Bagobo Robin: My 498th Philippine Lifer!

Skip this if you wanna go straight to the birding part! 

It’s been a loooong time since my last blog post and now we have a ton of backlog, so let’s try to work our way through this in the coming months. I’ve sorta had some type of task paralysis wherein I randomly edit different photos from different trips without actually locking in on a specific blog and now I have 4 months of backlog…. I was planning to do other retrospectives from some of my mega lifers from much earlier (Green-faced Parrotfinch and Spoonbilled Sandpiper) but am too overwhelmed for anymore of this at the moment!!! This is the first blog (not including that shitty Adams trip with 0 birds) where I actually get to use my new camera + lens (OM-1 MKII with a 100-400mm MKII lens).

498th!!!!!

Last September, Angel and I headed to Mindanao to get some lifers! We flew to Cagayan de Oro and were picked up by Ben Maputi, who has a strip of land that has a bunch of Mindanao endemics. Since 2025, this area has become a photographer's paradise as a hide allowed for some close shots of some endemics. My main target here was the recently habituated Bagobo Robin, which I had only seen as a shadow through a tent in 2024. I was also hoping to see the Goodfellow’s Jungle-flycatcher, which had been seen briefly by another birder. 

Some sort of weevil

We met our local guide, Herber, and we went straight to the hide. On the way, I spotted a nice mixed flock that included Yellow-bellied Whistler, Short-tailed Drongo, Turquoise Flycatcher, Orange-bellied Flowerpecker, Elegant Tits, Black-naped Monarch and Warbling White-eyes. The highlight was the Black-and-cinnamon Fantail, which is, in my opinion, the best fantail anywhere in the world. We heard a Rufous-headed Tailorbird, but it was nowhere to be seen.

A male Bundok Flycatcher with a short tail

Black-and-cinnamon Fantail

A female Black-naped Monarch

Yellow-bellied Whistler - apparently this species might be due for a ton of splits so definitely will be good to keep track of the subspecies

We arrived at the hide and almost immediately pretty much all the target birds showed up within the first half hour. First was the Bundok Flycatcher and then we saw the Blue-capped Kingfisher. Ben had planted some Tiong's Dendrobium which had both Gray-hooded Sunbirds and Scarlet Mormons feeding on it. The Gray-hooded Sunbird is one of the four Mindanao endemic montane sunbirds. It's found on the lower reaches of the mountains up to 1500 to 2000 MASL where its replaced by the Apo Sunbird. Among all 4 it's found in the more accessible areas and are the least colorful but honestly they still look great! 

A female Blue-capped Kingfisher

A juvenile male Blue-capped Kingfisher

A female and what we presume to be her offspring

Gray-hooded Sunbird with a Tiong's Dendrobium

Scarlet Mormon on a Tiong's Dendrobium

Gray-hooded Sunbird on a Torch Ginger

After a short wait, the Bagobo Robin finally showed up and what a great bird it was! I couldn't believe at just how large it was and how multicoloured it actually was with its mix of browns, grays and even hints of red. Seeing it in a hide was obviously a much easier route but nonetheless I appreciate having the chance to get great looks at this species especially given how difficult this is to find. 

There's definitely a much longer (and actually nuanced) conversation to be had about hides and feeding given everything going on in the Philippine birding community. That's not to say I condone all sorts of feeding but there has somewhere out there there's has to be an acceptable middle ground between whatever the hell is happening with the whale-sharks of Cebu  versus being completely against all forms of it. The first and most important step towards doing it better would be the security of the area from would-be poachers.

Bagobo Robin! My top target of this leg of the trip

As the photographers would say - "ID shot"! 

It absolutely must be mentioned whenever this species is posted online that Robert Kennedy once dubbed this bird the most “secretive” of all Philippine bird species. It was only first photographed by Rob Hutchinson in 2015, but in the years after, Dr. Miguel David de Leon of the Robert Kennedy Conservancy made massive strides in studying the biology and breeding ecology of this species. They discovered that this species actually isn’t that rare and was just really elusive thanks to its furtive habits.

