INQUIRER Global Nation

“Stash that photo quick before the website is pulled down.” What photo? The “Massacre of the Birds,” answers Wild Bird Club of the Philippines’ Michael Lu. Grisly snapshots of shot birds, displayed on the Internet by the “Bacolod Air Rifle Hunting Club” and other groups, sparked the drive to muster 10,000 signatures to curb this slaughter.

The petition “requests media to cover shocking activities of these bands, Lu explains. Public revulsion may prod government to enforce Republic Act 9147. On paper, this law protects wildlife. Neglect renders it inutile.

Routine browsing of the Net by Josef Sagemuller sparked the bird club’s infuriated protest. “Nothing prepared (us) for the ‘Quarry’ and ‘Photos’ section of Bacolod Air Rifle Hunting Club’s ghastly website,” explains Lu. The photos displayed hundreds of slaughtered doves, mallards. whistling ducks and snipes.

“It was unbelievable,” the petition continues. “One man in the pictures has more dead ducks around his neck than we’ve ever seen in the wild.” The same carnage is repeated by hunting clubs in Isabela, Albay, Palawan, Cotabato, etc. They boast in other websites: from Geocities’ “Birds We Hunt” to airgun blogs.

“This screaming injustice is illegal,” the bird club says. Of course, it is. But in this country, “the illegal we do immediately,” to paraphrase Henry Kissinger. “The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

Scientists estimate the Philippines has 580 bird species: from the haring ibon (Philippine eagle) to the new-to-science gail discovered in Babuyan Islands in May 2004. British and Filipino scientists, led by Carmela Espanola, found 200 pairs of these unique flightless birds, reports Forktail, a journal of Asian ornithology.

Like rivers, birds make up a unique and sensitive early-warning system .When rivers dry up, or birds disappear, they signal “the environment is under such stress that species which lived in them for thousands of years can no longer survive,” Philippines Red Data Book notes.

They curb insect infestation and scatter seeds. But they run a gauntlet of official disdain, shrinking forest habitats, pollution, traps – and airguns. A University of British Columbia study warned a decade ago:“If the present rate of hunting persists” in the shrinking North Negros Forest Reserve, 20 percent of trees would not regenerate.”

Deforestation saw “a number of bird species disappear from Cebu, Negros, Panay and Mindoro,” a United Nations study notes. “Of highest priority for conservation are Indonesia’s Lower Sundas, Eastern Himalayas, Luzon (especially Mindoro ).”

Negros’ primary forest cover is less than four percent. There, the tube-nosed fruit bat is probably down to one percent of its original population, Chicago’s Field Museum says. In denuded Mindoro, a shrew, three unusual rodent species, and at least two fruit bats listed in the 1997 Philippine Red Data Book are among those critically threatened.

Cebu is the country’s most thoroughly deforested island. Once, it had 14 species and subspecies of birds found nowhere else in the world. Three of these are now extinct, and, as Viewpoint (Inquirer, Feb 17, 2004) noted, “are now numbered among the “feathered desaparecidos.”

“All but one of those still living (have) fewer than 100 individuals in the entire population…. One is the exquisite Cebu flowerpecker (Dicaeum quadricolor). (It’s) the most endangered species of bird in the world. Only four individuals are known to be alive” – unless hunters got to them since.

Destruction of rain forests, plus hunters, may have doomed these birds. “Overall, the Philippines today has the most severely endangered plant and animal communities on earth,” Conservation International points out. “It (ranks) first in the world for the number (40) of endangered and critically-endangered unique bird species.”

We also hold this added distinction: “The Philippines is third highest in the world (after Indonesia and Brazil, which are more than 20 times larger) for the number of globally threatened bird species. Of these, 172 are ‘endemic’ or unique to the Philippines. And 75 are listed as endangered…”

“Most birds today barely survive in a narrow band of lowland forest around a few mountain peaks,” Conservation International notes. “Illegal logging and clearing for subsistence farms cut that forest band ever thinner. In some cases, the damage is greater, sadly definitive, and irreversible.” And airguns blast the survivors.

The Philippine barebacked bat is now extinct. “It is one of the first species to test, and verify, the horrible prediction of impending extinction for one-third to two-thirds of the species of mammals unique to the Philippines.”

Do these stark facts mean anything to these hunters? We cannot wait to find out, says Michael Lu. He urges all to save those grisly website photos before outrage moves authors to sweep them under the rug. Those who’d like to make common cause can sign on. Their petition is available on this website address: www.thepetitionsite.com/1/revolting-local-bird-massacre-website.

Perhaps, one of the more poignant comments on this “massacre of the birds” was a graduation address by National Scientist Dioscoro Umali, delivered at University of the Philippines just before his death: “Your children will no longer thrill, as we once did, to the heart-stopping dive of a hawk. We’ve stripped the land of its beauty. And the bitter tragedy is: the victims are our grandchildren – flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone.”