Elevated Field of Dreams

Being in the center of Mindanao is being in the center of nowhere. Valleys, plateaus and hills mingle with each other like passionate friendship. Slopes and curves complement as the contours of a wonderful face. Here the sky and the earth kiss – so intimate that one blends and melts with the other – while sheets of air embrace the mounds of earth.

I’m in Bukidnon, an elevated field of dreams. You can munch on its crisp, cool breeze like you would a lean, honey-cured bacon. Here, in the highlands, with the swaying of sugarcane, you can evaluate your past, look at the heavens and in retrospect see yourself – who you are and who you’ve been. Places like these are precious and highly volatile. The murmur of branches and leaves and the buzz of insects and bird life take you away from the mundane and meager monotones of Manila. Mt. Kitanlad is in front of me and nothing will keep me from her.

Sweat dripping all over my under-exercised body, oxygen seeping in my lungs sporadically, I arrive finally. Darn, it is a glorious view. Lush vegetation on the ravine post a stark contrast to the naked fields we just passed through. Here at the slightly camouflaged viewpoint we are parallel to the nest of the fourth eaglet on record. A pair of Philippine Eagle had faithfully laid an egg here once every two years since 1990 when it was first observed by an elderly Manobo.

Grabbing a pair of powerful binoculars, I browse through the forest and there she is – the eaglet – the proverbial conflict of life and inevitable death, of hope and irreversible despair. The eaglet, cradled in the arms of a large tree, a tree miraculously missed by chainsaws, is the marrow of many of our environmental dreams. She is restless, flapping her wings and flexing her muscles. She looks around gazing at the kingdom her family lorded over for so long.

After passing the binoculars around, I grab them again. Focusing on the nest, I sense the eaglet crying out by the movement of her beak. Out of somewhere, the parent arrives. Leaving the clouds behind, he zooms in but instead of going to his young, he hovers above our group.

I should really stop with the descriptions. My metaphors and your imagination no matter how fertile can never do justice to seeing the most handsome bird on earth. The Philippine Eagle should be felt and experienced. The eagle left us and I slump on the soft soil, exhausted. I’m probably a tad too melodramatic about these things but right now I don’t care. I just want to soak in this euphoria. Halfway through our retelling each other what we saw, the eagle comes back and is in some sort of pursuit. He is after a smaller bird of prey and they are going in an upward spiral motion. The king displays his reign over his dominion. After driving away the intruder, he settles down on a tree branch. I can now see his relaxed body, his talons, his face and his crown. After a few more minutes I let go of the binoculars and all of my previous reservations. Nothing compares to this creature.

The truth is I haven’t really howled in protest when they said that the population is fast dwindling – surely less than 200 in the wild. You see numbers, data, figures are hard to grasp. They do not extract the same emotion. Standing here at the look-out point I now realize how easy it is to sway me into environment activism. Conservation must really be personal. Tell me that this eagle family will soon be homeless or butchered and I will raise my arms in defiant protest. I will be enraged. The Philippine Eagle experience has become personal and I will not allow it to be taken away from me. As I trek down the mountainside, I make a resolve to make wildlife a personal conservation effort, an effort to portray a clearer picture of wildlife so that it can be planted in the hearts of more Filipinos.

Finally, as I wave goodbye to Bukidnon, everything around seems to wave back. If you are really into it, you can feel the air vibrating, you can hear the vegetation rustling, you smell sugar simmering. And if you are absolutely lucky, as you take one last look up the sky, you can see in all his majesty, the magnificent Philippine Eagle.