Bird Watching

One of the greatest pleasures of walking at dawn is watching the birds wake up with the  morning light and make their first flight for the day. They sing and hover over me; they perch on electric and telephone wires in a row; then they fly and chirp around again.

Alas, in my neighborhood, I see only birds of one kind. These are the same ones that constantly visit our garden and sometimes, one or two mysteriously make their way into our house.

As soon as this one flew in, we let it fly back out. I don't even know what it's called. In my dialect, we call it billit balay (house birds). 

The only other types of birds I see are on the Net, like so:

When Tony mentioned that his childhood friend Ed takes great bird pictures, I hurriedly visited Ed's FB wall. The pictures so fascinated me I asked Tony to ask Ed if I could post some of his photos on my blog. He said yes and here are my picks:

Lovely, aren't they?

In the Philippines today, there are guided birdwatching tours and then there's the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines, established in July 2003 “to promote birdwatching as a hobby and the responsible enjoyment of nature.”

As a little girl growing up in the province, I used to see all types of beautiful birds in the farm, but took them all for granted—like most Filipinos do. I shouldn't have.

Did you know that the Philippines has a spectacular mix of more than 600 species of resident and migratory birds? And even more spectacular, 200 of these species are endemic? That's a slew of beauty taken for granted and ignored.

Now that the world is changing, with the global warming quickly destroying the habitats of birds, many of these flying wonders are becoming extinct. Now is the time to take a closer look at how we can better treasure and nurture our country's avifaunal blessings.

The first step is to look at lovely photos such as the above (also google “birds” in the Net and viola!)  to awaken our dormant appreciation of God's creation, particularly the astounding grace of nature in flight.

Credits: Top photo; collages: Ed Tiotuyco