We did not see children with chainsaws, they were wielding bolos, but we saw three little girls and two little boys, the eldest not more than 8, demolish saplings along the road with their bare hands and feet and throwing rocks at Mang Lucio, the famous hermit in the forest – the very same smiling children who were quite shy at being photographed and who waved us good bye as we passed on the way home.
What is quite ghastly with the settlers is that most of the areas they clear are left uncultivated. Other than cutting, burning and destroying, almost nothing was seen in terms of raising food. There were semblances of haphazard farming but these tiny cultivated areas do not do justice to the widespread burning and destruction around it. So why cut more areas than they can plant on?
This brings me back to the jungles of Davao some 50 years ago. Settlers from the Visayas and later Luzon would lay stake on an area by cutting the trees and burning the shrub. They would ensure that the area stays cleared at all times in a vain attempt to show possession, control and occupancy. This penchant for clearing also had a deeper purpose – those settlers wanted to convince themselves that they did not leave their quaint little Visayan villages to be relegated into the jungles of Mindanao and be derided as “taong gubat” by their visiting relatives – so the jungle had to go.
Today, half a century later and a few miles north of Davao, the same greed and phenomenon seems to prevail still. It seems that we have not progressed in our way of thinking – so the forest has to die.
Hope
But they say for every cloud there is always a silver lining, and might we add, for every bald patch of land, a bit of a forest, for every bit forest, quite a few bluebirds.
Yes, we did see the birds we’d wanted to see – the Blue Fantails, the Short-crested Monarchs, why, the male Celestial Monarch came so close we could almost touch its crest!![]
Whoever said that non-endemic trees are a bane to our forest has not seen young falcata trees abloom with cuckoo birds. I will never look at falcata in disdain again. My heart will always go cuckoo when I behold a falcata for it is there that we saw the Indian, the Oriental (in both morphs) the Plaintive and the Brush Cuckoos. The beautiful Violet Cuckoo got away with “heard only” several times.
