A young woman riding shotgun in a passing SUV hollered as I went about my night run: "Go Pops!," she shouted in encouragement. I did not recognise the voice but a lump formed in my throat. Thanks, whoever you are, I needed that. My young -- and not so young -- colleagues at my mountaineering club are the only ones who address me that way. To my ex-university friends I am affectionately named "Goat" or "Alpha", and of course my daughter calls me "Dog".

I'd donned my running kit to do my usual mile-loops around the Makati Sports Club. "This is a celebratory run," I told an AMCI colleague later: the cardiologist had just cleared me to go back to all the things I'd loved doing after assuring me that I have the heart of a 20-year-old. I felt fine after four miles but I stopped to chew the fat with the rest of the climbers at the park. About a dozen would be doing the Kibungan mountain range the coming weekend, while my team was headed for the summits of the country's second- and fourth-tallest peaks.

After my mystery collapse three weeks ago I had gone through an alphabet soup of the most intimidating heart and brain tests to try and pinpoint what had caused the one-off attack: ECG, Stress Echo, 24-hour Holter Monitor, EEG, CT Scan, plus complete blood and urine tests besides. It's been an emotionally fraught period, but if you've been through the adversities I'd had, you learn to take the worst of them with courage and dignity. All the tests save one turned up normal, but for the neurologist that was enough to stop me. There were brain wave patterns in the test that she did not like.

I have not unloaded the backpack that did not travel, 11 kilogrammes minus water and fuel, since I am not quite ready to turn my back on the outdoors. It stands in a corner of the bedroom, waiting for the next hike, even as I began taking a half-dose for an unspecified seizure disorder. "You take that for two weeks and we'll see," the doctor said.

If you've gone through it more than once then that's an epileptic seizure, the medical journals say. I've had a single episode, but that was actually three in rapid succession, so maybe I now qualify as one. There are any number of causes, the doctor said, but most probably it was from the head trauma from a horrific cycling accident I'd had 20 years ago. "It doesn't matter how long ago it had taken place," she said. It could always come back to bite you. The worst times to have an attack would be in the water or a mountain ridge, but you could just as easily kill yourself while passed out behind the wheel of a moving car.

And yet, I have a young friend who confided to me that she has the same condition. She is one of our strongest, fastest climbers, and she'd managed to lead a normal life nonetheless through the wonders of modern science and medicine. Management is the key word. Some types can be treated, others are not. The neurologist actually said I could now go back to my normal activities, though she wants to see me from time to time, so I hope I would be able to use the loaded backpack soon.

I woke up shortly after 6:00 am last Tuesday to find myself alone, on my back on a bed of dark green seagrass. The sky was a bleached grey-blue and in the still air there was a barely audible ripple of the tide slowly creeping in and filling the crevices dug up by fiddler crabs toward the barrier line of mangrove trees inland. It was maybe two hours after the water reached its lowest level, and the brine pushed cream-coloured, crushed coral into my hair, my clothes, and my old maroon school pack beneath my back. For a while I could make no sense of what was happening. And then suddenly it hit me: If I did not try to stand up soon I could easily drown and die there.

I remember the last thing I saw, through the viewfinder on servo mode before my world turned upside down, was a Ruddy Turnstone, a male in unmistakable chestnut breeding feathers, scurrying on its short legs among the seaweed. That was my sixth new species during this trip. The previous day I had nailed many of my target birds after I and the local park warden followed the advancing water to glass the retreating Far Eastern Curlew, the white-rumped Eurasian Curlew, the Bar-Tailed Godwit, and the Asiatic Dowitcher, the flagship bird of the Olango wetlands of the central Philippines. In late afternoon I went in alone on the ankle-deep low tide to photograph the Terek Sandpiper and more godwits.

On hindsight what transpired shortly after I returned there the next morning was probably the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me. The nature reserve was beautiful in the early morning light but I was on my own. Help was nearly a kilometre away: the warden at the park office. Can you tell me what else happened after your vision went, the doctors later asked. Did you have convulsions and seizures, they wanted to know, but the only thing I could tell all of them for sure was that the camera and the tripod also went down when I did, and that there were several episodes.

After the worst passed I forced myself to drink lots of water and hobbled back to the park office. It was not easy. There, while waiting for a ride to the clinic I saw a tiny bird, a sulphur-bellied flyeater, hopping on a step of the building’s wooden stairs.

