My expedition in the Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park, Philippines.
Background
When I mention the Negros bleeding-heart dove, people often say they have seen it in zoos, and talk about the crimson “gunshot wound” of the feathers on its chest. But they're usually referring to the Luzon bleeding-heart dove, its closely related but far less threatened relative with a wider red strip on its chest and a different home range. The Negros bleeding-heart, a Critically Endangered, elusive forest-dweller with just 70-370 individuals thought to remain, hasn’t had enough conservation attention to make it to any UK zoos yet!
The Negros bleeding-heart is found on only 2 islands in the Philippines, one of the most biodiverse areas in the world. However, both of these islands, Panay and Negros, have been severely deforested, with losses of original forest cover greater than 90%. Habitat loss and hunting, major threats to the dove, are still ongoing.
Recognising the threats to this understudied species, Bristol Zoological Society have been searching for it. After several years of camera trapping and surveying on rainforest in Negros, they found no signs of the dove, so they turned to a new site on Panay in May 2018, and found it in relatively high density in the Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park. The area is the largest area of lowland rainforest remaining in the dove’s range, protected by the local charity PhilinCon. Therefore, I travelled there for my MSc research project, to measure the Negros bleeding-heart’s habitat preference, with the aim to use this to inform future conservation action plans.
Getting there
In July 2018, I flew into Caticlan airport, on Panay. This is usually where foreigners go to visit the nearby island of Boracay, for parties and beaches, but this had been closed for a major environmental clean-up, so everyone’s favourite question to ask me was “why are you here?” It was a bit hard to explain that through language barriers, but I soon figured out that “birdwatching” worked if the finer details didn’t!
From the airport, I needed to reach Pandan, a town about 30 km away. I had tried to look up the transport systems before I went, but all I could find was vague advice to take tricycles and buses from unspecified locations. So, I queued with my 2 backpacks and a suitcase to get onto a tricycle to the bus terminal, which I think was in Caticlan. Without enough time for me to really figure out what was going on, the driver passed me onto a bus, and that driver then passed me onto another tricycle driver when we stopped, who took me to my hotel with the help of the maps I had printed. I was really impressed by how helpful everyone was.
My hotel, the Pandan Beach Resort, was right on the beachfront, made up of a series of buildings that had woven plant-based walls (maybe rattan?). I dumped my bags in my room and left to go and find the PhilinCon office, armed with a printed map since my phone had no internet signal. A couple of things surprised me on my way. The first was the houses. It really shouldn’t have surprised me, since the climate is warm all year there and it’s not a rich country, but the houses weren’t brick and insulated like those in the UK. They were made of things like wood and metal as well as brick and concrete, and generally far more interesting and colourful to look at. The second thing was the number of people who called out to greet me, particularly with “hello ma’am,” a term that is just not used in the UK. As well as being a foreigner, I'm really tall (5'11"), so I’d never stood out so much in my life!
About 15 minutes of walking later, I was fairly sure I was where the office should be. But all I could see was a large school, no matter how many sides of the building I tried to look at. Meanwhile, I was attracting even more stares for loitering, so I took a walk and came across a 711. It was the only shop I’d seen so far that was a separate building rather than a hatch on the front of someone’s house, so I wondered if they might have someone who could help me out with finding the office. I got lucky. The security staff told me to go to the end of the road and turn, which was totally the opposite direction to my map, but I did as they advised and there it was. After meeting Rhea, the PhilinCon secretary, I returned to my hotel. Turns out I had done a loop and the office was only 3 minutes away!
That night, I woke up at 2 or 3 A.M. thanks to jetlag and couldn’t get back to sleep. I packed my bags and met Potpot, my bird guide, at 6:30. We took a tricycle to Libertad, the closest town/village to the entrance of the North Panay Peninsula Natural Park (NPPNP). The rain was really hammering down, and small baths had formed in the potholes in the road which our driver was constantly dodging. Even under the cover of the side-cart, I was getting drenched, but the ride was exhilarating! We stopped to pay the park entry fee in a seaside house where the sea furiously licked the back garden and rushed in and out among the laid out fruits. After that, we joined up with porters carrying supplies and commenced the walk to the research station I was going to be staying at.
