Wilderness within Reach

 Wilderness within Reach

(Every single day in my backyard is mini-ecotourism day.)


Although I have spent a sizeable part of my growing up years in the big city, I am blessed to have spent a great deal of it too in its total opposite: a bucolic setting like my humble place. The thing I appreciate the most about provincial life is the luxury of doing nothing in the backyard and watching nature's little untold wonders unfold right before my eyes. Without all the hassles of getting a passport or spending a single cent on travel, this experience has brought me a lot of unbidden moments of encounter with many little creatures I had never set my eyes on before, to say nothing about the sight of constantly changing clouds and sunsets that give a range of breathtaking hues, from pink to orange to mauve. In my backyard, every single day is a mini-ecotourism day.

Here, in this barangay they once called Palandey (mountain) and which was historically described either as a "jungle" or "mountainous area" then eventually converted by the Americans as a military camp, I have experienced being face to face with fireflies at night for the first time in my life. Kulibangbang and madre cacao trees grew wild in abandon, and so did wild shrubs and grasses and herbs considered either as medicinal plants or weeds: kulibetbet (pandakaki), tsaang gubat, viray, amorseko, makahiya...

At night, the silence was routinely pierced by the chorus of kuryat (kuliglig or crickets), together with various croakings of different frogs. Sometimes, the darkness was punctuated by a hissing sound and an ensuing racket that could only come from a bullfrog fending off a snake. But most nights, depending on the season, meant an assortment of creepers and bugs I had, for the life of me, no name for. From antlions to box moths to katydids to dung beetles and praying mantises, I had to do deep research just to find out.

On good days, a lone eagle or some other raptor could be seen hovering in the blue skies above, and flocks of white herons or egrets flying by. The sight of a giant moth or a giant bat was rare, but they did occur now and then.

During the rainy season, it's anybody's guess what wildings from bird droppings would come a-sprouting and greeting us on a clear morning. I've lost count of plants that made a surprise appearance, but among those are wild pipinos or pepinitos, niyog-niyogan, sung-song carabao, and ivy gourd. A few kinds of snails and sometimes a lizard also routinely made an appearance, adding to the biodiversity.

Each encounter with new species is like unmerited grace, treated as someone's gift to me for no reason at all, just because I exist. Each kind has its own innate beauty despite its reason for being mostly unheralded and unappreciated. Whenever I feel tired of being good and doing good, some organism stops me in my tracks, springing a surprise of discovery, offering a grand eyeball of sorts for the first time, and the little encounter easily comes off as a secret blessing that only I know about.

My experience with letting nature surprise me on its own terms was once sparked by a big yellow butterfly that flew skittishly on top of our santol tree. What, to me, was an unusual sighting was followed by another butterfly species, then, another, and another, all in one day while I was occupied with nothing. I don't know what's with the santol tree at the time (maybe it was blooming and fruiting?), but this incident singlehandedly opened my eyes. I had already found it amazing that there was such a variety of ants and spiders and dragonflies and frogs and fungi (including mushrooms) around me, but it turned out that diversity was also an arresting feature of yet another family of beings or, biologically speaking, organisms: the butterflies. Eventually, I was compelled to draw each of what I saw for the first time and came up with about a dozen kinds.

And it didn't stop with butterflies. The next happy incident would involve birds, and this time, the one that first sparked my curiosity was a tiny black bird with a single white spot on each wing that looked like eyes in flight. It was something I had never seen before, and it would take years before I was able to learn that it was a pied bushchat. The little bird was perched on a guava tree at my eye level but wouldn't fly away upon my approach like any wild bird would, so I sensed something was wrong. Indeed, it seemed weak and unable to fly for some reason, so after inspecting it, I left it perched on the branch. Then it was gone. But obviously it left a lasting mark.

It turned out that there were other birds here aside from the so-called maya bird, which I eventually learned to be not even a maya but a Eurasian tree sparrow. Pretty soon, I became cognizant of any new thing manifesting its presence whether by sight or sound, or as a mysterious silhouette in the shades between branches and shadows of the underbrushes. This is how I got to learn about the yellow-vented bulbul, the fantail, the shrike, the martinez (mynah), the long-tailed shrike, the zebra dove, the red turtle dove, the brahminy kite, the kingfishers, the white-eyes, the munias... I became a 'birder' (bird-watching enthusiast) without knowing the term yet... right in my own backyard.

I feel especially celebratory whenever I discover something new on my list of confirmed scientific names. By being a serious birder, I would eventually discover that certain species that I never imagined to be present within my locality would someday come face to face with me: olive-backed sunbirds (now called garden sunbirds), orioles, spiderhunters, bee-eaters, parrot-finches, pied trillers, golden-bellied gerygones, red-keeled flowerpeckers, pygmy flowerpeckers, woodpeckers, kingfishers, swallows, swifts, tailorbirds, starlings, finches... As time went by, the list got longer and longer. I even strongly believe that those were a coucal, an elegant tit, and a malkoha that I spotted or whose unique call I heard around my neighborhood at least once. Each first-time-ever-in-my-life encounter is called, fittingly in the birding community, a "lifer." There is this sense of frustration with every species left unidentified, like it's an unresolved issue deep within. But, yes, each new sighting calls for a moment of self-congratulation.

From the surface, my own humble patch is not much. With the rapidly encroaching urbanization, most of the creatures are gone. The sudden loss of certain species, I noticed, always coincided with the removal of certain vegetations that the missing ones find attractive (such as bamboo groves, citrus, and native flowering and fruiting trees). But with many of the trees still around, it still holds so much life in all its manifold forms awaiting to be discovered if only you have the eyes for it.

To make things clear, I hold no romantic vision of nature. Nature can be such a bitch, even beastly. Let's not kid ourselves. Nature also means rats, mice, shrews, flies, mosquitoes, armyworms, centipedes, scorpions, silverfish, cobras, stinging bees and wasps, molds and mildew, pestilential caterpillars, leafcutters, locusts, mean ants that bite you fiercely, and termites -- which my place has a fair share of. I am a nature-lover, true, but also a nature-hater and -basher, depending on the encounter. Nevertheless, I am grateful that I am not totally detached from nature, and the wisdom of the wilderness is still within my reach.

(This content is 0% AI-generated.)