Day 9 - Philippine Eagle Foundation

We caught the small ferry from the island around 7am, back to the mainland. We were picked up by Ronny and then dropped Gerry back at his place. We then left for the Philippine Eagle Centre about an hour out of town.

The centre is set in lovely position in the Malagos area. This is lush jungle vegetation and is about 80 hectares in size, although only about 4 are open to the public. This is because, according to our guide JB, that they try and limit the amount of human contact for those birds that they are intending to release into the wild. This makes them more scared of humans and hence less susceptible to hunting.

JB explained that they have about 34 eagles at the Foundation and their aim is to promote, protect and educate. It is all done through voluntary donations and corporate sponsorship. They carry out research and monitor release birds by radio telemetry and GPS.

We had a wander around with JB and in addition to the giant Philippine eagle they have White Bellied Sea Eagles, Brahamany Kite, Crested Serpent Eagle, Pittar's Hawk Eagle and some Macaque monkeys, which they sometimes use as live bait when they are training for release!

They had one eagle on a perch out in the open, and although a male, which is smaller than the female, it was still a magnificent bird with tremendous hooked bill and deadly talons.

After our tour we went and met the Foundation director - Dennis, who is a friend of a cousin .... etc. He was a nice guy and made us very welcome He even made some calls to some friends in a birding society in Manila to check on a proposed visit to a swamp area.

After our visit we returned to Annabelles for another massive lunch with some of the family. As always this was huge by our standard, but 'quite normal' according to Gerry.

After another blow out we returned to Gerry's and went downstairs to his salon for haircuts, foot pedicure and a truly excellent full body massage, by 'Irish', a tiny Filipino girl. Although tiny she was very strong and had good technique. Her size 3 feet where just the right size to manipulate your muscles as she stood on top of your back!

We just had time to wake up and get showered before it was time to go out and join Annabelle and some of the family for a sumptuous dinner at an Italian restaurant - Sparrowe. It was a great meal - we lost count of the number of courses as the food kept coming and coming. Needless to say we were carrying our stomachs as we left an incredible hour and a half later!