A Tricycle Ride to a Birding Hotspot

Boarding the outrigger boats at Mactan for the trip to Olango Island.At the end of our second day in the Philippines (but just my first full day) we flew to the island of Cebu and spent the night there. The next morning we drove to Mactan and boarded outrigger boats for the short journey to Olango Island. On Olango we were going to be transported to one of the Philippines' finest shorebird-watching spots, the Olango Island Wildlife Sanctuary.Tricycles......

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Mr. Brown is Back in Town

The brown thrasher returned to our ridge-top farm on Sunday morning. Zick heard him first and yelled it to me from the other end of the house. I stuck my head out the window and heard his jumbly sing-song coming from the spring trail.This is a photo of the same dude (I suspect) from a few years ago. He was singing from the same tree yesterday and I would have gone after him with the camera for some fresh images, but I was simply not able. I've been......

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This Just In: Tree Swallow

This morning when I took Phoebe out to the bus, dawn was barely breaking and there was a heavy dew on the ground. By the time I took out Liam to his bus, just after 8 am, the dew was still there, and it was joined by a heavy, filmy mist, which obscured the sun. As we walked to the garage, the silhouette of a bird sitting on the power line caught my eye."Is that a tree swallow?" I asked myself. Liam overheard me and said "Walll, you know what preddy-mush......

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Forest Birding Around Subic Bay

Coleto, a starling relative, is a common forest edge bird. Its head is covered in bare pink flesh.On the afternoon of March 3 and the morning of March 4 our group looked for birds in the forested hills around Subic Bay. The birding was somewhat difficult for a few reasons: the birds were not present in large numbers or variety (though a different group visiting later in the week had great birding there), the forest was thick and dark, and the light,......

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Giant Golden-crowned Flying Fox

I posted an image a couple of weeks ago of the flying foxes my group saw in the Philippines, but I wanted to share a bit more about them. We encountered this mammal (a lifer for me) in the forest near Subic Bay on the island of Luzon.The flying foxes (formerly known as fruit bats—they are not foxes, but merely look like foxes) were in their daytime roosts, hanging upside-down. The scene was something I'd only ever seen in nature documentaries or in films set in Southeast Asia. From a distance, it looked as if a whole shipment of dark-brown umbrellas had fallen from a cargo plane and landed in......

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Tracking the Timberdoodle

Can't find the woodcock in this photo? It's not there. This was a test shot.It's the time of year when the male American woodcocks perform their sky-dance courtship displays on our southeast Ohio ridge top. Some nights when it's cold or rainy or both, I wonder how they muster the energy. Lately we've had two or three displaying males each night on various clearings on our farm.The woodcock is a shorebird that lives in wet woods. One of the folk names......

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Long Live Acoustic Music!

There's a real satisfaction in sharing favorite songs, albums, and artists with and among my music-loving friends. A year or two ago, my friend Debby Kaspari sent a CD she'd burned (legally) of a live performance by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings at the legendary Telluride Bluegrass Festival. I'd listened to the CD several times, but I'd never made it all the way through, for some reason.The other night, while driving home, I was reaching for something different in the ear-candy department. I popped in the Telluride CD and hit the random button on the CD player. The first track that came up......

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Bee-eaters of Subic Bay

On the afternoon of March 3rd we spent a few hours bird watching around Hill 394 in the Subic Bay Freeport area. Subic Bay served as the location of a U.S. Naval base from the early 1900s until 1992, at which point the land was turned back over to Filipino control. Because of its years as a military base, there are large areas of undeveloped habitat at Subic Bay, and it's become a well-known destination for local and visiting bird watchers.In the......

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Candaba Bird Dancers

One of the principal dancers for the Candaba group.Much of the Philippines' natural habitat and landscape has been greatly altered by human activity. In fact, a number of the areas we visited on our "fam" trip were not as birdy as they might have been due to the effects of subsistence farming and hunting, large-scale agriculture, and logging. There are some areas that are bucking this trend, with the local government and people working together to......

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Traveling to Asia: First Impressions

An aerial view of the Philippines.On the morning of March 1, I left my van in the long-term lot at Port Columbus Airport and boarded a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit. Later that afternoon I was scheduled to be on a flight flying west over Canada and the Pacific Ocean, to Manila in the Philippines, via Nagoya Japan. Trouble was, my Detroit to Nagoya flight was delayed for nearly 9 hours, so I whiled away the time in the NWA FatCats' lounge (after......

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Birding Update from the Philippines

Blue-throated bee-eaters near Subic Bay.It's been good bird watching here in the Philippines, but the bird photography has been quite tough. This image of a pair of blue-throated bee-eaters is one of the few "worth-keeping" images I got while we were birding around Subic Bay outside Manila.The light conditions range from super bright to near dusk depending on whether you're inside or outside of the forest and inside the forest, many of the birds......

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Flying Foxes

A lifer mammal for me in the forest near Subic Bay: fruit bats, which are now (I'm told), officially called flying foxes. We saw two species in these large roosts: golden-crowned flying fox and Philippine Island flying fox. Fascinating creatures and something I've always wanted to see. The bats were opening their wings and flapping a bit to cool off in the late morning sun, which was already blazingly hot. There were hundreds and hundreds of them......

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Sandhill Reflections

The blurry lines at top center are sandhill cranes. This is an art shot.These two images of sandhill cranes were taken in New Mexico, near Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge a couple of Novembers ago. The night I took these it was as cold as the balls on a brass croquet set. The cranes were flying in against a tangerine, high-desert sunset, garoo-ing to each other and settling in restlessly, in twos and threes.I recently got to enjoy watching......

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