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.