DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 5 September) — The country’s national bird might get extinct in the next 50 to 80 years, an official of the Philippine Eagle Foundation (PEF) said.

In an interview with MindaNews Thursday, PEF director for operations Jayson C. Ibañez said that based on their Population Viability Analysis workshop conducted this week, certain factors indicate the possibility of the extinction of the Philippine Eagle.

Based on the PEF’s latest study published in 2023, there are only 392 remaining pairs of the raptor left in the wild.

Ibañez said juvenile (below three years old) and sub-adult (three to seven years old) Philippine Eagles are the most prone to hunting, shooting, and trapping. 

A continuous decrease in the number of young eagles would lead to a drastic decline in 50 years, he said.

Factors include the success rate of breeding, mortality, and the quality and availability of their habitats, he said.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has listed the Philippine eagle as critically endangered since 1994.

In an interview with MindaNews Tuesday, Dr. Simon Valle, an ornithologist at IUCN-Species Survival Commission, said that Philippine eagle conservation groups attributed the bird’s status to habitat loss and degradation, negative human interactions, alien diseases, and effect of climate change such as successive typhoons.

This was affirmed by PEF executive director Dennis Salvador in an interview on the same day.

He said they reintroduced four Philippine eagles in Leyte where they have become extinct.

He added that they hope to bring more Philippine Eagles abroad as a backup conservation measure.

The Philippine government and conservation groups including PEF sent a pair of Philippine Eagles to Singapore in 2019 for a “breeding loan.” In 2023, however, the male eagle, Geothermica, died because of lung infection. (Razl EJ Teman/MindaNews)