Sibaliw research station, owned and run by PhilinCon, is in the centre of the NPPNP. There are 2 trails to get there – a short one “Bulanao” with waterfalls and lots of river crossings (2-4 hours), and a long one “Maramig” that was drier (4-6 hours). Thanks to the heavy rain causing flooding, we needed to take the long one. It still involved one river crossing, in the agricultural bit at the start of the trail. It was just deep enough to soak my trainers. After walking through some flat rice paddy and coconut fields, with little coconut-drying huts lying about and husks on the floor, we entered the forest and started at a rapid pace uphill. The guides were racing ahead. I followed as fast as I could, and all was going fine until the hill just didn’t stop, the fact I had barely slept for the last few days or eaten caught up with me and I just felt so incredibly sick I had to stop. Instead of going back, our solution was to go up slowly with breaks, and therefore the walk took almost 8 hours! In retrospect, I should have left some jetlag recovery days. It was a tough walk, but we did cross a pretty coconut tree clearing where we had stunning views over the forested hills around us. The porters scaled coconut trees to cut down fresh green coconuts, which were totally new to me and tasted amazing.
Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park
Sibaliw research station is very remote. When I asked why it was built so far into the forest, I was told it was to make use of an underground spring. As a result, clean, cold water is constantly streaming out of pipes in the washing up area and the bathroom. The main building is wooden and sits on stilts where the ground slants underneath it. It has 4 rooms, with space for 4 more yet to be constructed, and the beds are wooden slabs (but several exercise mats have been left behind there now, so you can sleep on those). There is a kitchen area with a communal table and a bookshelf containing A Guide to the Birds of the Philippines (Kennedy et al.) which was great for learning the species and also for passing time drawing from the bird pictures on rainy days. Cooking is done on gas burners. There are 2 wide windows with a fairly high vantage point where you can watch the birds. Awesome insects fly in and out of the station – we had huge stingless wasps with such thin thoraxes that their bodies seemed disconnected, large black and yellow spiders that made really thick, tough webs, and stick insects who were happy to walk up and down your arms. We even had fireflies wandering in and out in the evening, and a huge swarm of them not far away from a window at the back! The ground outside is regularly used for sunbathing by lizards, and bright blue butterflies frequently fluttered nearby. The bathroom is a short walk away down a path snarled with tree roots, where the clean water flows constantly into a large bucket and you use a scoop to shower with. There is a toilet bowl in the centre, which you flush with the scoop also. I found glow-in-the-dark mushrooms on the wooden shelf there once, which was amazing, and I was sad when someone cleared them away! There is also a station for rehabilitating rescued hornbills, where several Visayan tarictic hornbills and a pair of Walden’s hornbills live. The Walden’s male was quite aggressive with me at first when I went to photograph them. I wonder if it was breeding season…
My survey aim was to measure the habitat preference of the Negros bleeding-heart dove using point counts and camera traps associated with measured habitat plots. One or the other of my guides, either Potpot or Jun, came with me on surveys to identify birds. Both were amazingly knowledgeable, sometimes identifying birds from sounds that I hadn’t even registered as an animal noise! Habitat variables measured included circumference of trees, canopy cover, ground vegetation cover, understorey vegetation cover, height of trees, altitude, and presence or absence of the plants rattan and pandan. Pandan plants are in the genus Pandanus, and have a sort of palm tree like crown of leaves with spikes at the edges, growing from the ground or spiralling up around trees. Rattan is a savage plant with just about every part covered in thorns, but the worst part about it is when it grows tall and sends down millimetre-thick, long tendrils that are covered in hooked barbs. These dangle at eye-level, too thin to see amongst the forest, but sharp and thick enough to cause quite a face injury if you’re unlucky! I was fortunate to just get them constantly stuck in my hair instead.
This leads me on to talk about the forest. It was incredible. Parts are secondary, cut when the local people used the rainforest to hide from the Japanese in WWII, but most of it is primary, and the trees are staggeringly tall. Sometimes, when I was attempting to measure their height, I just couldn’t see the top no matter how far away I tried to get. The ground and understorey flora in general seemed quite sparse to me – it was easy to walk off the trails as there was nothing like nettle or bramble which grows in UK forests, making large areas impassable. There were also lots of huge ferns, significantly taller than me, and amazing flora such as banana plants, which have huge, heavy canvas-like leaves. Potpot made a waterproof shelter out of them once when we waited out in the rain. Enormous vines came down from the trees, sometimes so thick that I thought they were trees, and could support my weight sitting on them. My favourite plants, though, were the fig trees. These start life as parasites, growing in the canopy on top of existing trees. Over time, their roots grow around the tree and all the way down to the floor, strangling and squeezing the host. Eventually, the host tree inside dies and rots away and the fig tree, with roots in the ground by that point, remains standing with a beautiful lattice of roots and a hollow interior. Fig trees are also really good for animals, particularly hornbills and macaques, which eat the fruit.
