After a long hard school year and an interesting spring migration it's time for a change of pace. Honey and I are heading to the Philippines and Sabah, Malaysia on the island of Borneo. The primary purpose of the trip is to visit Honey's family on the island of Cebu in the Philippines. After a few days we're flying over to Sabah for two weeks to do some serious birding. We plan to bird at Sepilok, Kinabatangan River, Poring Hot Springs and Mount Kinabalu. As usual we're on our own and planing to spend less than $1500 on the Borneo portion of the trip. Organized tours regularly charge $3-4000 each. I'm sure we'll see fewer birds, but they'll be our birds.
Then it's back to Cebu. In between family stuff we plan to bird the Raja Sikatuna National Park on the island of Bohol (I'm armed with Yellow-breasted Tailorbird calls) and check for shorebirds of Olongo Island. We may try for the critically endangered Cebu Flowerepecker this year. And I'm still thinking about a run for the Philippine Eagle in Mindanao or maybe over to Negros for Flame-templed Babbler.
Here's some of my equipment. How about a $30 SanDisk mp3 player loaded with calls and songs from 180 species with a $10 Radio Shack speaker.
I do my photography with the 10 meg Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50. Not as good as a digital SLR with a big lense but still has manual focus that is lacking on other megazoom point and shoots.
Out field guide is Birds of Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali by MacKinnon and Phillipps. This book has been out of print for some time and I was lucky to find a used copy on Amazon.com. Not sure if I'll carry the Philippine field guide as I pretty much have it memorized.
We'll try to keep the blog updated a few times while on our trip. Adios muchachos!