About Me

 

I'd much rather write about the birds I see than about myself, so I'll keep this short: as my URL suggests, my name is Forest Jarvis, an American birder trying to spend as little time in America as possible. This blog started out as simply a photo-blog (as you can see if you dig deep enough into my archives), from back in college when I was a strictly a photographer mainly taking landscape, street, and travel photography. The name is in Spanish since for a while I spent most of my time in South America and expected to be based there professionally; I'm still a fluent speaker of Spanish and Portuguese, and hope to return to Latin America. However, through a somewhat convoluted turn of events I instead managed to end up in the Philippines, where I've been on and off since 2015 and am living as of 2022 when I'm writing this. 

I picked up birding in 2016 while living in the Philippines, mostly due to the intervention of Pete Simpson, who helped to turn me into a proper birdwatcher. Since starting to bird, I've lived for two years on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, three years in Washington DC (one year longer than I would have liked), three months in Ethiopia, and as of December 2021, in Sorsogon in southeastern Luzon, where I am currently based.  I'm lucky enough to work in the field of international development, which allows me to travel a great deal more than I'd otherwise be able to afford, and for now to be based wherever I want to be. My partner, Nikki, is also a birder (albeit on and off), and I'm constantly doing my best to get her more into the hobby and ideally to make some contributions to this blog. 

I'm a middling birder at best, so my blog posts are best interpreted as the results of my flailing attempts at seeing birds rather than the accounts of an expert in the field. While I try to avoid ID mistakes by the time I get to publishing on the blog, they're inevitable and corrections are always welcome. Nonetheless, I do get to quite a number of under-birded areas and often manage to blunder into some rare finds (mostly due to pure luck rather than any modicum of skill), so hopefully this blog will still be of interest to world birders and others interested in reading about birding in out-of-the-way places. I'm also trying to be better about documenting the logistical aspect of birding, and hope to start putting trip reports on my blog at some point soon. 

Beyond birds, I'm also interested in lots of other aspects of naturalisting, particularly lepidoptera (both butterflies and mothing), odonata, mammals, herps, and plants to some extent, as well as contemplating the intricacies of habitats and biogeography. Hopefully there's enough of that here to be of interest even to non-birders. 

If for whatever reason you happen to have any questions, or (more likely) would like to let me know about some flagrant mis-ID of mine, I'm best reached in the comments of my blog post, on facebook at Forest Jarvis (seriously, if you're a birder of any sort please add me), or via email at forestjarvisbrach@gmail.com.