I get asked a lot now what had happened. Basically the medical people said that for some frightening moments, my heart stopped pumping blood to my brain. I feel fine now, but at the moment, everything is up in the air. There is a mountain of tedious steps that I have to undergo to answer the question why. I am just thankful He gave me the opportunity to be with my daughter still.

All Fools' found me at my preferred lowland habitat, a swamp, to complete the second year of my morph into a bird spotter. There I was pleasantly surprised to see like-minded friends, Raul and Rissa. We spent a good part of the morning with farmers who were ploughing the irrigated fields for the year's first rice planting, and were rewarded with our first sighting of a long-toed stint, a tiny Siberian visitor that was practically invisible, even in its breeding plumage, among the brown clods jutting out above the flooded furrows.

After several visits to the place, we also finally saw a black bittern, pushing up my lifer count to 73 for the past year and 179 overall. To top it off, we found three pheasant-tailed jacanas, all in their breeding phase marked by the appearance of singular long tail feathers.

It was exactly two years ago that I got my fist binoculars, plain Bushnells. A fantastic purchase that was. I had not quite achieved my target of 100 birds for the past 12 months with less opportunities to go out, but nonetheless it had been, in a way, to use a Hollywood cliche, a big year. My highlights for the period were the Philippine eagle-owl at an Angono historical site, my first shama at Mount Kalawitan, coletos and Philippine falconets at Mount Palay-Palay, a Peregrine falcon in Pagbilao, my first tailorbird and huge numbers of sunbirds at Balinsasayao Lake, the citrine canary-flycatcher at Mount Banahaw, a substantial increase in the number of wild ducks in my list including the green-winged teal from all that trawling of the fish ponds in Gabu and Candaba as well as Paoay Lake, and my first snipe. Add to that, of course, meeting people who are really passionate about this wonderful distraction, guys like Richard Ruiz of Laoag, Professor Tirso Paris and Agriculture Undersecretary Fred Serrano of Los Banos, and Rico the Balinsasayao park ranger.

A few months ago I took the plunge and got hold of some recording equipment. It had been a frustrating but also enjoyable experience, and though I still have to produce decent-quality images (that one of Philippine ducks, above, was my first-ever frame to be post-processed with the software that came free with the digital camera -- not much to write home about), my meagre collection of captures has served my purpose, which is to keep mementos of my encounters with these magnificent creatures.

There are 400-plus species still to see, and over the next 12 months -- work, climbs, runs and dad roles permitting -- I hope to add to my list of migrant water birds before they fly out as spring deepens up north. Then when only the residents are left in the summer I would seek out the supposedly readily accessible species that have somehow eluded me: full-size forest woodpeckers and hanging parrots, quails, endemic kingfishers and spiderhunters. Come the fall I would start to pay attention to the annual raptor invasion.

Perched on the highest usable branch of a pine tree atop Mount Kalawitan, I could see to my far right a woman in repose -- Mating-oy Dinayao, the Sleeping Beauty of southern Kalinga. The rooftops of the hill town of Sagada shimmered in the temporary noonday heat to the northwest. And immediately below me were two vandalised summit markers. The older piece of metal lay face down and rusting in the dirt, its originators now unknown. Right beside it stood a chrome sign with the name of the mountain and the incomplete word _AYY_. Put up by the people of Bayyo, the letters B and O had been savagely punched out with crowbar blows.

Much like the tribal water wars of old over the scarce resource, the small mountain towns of the Gran Cordilleras are locked in a new and potentially explosive conflict to grab a share of the region's hottest must-have thing -- tourist dollars. Why should Sagada and Banaue have all the fun?

At 2,714 metres above sea level, Kalawitan (Calauit in the topo maps) is the Philippines' 10th tallest peak. It opened to the local climbing community sometime last year, and the town of Sabangan, owing to its ideal location beside the main north-south Halsema Highway, assumed the still contested role of the de-facto gatekeeper. Its community guides insist the summit is within municipal limits since it lay on the near side of a creek that marks its boundary with Bayyo. One of the two rival claimants insist the stream must be reckoned from its source, said the guides.