The age and height of the forest was particularly accentuated in an area called the dry riverbed. Taking a trail down from the research station, roughly 300 m altitude descent, you walk over a lot of jagged limestone rocks, on which I’m told someone fell and broke his ankle once, until you get to the dry riverbed, which is exactly what it sounds like – the pebbly and rocky floor carved out by a river once upon a time that no longer exists. The feeling of walking where the deep water used to flow is awe-inspiring, particularly when you need to start scrambling over rock-pool like boulders which must have formed rapids in the past. But the dry riverbed also gives an amazing view of the trees, especially nearer to the tops of the trees, which you can’t usually see in the dense forest. It also shows some of the steep slopes in the area, showing you how far you climbed down to get there!
In terms of birds, I recorded 45 species during my trip, with more present that I didn’t come across. Highlights included finding a red-bellied pitta nest with a chick inside on the way down to the dry riverbed, and regularly hearing the distinctive sound of Visayan hornbills. The station released a rescued hornbill a few years ago into the forest, and he turned up cawing outside the station on a regular basis, asking for food. We threw him rice, papaya and banana, and he caught it in mid-air. But the real highlight has to be seeing the Negros bleeding-heart dove! Most of the time I just heard it, as is standard on bird surveys, but once, it started calling when Potpot and I were down at the dry riverbed and had speakers with us. We played a recording back to it, and crept closer and closer. This chase lasted for more than an hour, with us moving as quietly as possible through a scrubby area of forest and the dove moving further away from us, but eventually, we got a good sighting of it running across a clearing! We tried to find it again to take a photo, but after I nearly broke my camera by not paying enough attention to my footing on some limestone and the dove continued to run away, we settled for a second brief glimpse and headed back. I also really liked hearing the call of the coleto, a mechanic, music-box-like clink, and seeing tiny bright red crimson sunbirds.
The camera traps were also great for recording wildlife. Along with the bleeding-heart dove, they filmed Critically Endangered Visayan warty pigs. We watched footage of a family of 8 running around, repeatedly setting off the sensor. Other species included palm civets, macaques, and one clip of a leopard cat! Worryingly, they also filmed hunters passing along the dry riverbed with guns and dogs. The forest rangers, who patrol the forest periodically to stop hunting, were in the station at the time we brought this footage back. All 12 of us crowded round trying to get a look at the hunter’s faces, but the camera traps only filmed to shoulder height so they remained unidentified.
Finally, it was rainy season, which meant rain every day, for a large part of the day! It was tricky to survey around this, and if I had any choice I would have gone in dry season, but all the hours stuck inside waiting for the rain to stop and all the times I got drowned on survey walks didn't make it any less worthwhile! My advice to anyone going on rainforest surveys is to wear wellies. That’s what the guides used (well, wellies or flip-flops) and my shoes never dried, which eventually, a few days before I was due to leave, gave me some type of horrible trench foot that confined me to the station for a few annoyingly sunny days. So, take wellies and anti-fungal foot powder!
The End
On the way back, we had to take the long trail for the second time due to rain, but we stopped to eat fresh coconuts again. A combination of a downhill route and me not being ill this time meant that our trek only took 4-5 hours, so I had time to go and visit Malumpati Cold Springs afterwards (bright blue water, with rapids, rubber rings to ride them with, a diving board and lots of interesting stalls – I’d recommend visiting if you’re in the area).
Back to the science part: once back in England, I started data analysis. I found that the Negros bleeding-heart dove had a preference for dense understorey vegetation, and I did species distribution modelling to map out the best potential habitat across its range where it would most likely be found. If you are interested in reading more about that, my thesis is uploaded on my website.
Overall, the Northwest Panay Peninsula Natural Park is an amazing place to visit, particularly for bird-watchers, and there are many other research projects that could be done around Sibaliw Station (including more work on the Negros Bleeding-heart!). Please feel free to get in touch if you want to ask me anything, and thank you for reading.
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