little green blur flying away from us it hadn't exactly been a satisfying view, particularly of a bird that ludicrously unlikely. I might have ticked it, but it would have been an extremely uncomfortable tick. We decided to stick around by the little pool in hopes that it might come back. After about 15 minutes of agonizing waiting, a little bird flitted out of the foliage and perched right in front of us- Green-faced Parrotfinch! We all feverishly started taking pictures to document the sighting, and it was nice enough to perch for 30 seconds or so before disappearing again.

Green-faced Parrotfinch!!!!!

It took us the next while to fully digest the enormity of the sighting. There are mega birds in terms of local rarity, like a first country record. And then there are mega birds in the sense of "no birder has seen this species anywhere in the world in five years". Green-faced Parrotfinch is the latter. Aside from a handful of one-off sightings (most recently in 2019), it's been considered essentially impossible to find ever since the last irruption that was seen in Bataan in 2015. I had certainly written it off as a bird I wasn't likely to see in the near future, barring another lucky find. And yet here we were. 

The group post-parrotfinch

We probably should have stuck around in the same place longer to wait for the parrotfinch to return, but the day was getting hotter and there were some other species we wanted for our Big Day list. On the way down the trail I was finally able to call in an Ashy Thrush which made a brief flyby, not long enough for a picture but a very good addition to our list and a lifer for Raphaël. We drove to a spot where Spotted Buttonquails had recently been seen, but didn't come up with much most likely because it was hot and sunny. There was a nice little mixed flock of common birds with Black-naped Monarchs, Philippine Pygmy Woodpeckers, and Arctic Warblers, the last of which was surely beginning its migration northwards. Another disappointment was that the owners of the subdivision had recently cleared the grass in the area where Chirupping Nightjars (formerly known as Savanna Nightjars) roosted and there were no nightjars to be found. We did have good looks at some new birds like Long-tailed Shrike, Pied Bushchat and Ameline Swiftlet, and a Rufous-bellied Eagle flying over was a nice unexpected addition to our list.

Arctic Warbler (yes, it was vocalizing)

Philippine Pygmy Woodpecker

Black-naped Monarch

Rufous-bellied Eagle

We ended the morning of birding with 63 species- not much by Big Day standards, but enough to put us at the top of the Philippines list. More importantly though it's hard to beat the quality of the birds- 4 species added to the Global Big Day list that were observed by no-one else, including one that as far as I know has never been seen on any Global Big Day ever- not bad for a morning of birding just a couple hours outside of the largest and worst city in the Philippines. It even made the early morning wake-up and 3-hour drive back to the hotel in gridlock traffic completely worth it. 

The celebratory post-birding lunch

This whole story has somewhat of a bittersweet follow-up. When we saw the parrotfinch it was unclear if it was part of a larger irruption or just a single bird wandering around and stopping briefly for a drink of water. Of course, the first sighting in half a decade is bound to arouse some interest and a good group of birders visited Palo Alto the next day to look for them (including a certain extra-crazy birder who flew in from Hong Kong). Thankfully it turned out to be the former- they saw a whole group of them, including the brightly-colored males that are much gaudier than the single female we saw. Over the next couple of weeks my social media was flooded with ecstatic posts and pictures of parrotfinches, most of them much better than the record shots I had managed. It was all very heartwarming although I admit to being irrationally gripped off by all of the good pictures. 

Unfortunately, the sighting happened to be on private land- and not just any private land, but a subdivision owned by one of the largest corporate developers in the country. If there's one thing governments and developers in the Philippines can't stand it's the general public having access to green spaces and natural areas, so as soon as management heard what was going on they knew they had to put a stop to it. The parrotfinches seem to have moved on, but more importantly the whole subdivision is now off-limits to non-residents, its days as one of the best birding spots around Manila seemingly over. Meanwhile rampant forest clearing continues throughout the area while the government is mainly focused on trying to shut down the forest reserve and conservation site next door. The whole episode was a microcosm of what birding in the Philippines can be like- the rampant deforestation and complete lack of effective environmental governance are always discouraging, but the vibrant and active birding community, amazing birds, and constant possibility of making an earth-shaking discovery are what will always keep me coming back for more.