The climb is unique in that the locals limit access to only up to 14 backpackers at any one time. They currently average about two trips a month in the dry season -- the mountain is closed to tourism in the wet months. Two AMCI teams visited the mountain this month, including my group of Bugsy, Pie, Kim, Ai, Rica, Josh, Bitoy and Alvin.

Backpackers are a notoriously skinflint bunch. Left to their own devices, all they really need is a reasonably flat, open patch on which to pitch their tents and not much else. It does not even need to be dry. By requiring them to leave their tents, portable stoves, mess kits, and frozen food at home, the locals maximise the value-added to the local economy. The local guide association, trained in business sense by a recent Swiss visitor, provide all these for a fixed fee. Just in case you forgot your sleeping pad and sleeping bag they can even provide you with extra blankets. All visitors must follow a set three-day itinerary (shorter ones for beginners) and must stay during the night at a cluster of mountain huts located above the Kapangdanan River at about 1,190masl.

But let no one be fooled into believing the mountain is a cakewalk. The trek from the highway trailhead at 1,156masl to the Apa camp site and back in themselves are a breeze, leisurely walks past the bleached-white rocks of the docile and meandering Chico River. The trail rises only gradually as it enters the narrow valley created by the tributary. The walk beneath the forest canopy reveals the ingenious improvisation of a mountain people who have mastered the use of water and stone, two of the more unyielding elements of nature. Two layers of ditches, one a few feet above the river and the other high up on the cliff side irrigate the terraced rice fields below. Pie and I used some parts of this upper section as the setting for an impromptu and a bit terrifying trail run.

The summit assault by contrast is daunting on its face  -- a net elevation gain of more than 1,500 metres. The long-haired lead guide Raymund set a 5:00am start and said we must reach the summit by 12 noon or turn back wherever we would be, since they do not allow night treks for laggards and the return hike itself would take another six hours. In the end we made the summit in just six hours flat  -- an amazing 250 metres per hour ascent even though the team stopped frequently to take tonnes of pictures. It also took us just four hours to get back to camp.

Kalawitan, meaning the tallest according to Raymund, is remarkably unspoilt. A moss-backed montane forest covers most of the trail after a short patch of old pines in bloom on the lower slopes. This is game country however. The trail is studded with snares, all booby-trapped with huge shotgun rounds. We were firmly warned not to stray beyond five metres either side of the path.

The relatively expansive summit area is marked by patches of dwarf, yellow-green bamboo and a recently disturbed shallow water hole. "Deer," said the betel nut-chewing middle guide. "It went that way," he motioned toward the trees. All throughout the climb, he would look at some unseen footprint hidden on the ground beside the trail and interpret it for us amazed city dwellers.

I had not realised how steep the climb through the mossy forest was until it was time to go down. My hamstrings immediately cried bloody murder, though I managed to walk it off after about 10 minutes and began to enjoy the descent, using the tree branches and my long legs to propel myself downward at speed.

Although I do not normally write about it, let me just say that the victuals were great. The woodfire at the camp grounds were almost always crackling alive, for the heavy coffee drinkers like myself. Tomatoes, my favourite vegetable, and onions were a mainstay of the meals, except at the summit lunch when I forced myself to eat three hard-boiled eggs from out of the all-meat packed lunch. The young male cooks actually wore aprons and prepared the flour wrapping to the minced vegetable rolls themselves, and joined the guides at night for their traditional war dances complete with small brass gongs.

It seemed an unlikely place to find such a huge and rare bird in the wild. The East Road that stabs through dreary shopping malls, slums and lumberyards at the edge of Laguna de Bay and sprawling metropolitan Manila branches off to a narrow, uphill road that is clogged with ugly purple motorised rickshaws that haul the work force and the students of the barrios to school or places of work before giving way to a steep, winding climb that leads to rolling hills sheared of all trees and converted into a golf course, unfinished row housing, and a casino in the middle of nowhere. Women caddies walked on the side of the near-deserted road and we had to ask the guards several times whether we were on the right track. It turned out we missed the turnoff into a gravel road and had to double back. We left the car in front of the dark pedestrian tunnel carved through the rock.

