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). Otherw...