17,000 birds sighted in Candaba swamp

So reads the headline of an interesting piece in today’s Inquirer.  I bet I have heard a thousand times from visitors and foreign residents that ‘there are so few birds in the Philippines’.

It’s no secret that the Philippines are not an ecological paradise … and years ago when I first started coming here I think I would have agreed with the ‘there are no birds’ crowd.

But there has been a lot of improvement.  I frequently seen birds, and just yesterday we were driving across the Candaba Swamp viaduct on the NLEX when my wife comments on how many birds she was seeing.

The Candaba Swamp is actually a large, diverse wetlands are I live … it does  farming land and it is managed as a government wildlife sanctuary.

I don’t know how 17,000 birds sighted in 24 hours compares to similar statistics in other refuge areas, but it sounds like quite a few birds to me, makes me happy, and causes me to offer a tip of the hat to folks who work at saving our environment in tough economic conditions … one fellow I know, when he heard I lived in Bulacan, could think only of the fact that there are some badly polluted areas … and there are, and that makes me sad.  But things aren’t all bad.

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