"You're here for birding," declared the lone guard, who has had more visitors armed with binoculars, tripods and cameras of late rather than historians and linguists trying to divine the meaning of picture words etched on the walls of a limestone cave about 5,000 years ago, perhaps by some of our poorly-known ancestors. Our very own Lascaux. "They're over there," he said, leading us to a stand of mature white teak. But we only found the male, glaring down at us from a branch, bleary-eyed and starved for sleep after a full night hunting for food.

The Philippine eagle-owl, a magnificent, 20-inch nocturnal bird of prey with a mane that evokes the visage of a male lion, is on its last stand at the tiny sliver of a wooded park better known as the Angono petroglyphs. A fellow Wild Bird Club member I'd never met had discovered the family a few months earlier on his daily walks to the park. They are one of only two known families of eagle-owls in metropolitan Manila -- the other family having taken residence at the Balara compound of Manila Water Co. I signed up for long queues for a chance to see the Balara brood, but in the end work always got in the way, so I grabbed at the chance to visit Angono at the first opportunity.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature rates the species, found only in six of the larger islands in the Philippines, as "vulnerable", just one step above "endangered", due to a small, severely fragmented population that is under intense pressure from lowland deforestation and hunting.

The wide swathes of fairways must be ideal for night hunting, but the guard believes the bird itself could soon be doomed to extinction there. Half the hill that hosts the cave of ancient scrawls itself has been bulldozed and flattened on the other side to give way to a warehouse and a garden, and that is not the only problem. "The people who live on the other side sometimes throw rocks at them at their perches," the guard said. "We know because the rocks would rain down on the view deck at times." I managed 42 frames of the beautiful creature, all full-frame-ready, before we retreated, profusely apologising to the king of the night skies for intruding in its shrivelled realm. A fourth were actually in sharp focus. I could not have been happier, although the absence of the female and their young gnawed at me.

We met a man called Edel Peredo about halfway up Pico de Loro yesterday as we stopped to watch a scale-feathered malkoha gather twigs to make a nest. It is a large and visually arresting bird, found only in the forests of Luzon, Catanduanes and Romblon and nowhere else in the world. I could not get a clear shot of it with the admittedly deficient 135mm lens, and I was reluctant to get closer as I might be ruining its one chance to raise its young this year. But in a way the man in front of me (I hope I spelt his name correctly) was even more remarkable -- small and thin and dressed like a peasant, with a machete on scabbard hanging from his waist and leading a long line of first-time climbers up to the famous parrot's beak. He knew the names of the birds of these hills by heart, knew their distinct songs and their spectacular plumage, and knew the particular fruiting trees that these birds fed on. Come back in October, when the balete fruits ripen, he said. It turns out he is the resident forest ranger, PAMB according to him, and has met many of my colleagues at the Wild Bird Club in its apparently losing advocacy to preserve the last strip of forest in rapidly urbanising Cavite.

It felt so good to be tramping up mountains again, even on peaks like these that barely qualify. "Akyat-gulod", is the derisive term some of my colleagues use for destinations that can be done in a day or less. We managed it in less than six hours on my second visit, though my colleagues were not interested in tackling this mountain's infamous lower beak in the brisk winds of midday. The fact is, I had not been up a mountain since November 2, an appalling four months on the flats, discounting a short hike last month on the lower skirts of Makiling. Even my running mileage has suffered due to work commitments. But there is nothing quite like giving your legs a workout on an inclined plane. There are a lot more muscles involved than even long-distance running, and they are worked a lot more intensely.

With guys like Bugsy and Enrico and their cars, practically all the minor peaks of central and southern Luzon -- Tarak, Natib, Arayat, Sembrano, Daguldul, Talamitam, Maculot, Batulao, San Cristobal, Makiling, Malepunyo, to name a few -- fall under day-hike range. This is important for me because I am a mere working man. Yesterday was a walk in the park though, seen in the context of what some of our other AMCI friends were doing that very same day: Roger completing a 102-kilometre run in the annual Bataan Death March race, Zean running a half-marathon at speeds I could only dream of, and ultra-marathoner Cheryl doing a 21-kilometre training run at full race pace. Yet another group of AMCI members were blazing a new trail up San Cristobal. But then some of these friends are practically half my age, so I guess you could say I am in exalted company.