That legendary line from the Kennedy Guide

The Bagobo Robin is my 3rd to the last Mindanao mainland endemic. Now just Mindanao Serin and Goodfellow’s Jungleflycatcher are left! I do think there are probably some overdue splits for birds like Long-tailed Bush-warbler that I probably haven’t seen yet though. 

Ben's Hobbit House

By afternoon, we had some torrential rain and we just stayed in Ben’s lovely and cozy hobbit house. I tried convincing myself that I was a good herper and I did attempt to find the Mindanao Horned Frog (which at this point is my nemesis herp) but alas I did not find any frog at all so I went back and enjoyed some great home cooking for dinner and called it a night. 

We woke up at 4:30 and started owl-ing. Just a few hundred meters from our hobbit house, we tried to look for the Giant Scops, but this bird remained completely silent. It had only been around 20 mins, but sunrise was dangerously close, and I just felt like we weren't gonna get it until Angel scanned and skillfully found a Giant Scops-owl directly above us. This bird gave us incredibly close views and I had what I think are some of the better photos of this incredible species. 

Giant Scops Owl - by far the best owl in the Philippines

As the sun started to rise, we had another target in mind and went to an open field. A quick burst of playback and a pair of Bukidnon Woodcocks would fly over us and gave us the best possible in-flight views of this bird! Regrettably, they were flying too fast and I was unable to take photos - looking back, I should’ve just used my phone for video recording! 

In the span of an hour, we got 2 of the best nightbirds and it was definitely the best and most efficient owling I have ever done in my life! 

The clearing where we saw Bukidnon Woodcock - it came with an incredible sunrise

We had a quick cup of coffee and then started birding again and revisited the hide and walked around. Our only new (and properly seen) bird of the trip that day was a Buff-spotted Flameback. I did get quick flyby views of the Red-eared Parrotfinch, but unfortunately no tickable views for Angel to lifer!

We left the farm and did a quick stop at a waterfall area, which apparently was a good spot for Southern Silvery Kingfisher and Cryptic Flycatcher, but unfortunately did not see anything.  My only true goal of the Bukidnon leg of the trip was to see the Bagobo and I was happy enough with our haul!

On the way to our Camiguin ferry we saw this absolute disaster with thousands of broken coke bottles - check out that puddle of coke

On the way to Camiguin ferry point at Balingoan, we stopped by a very special place for my all-time favorite reptile - the Philippine Sailfin Lizard. There’s this old couple that feeds these incredible reptiles right at their house. Over the years, more and more lizards would come to feed and bask and apparently at some point reached more than a hundred lizards. Unfortunately, a lot of the surrounding mangroves were cut and there’s quite a lot of construction going around so the population has declined drastically to just around 10 lizards. Out of these 10, our focus gravitated towards this large male with a huge sail!!! The Philippine Sailfin Lizard is quite famous in the foreign pet trade for being violet but there seems to be quite a great amount of variation around different areas, so the sailfins here were more on the green side. Nonetheless, this site is a great place to see them up close, and I still have hopes that more people can support the old couple. 

This area has been featured on programs like Born to Be Wild and is featured as a tourist site, but upon checking the logbook visits were extremely sporadic with a visit or two every month. I understand the location is quite out of the way, but it does bum me out that the area never became that popular. When I posted this on Facebook, the photo did reach 500 likes so I do think that there is interest in these reptiles - we just need to find a way to promote this site better! I do know that word awareness is always thrown around like its the solution to all of the conservation problems but it's just the first step of many! I won't even claim to know how to fix everything because if I did we'd wouldn't have these problems in the first place but I know damn well that this goes far beyond posting photos for awareness. 

A female Phillipine Sailfin Lizard

The male Philippine Sailfin Lizard

Here's me in 2009 (7th grade) absolutely obsessed with Sailfin Lizardds

That’s it for our Mindanao mainland! Next up is Camiguin and my 500th lifer!!!!