Humble Birder

This blog is fourth in a number of blogs from the beginning of January when I went away, with Paul, to see a number of new birds, sorry it is taking SO long to post.

We woke early next morning ready to both bird and move to our next location, there was an eagle to see…However, the rain-gods had other plans. Sometime during the night it had started to rain again and by the time we woke up, it has very heavy! If we went out in it, we would only get soaked through and still not see any flying displays of eagles. With a heavy heart, we cancelled the birding in the morning, called our driver and made plans to leave early. We had a long day on the road and therefore the sooner we left, the longer we would have daylight at the next location to do some scouting for birds. We spoke briefly over breakfast about the ‘Tree-stump’ and its identification, I guess I will never know if it was the eagle or not, but I should have another chance later in the trip to see the amazing ‘Bird King’, so this mystery wasn’t as frustrating as it could have been. I would feel completely different if this had been my only chance…

Our driver from the day before turned up and we loaded the car. Unfortunately he had not miraculously learned to speak English overnight, and in his defense I also had not been able to learn Tagalog, so communication was a little strained. We managed good morning but requesting a coffee stop on our travels was just a little too far for our improvised sign-language. Paul eventually got a response which was “1 hour”, so we naturally thought there was a coffee stop in an hour. In an hour we did indeed stop and the driver went and sat down to have something to eat, but there was no sign of any decent coffee. We waited for him to finish and then hit the road again.

From communications with the guy who we had booked the car through, we knew we were about half-way now, though due to the heavy rain a bridge had been washed away on the usual route, so we would have to drive an additional two hours to get around this bridge. But as we were getting closer, and the towns started to become few and far between, the full impact of nature became apparent and I was fixed to the window. We were travelling through the middle of a disaster area.

For those that know me, and friends with me on FACEBOOK, you will know that when a serious storm comes through the Philippines I always post an ‘I’m still alive’ status, just to let everyone know that I am still alive. The majority of the time tropical cyclones pass through the South of the Philippines, it is a great distance from where I live and aside from some extra rain, I have been generally unaffected. But now I was travelling through the heart of the country which was the worse hit. Typhoon Pablo trashed its way through Mindanao during early December 2012. Like most tropical depressions it flew through the country fast and then continued out to sea where it lost power and dissipated. Pablo is the strongest tropical cyclone to hit Mindanao, being classified as a category 5 as it made landfall, with winds of 160mph. The road I was on now was going through the centre of the scar it had left on the landscape.

The only way I think I can describe the damage to you is by first describing what the landscape is like normally. The landscape of this part of Mindanao had been fairly flat and you can generally see rolling hills and elevations of green, bushy palms as coconut plantations spread far and wide. Between these plantations and palms were huts, made from bits of material that people could find. Often constructed from bamboo and generally no bigger than a typical garden shed. Livestock could be seen between the huts or grazing the ground. This was what it was like before we got to the area that was hit hard. Now all the palms had been pushed over. Entire trees had been forced down, parallel with the ground or uprooted and moved. Entire plantations were laying down, all facing the same direction, like full-scale deforestation. It looked like an enormous wave had travelled through, moving everything as it went. Similar to the way domino’s look after a lot of them have been pushed over. Of course nothing could have stood up to the brutal force of nature, so huts and houses were flattened where they once stood, many seeming to be the result of reverse flat-pack building. Some had walls pushed in and the roof still on top, others had no roof but a wall sticking up and some just stumps where a hut had once been. We were traveling about a month after the event and some had started the long process of savaging and rebuilding what they could. Some palms had been cut to produce new building materials or simply just to be removed from where they once lay through the middle of a hut. Paul mentioned that the huts which were still destroyed, with no signs of salvage, probably meant that there was no one left to rebuild and probably belonged to some of those people who still remain missing. The simple need we had for a coffee passed as we kept travelling through this deep scar of nature.

There were signs of hope though. Some villages had rebuilt quickly and we saw several places where heavy machinery had been brought in to repair bridges across the river. In the worst areas, I saw several large white tents with ‘Shelter Box’ written on, one village looking like it only consisted of white tents. Relief had been sent and it was being used.

As we arrived at our hotel, for the next few nights, the extent of the relief effort was obvious. The hotel was booked up (we had fortunately booked ahead) with the Red Cross, Shelter Box and many other organizations which had sent representatives. A conference room seemed to have been taken over, with maps of the area and huge banks of computers. There was a very large international community based here, all working towards helping those that had lost during Pablo. That night, similar to the rest of the week, Paul and I sat in the bar/restaurant and tried to spy people’s organizational logo and hear their accents.

Soon after we got in, we met our guide for the next few days Zardo who Paul knew indirectly. We spoke about what the plan was for the next few days and what we were likely to see. Paul explained that though he had seen a lot of the Mindanao endemics, this was my first trip and I wanted to see them all. Zardo assured me this was fine and we would get some good birds. He went to make arrangements and left us in the bar. It was mid-afternoon and we were too far away to go scout for birds, so we order a few rounds of beers and settled in for the night. The perfect way for a birding trip;

Wake then bird, bird until beer, beer until bed, repeat!

Tomorrow was going to be a big day.