It felt strange moving on the forest floor with binoculars as well as an SLR camera dangling from my neck. As my outdoor interests broaden some things have to give. The first thing you sacrifice is speed: you resist the urge to fly atop the rocks out of fear of slipping and reducing high-quality optics to smithereens. The second is the overwhelming urge to just stop and, well, smell and photograph the flowers, and to go off trail to follow the insistent bird sound instead. Apart from the malkoha, I managed to see some balicassiaos, remarkable luminescent-blue drongos, along the trail. You can't begin to imagine the sheer range of notes that they make in full song: It's like listening to a full orchestra on an open-air amphitheatre.

These may be the last few summers for these forest birds though, as forest conversion creeps higher and higher up the skirts. No trees means fruit-eaters starve to death. Parts of the valley beside the early part of the trail are now fenced off with concertina wire, apparently by local farmers. Edel the forest ranger remembers seeing whole flocks of crested serpent-eagles circling around the beak as late as the early 1990s. These days they are mostly solitary apparitions. There are only five rufous hornbills left on the entire Palay-palay range, he says with sad conviction.

"You know, you have to learn to take decent pictures," my friend and work colleague Jay told me more than three years ago, when he made the mistake of agreeing to join me on a long mountain hike. "Because you're the only person I know in our profession capable of reaching these places."

I do take atrocious photos, at least according to another hiking friend. Most would be soft focus, to put it mildly, even with a point-and-shoot auto-focus, while I also seem to have the talent to make really good-looking people turn ugly on photographs. It took me a long time to gain the courage to try my hand at single-lens reflex cameras, and will probably need an even longer period to learn to use them properly.

The tipping points were when I decided to spend some of my already limited spare time to seek out then stare at wild birds, on top of peak-bagging and long-distance running, and also when my daughter started using one. At least we now have a common point of reference and interest, because I could probably count by the fingers of one hand the number of times she had agreed to join me on my outdoor activities. The other is the convergence of technology in my profession. The journalists of the next generation would be required to produce Pulitzer-winning copy, world-class photographs and television-ready video footage day in and day out, using only an SLR camera for the last two tasks. I, a dinosaur of a bygone era who had gone to school in the age of typewriters, had better evolve or perish.

Rubbish, said the second friend, referring to all of the above, likening the decision to buying a Harley-Davidson. And a poor man's hog at that. Well, the photographers and television guys may laugh at me and my skills, or absence of it, now, but amongst us, it is their jobs that are the ones most at risk by this convergence. In the near future there will be no out-and-out reporters, photographers or videographers. There will only be content providers.

It has been a steep learning curve though, to use a cliche, even for the most basic tasks. The wide angle-capable kit zoom is almost idiot-proof actually, since, if there was one thing I learned in the days of film photography, it was that at small enough apertures, they focus from x distance to the horizontal figure 8. I've yet to get a really sharp image with a super-telephoto though, even using spot focus and tripod. It must be the Indian, as they say, because the arrows are fine pieces of engineering, crafted to near-perfection. Either that, or I need a new set of distance glasses.

There are also hard truths to learn, among them that 400mm does not cut it for most birds, unless you consider those behind a cage, and if you try to crop and blow them up too much they become useless. Also, that if you try to load your tripod aboard a Cebu Pacific plane without a protective case, their baggage handlers have the uncanny ability to separate the gimbal head from the legs in mid-air. The finer points of back-lit subjects and exposure bracketing -- not to mention shooting video -- and all those other items that I have no idea about at the moment, would have to wait in the future.

The rig is heavy, 1.5 kilogrammes with the kit, so I am not really sure if I would actually enjoy lugging the thing up the mountains especially now that I've decided not to carry a gram more than 10 kilos in food and water, clothing, shelter and pack at any one time. We'll see.

“You are standing on it,” said the old man I’d met about an hour into a backwoods walk. I was looking for a spillway that a teacher at a nearby school had mentioned when I asked for directions. There was a white-throated kingfisher and a blue-tailed bee-eater on a nearby power line and so I failed to notice that the wet, earthen paddy wall had broadened into a wider, paved path coated with a thin film of mud.

I had crossed over a hill to look for water birds in Pasil, a marshy patch of farmland southeast of Paoay lake. “I think we’re related,” said the man after we had made the obligatory exchange of credentials, which, in these parts, entails mentioning the name of your home village and the name of your father. So then I had to kiss his hand -- he was, by Philippine reckoning, a distant uncle. He wondered what I was doing there – the only reason he was walking was to collect bets on jueteng, an illegal numbers game.

