The Best of West Mindanao
After our brief but highly successful jaunt in eastern Mindanao , the rest of my time on the island with Doug and Andrew was spent further west, in some of my favorite birding sites in Region XII. We had three days in my usual patch of SNA to look for lowland forest birds we'd missed in Samar, as well as a couple of stops on various mountains to look for the remaining high-elevation Mindanao endemics. We spent the night of February 22nd in Kidapawan City in the province of North Cotabato, on the opposite side of Davao City. The next morning we headed up the slopes of Mount Apo to the Lake Agco area, where we were looking for Mindanao Miniature Babbler. Similar to Mindanao Brown Dove (and also Visayan Miniature Babbler), Mindanao Miniature Babblers are inexplicably rare, being mysteriously absent from most of the appropriate habitat but oddly reliable in other spots. Of these, Lake Agco is by far the most reliable. We arrived at the site just after sunrise, and set about loo...