The Great North Road (Part 1)
After our fun (and weird) couple of days in Subic , Nikki and I continued northwards toward our ultimate destination of Ilocos Norte. This was mostly a birding trip, and there were two main goals: first, to see some of the uncommon Luzon endemics that I was still missing, including visiting well-known national parks and some up-til-then unbirded potential new sites. The second goal was to look for migratory birds and (ideally) vagrants, which tend to concentrate in the northern part of the Philippines that's closest to Taiwan and the Asian mainland. The latter had already gotten off to a good start with our Black-winged Cuckooshrike in Subic, but I was hoping for even more interesting migrants to pad my Philippines list. The initial plan had been to stop at the famous Candaba Wetlands on the way up to Subic to look for ducks and other rare migrants, as well as some birds I was annoyingly still missing from my Philippines list like Eastern Marsh Harrier and birds I hadn't seen...