Built by earthmovers, the broad hill paths that criss-cross the rural north are changing fast. Now there are paved sections, and a few tricycles and small-displacement motorbikes would occasionally break the long stretches of silence. People had basically stopped walking these trails, so I had them largely to myself. My father advised me to bring a stick to take care of the dogs, but I did not bother: I could usually stare down the most ferocious of them to a stalemate.

People in the West call this activity “rambling”, walking in the countryside for pleasure. Since I also run, climb mountains and engage in birdwatching, the leisurely pace is something I could do in my sleep, theoretically. But it is such a rare activity in these parts now that I was variously mistaken for a salesman and a surveyor. Three days earlier I had made a similar walkabout eastward, going through five villages in four hours. Pepper and tomatoes were being planted on drying fields dotted with haystacks from the last rice harvest. The last hamlet, Bollilising, was named after the colasisi, the Philippine hanging parrot, I was told, but it was more to honour the bird’s memory, the equivalent of a stone monument, since it was not among the birds I saw.

Small flocks of Philippine ducks flew high up, heading east, during my second walk, when I saw Kentish plovers, yellow wagtails and common sandpipers on the edge of the marsh. Although this region is known far and wide for its itinerant labour, the farmers transplanting rice seedlings probably were unaware how far these long-distance voyagers had flown. After all, this is the region that produced the first Filipino overseas workers, sending out its sons, the "pucan canes", by the shiploads to cut sugar cane in Hawaii, back when planes had not been invented. The tradition has endured, reflected in the large, Mediterranean-style houses in pastel hues that dot the countryside, built with remittance money. It was past noon when I hit Salbang, broadly tracking the path of two streams that spill into the nearby South China Sea coast and marvelling at the colourful plastic bags and other flotsam embedded high up the branches of bamboo clumps that lined the river bank. This area was hit by floods back in October, I think.

We came for the rare migrants but the face-off on the far bank soon caught our attention: a grey heron belligerently walking toward a pair of immature Brahminy kites, lounging on the soft fine sand at daybreak. Surprisingly, it turned out into a no-contest. The red eagles flew off as the big wader chased them one after the other. Whoever said raptors are top of the avian pecking order have got their facts wrong.

After lucking out on rare white-shouldered starlings at the Laoag cemetery, our host Richard Ruiz took us to a site with a guaranteed lifer for me: on the bank of the Padsan River near the local Muslim shantytown. The resident birds had consumed all the mulberry fruits at the cemetery, so there was no more reason for the seasonals to visit, he said. We duly found the white wagtails at the muddy edges of shallow pools near the river mouth, freely mingling with common sandpipers, yellow wagtails and Java sparrows. We ticked off the ocularis subspecies, the ones with dark eye stripes, and the leucopsis race, which went without. It would be interesting to know how many of these people were among the 700,000 people or so who were displaced by the unending wars of the south, as opposed to normal, itinerant Maranao traders who have set up shantytowns across the Philippines, from Taguig to Baclaran to San Lorenzo in Laoag.

A short drive to the rice paddies of Lagui-Sail later brought me my first sighting of a Eurasian kestrel and white-bellied munias. But the day's highlight was a private fishpond beneath the airport control tower, where Richard counted a flock of about 450 ducks that fled as one from pond to pond as we crept up to get a better view. He and Doc Calope, another local birder, had discovered the sanctuary for the endangered marsh ducks while exploring the mouth of the Padsan earlier this year. They had heard a quack and instinctively followed the sound, climbing over the fence and committing trespass. They later got to know the owner, who had bought the property for a seemingly bargain price of about 10 million pesos eight years ago. The caretaker told us the ducks stayed there for nearly the entire year, leaving only during typhoons and when the rains bring the water to their highest level.

A systematic inspection revealed at least four species among the huge flock. Richard easily spotted the northern shovelers, with their oversized beaks and dark-coloured necks that were unlike the signature yellow of the Philippine ducks. Then he saw the white vertical line behind the bills of some other duck that had similar feathers as the shovelers -- he identified them as the female of the greater scaup, a heavy, diving duck that is listed as an accidental migrant by the local birding field guide.

We were about to leave when he re-examined some other ducks that we had lumped with the shovelers -- they had strange yellow tips on their beaks. Spot-billed ducks! Surface feeders that are listed in the field guide as rare, with only three previous sightings anywhere in the Philippines at the time the field guide was written. At nearby Paoay lake the following day my duck count rose some more when we saw a pair of small, green-winged teals that had hitched onto a flock of tufted ducks.

Ternel the long-haired landscape photographer found them first and frantically waved at the rest of us to share the excitement: pairs of webbed feet imprints, frozen in time on the drying cement-grey puddles of the Masinloc coal-fired power plant. We found the presumed owners across the dirt road, on the stagnant pond behind the tall grass about 200 metres away. We were as close as we could be to a breeding population of about 200-plus Anas luzonica, possibly among only 5,000 or so left on earth.

The endangered Philippine ducks, one of nearly 200 or so remarkable bird species that are found only in the country, were easily the highlight of the long, 10-hour return drive up and down nearly the entire length of the Zambales coast.

Coal-fired baseload power plants are normally the big bad wolves of this antiseptic, politically correct age, and why not? They have huge footprints, all 137.22 hectares for this 2x330-megawatt one, with a third unit set to rise next year; they belch out supposedly climate-altering greenhouse gases and bring acid rain; and they need to grow a forest around them as a sort of carbon sink before they are even allowed to operate. Just like windmills but more sinister, their humongous, orange-on-white smokestacks dominate the skylines of their localities and dedicated jetties have to be built to bring the dirty, cheap black coal that they burn by the thousands of tonnes everyday to turn the turbines on which entire countries rely for cheap electricity.

Imagine the irony, then: These plants, just like Sual to the north and Pagbilao southeast of Manila, offer what are arguably the safest refuges possible for wild birds and specifically Philippine ducks, which, like many other birds, are being rapidly hunted and eaten to extinction everywhere else in the country.



Power plants are made of expensive stuff, so they are among the most heavily guarded properties in the country. This makes them no-go zones for even the most heavily armed of poachers. You don't argue with security guards armed with assault rifles.

Since sea water is an integral part of their cooling systems, coal-fired plants are also invariably located along the coasts, making them natural allies of mangrove forests, another fast-vanishing entity in the Philippines. I padded up my life list to about 158, I think, with an osprey and a slaty-breasted rail among a vast array of nearly 60 bird species that we found during a two-day bird survey. For many among the 10-member Wild Bird Club of the Philippines team, the secretive rail which skittered on the shallows beneath the mangrove roots was the star turn of the trip. For me though, it was the way the eyes of the staff lit up as they saw for the first time their extravagantly-hued, winged neighbours at close-quarters, courtesy of high-magnification birding optics that we shared with them, and the way they lapped up our club president Anna's basic birdwatching taxonomy lecture later on. Our tiny tribe could be about to increase.

Bani Point, the property's highest section is the site of the Masinloc plant's 80-hectare ash pond, where the solid by-product of all that coal burning is dumped. Bright-capped cisticolas in their breeding plumage, white-throated kingfishers, large-billed crows, black-naped orioles,olive-backed sunbirds, and large numbers of doves and some pigeons -- red turtle-doves, zebra doves, and, amazingly, pompadour green pigeons, as well as blue-tailed bee-eaters and rails also thrive in the trees and reeds of the pond, created by a naturally occurring spring and augmented by seasonal rainwater.

Plant staff said the ducks are known to breed there, with clutches of up to a dozen eggs found scattered among the weeds surrounding the ash pond when they burned the place ahead of the reforestation, according to them. Whoops. By December, when the fledglings are grown, the pond dries up and the ducks migrate to the nearby Lawis river, where they are, unfortunately, fair game for poor locals wanting to augment their protein intake.

The plant does produce a lot of ash -- about 10 percent of the fuel, according to plant officials. The fly ash portion is a valuable raw material for cement production, and, as things stand, local officials seem to have first dibs on the more desirable by-product. Business, Philippine style, I guess, even though Masinloc is now owned by AES. The Americans are usually finicky about these things. The other, less desirable by-product is good only for making cinder blocks, and it now threatens to overwhelm the ash pond. The original plan had been to bury the pond with the refuse, but better counsel prevailed and the duck habitat has won a stay of execution for now.