Alaga ng Matanda, Kaaway ng Mangingisda – Considering Local Perspectives in Wildlife Conservation and Management
(alternative title: Nicky writes about birds again, as a substitute for going outside or writing her thesis)
Alaga ng Matanda
Barangay Tagalag in Valenzuela City is a birder’s dream. Even months after the peak of the winter migration, the river is thick with shore birds. Whiskered terns sit, evenly spaced, on nets encircling nearby ponds. Cattle egrets occupy islands of water hyacinths, the caramel of their breeding plumage standing out against the greenery. Thousands of black-headed gulls blanket portions of the water, until a sudden movement makes them take to the air.
Cattle egrets (Bubulcus ibis) - Barangay Tagalag, Valenzuela City
All this is seen from a narrow “bay walk,” across a narrow street from a busy barangay. The residents puzzle at the fascinated birders counting Common moorhens in a vacant lot behind their homes: “May maganda palang natatanaw diyan sa mga kangkong? (What’s nice to look at in those water spinach fields?)”
Hindi daw nila ginugulo, baka daw alaga ng matanda (They say they don’t bother the birds, because these might belong to the old ones), a fellow birder explains, the Matanda, or old ones, referring to folk beliefs of spirits who live in the area. Amid the karaoke machines and electric tricycles of Barangay Tagalag, someone, it seems, is still looking out for the birds.
Common moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) - Barangay Tagalag, Valenzuela City
Kaaway ng Mangingisda
A summer’s fieldwork in Ilocos Sur with the Ateneo Cultural Laboratory revealed a markedly different outlook toward the local bird life.
Owners of small fish pens farming bangus (milkfish) and tilapia in estuarine rivers near the coast explicitly described certain bird species as enemies (kaaway). These were locally called Kannaway and Tiggaak, and while not identified firsthand in the field, were said to most closely resemble the egret and heron species in the illustrated plates.
Fish-eating Great egrets (Ardea alba)
Striated herons (Butorides striata)
Fish-eating Great egrets (Ardea alba) and Striated herons (Butorides striata) could be among the Kannaway and Tiggaak referred to by the fishpond owners.
The Kannaway were described as white, long-necked birds that flocked to the fish pens during the day, while the Tiggaak with their grey and brown plumage and long bills, were observed more frequently at night. Both birds ate fish fry, fingerlings and small fish in the pens, with the Tiggaak allegedly able to consume 5000 to 7000 fingerlings in one night.
The fish pen owners frightened these birds away with noisemakers made of empty cans or plastic bottles filled with stones, or kept them out by covering the pens with sinamay or gauze-like cloth. Others relied on avoidance strategies, moving fingerlings into the fish pens after the rains had begun and the birds’ numbers had diminished.
These anecdotal reports aside, research from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) notes that there is still no standard method for quantifying bird damage in agricultural areas. Notwithstanding this, farmers often blame birds because they are particularly visible in their arrival and departure from the fields.
Counting Birds and Listening to People
Wildlife forms an important component of biodiversity. In some cases, it can be an indicator of an area’s environmental quality. Bird species in particular are often considered biological markers that can indicate the health of an ecosystem (Evans and Sheldon 2008, 1016).
Much of today’s biodiversity occurs and is maintained in fragmented landscapes (Perfecto and Vandermeer 2008, 174; Evans, Newson and Gaston 2009, 19).” Perfecto and Vandermeer conceive of this patchwork of areas as a matrix, such that “those habitats that are biodiversity “poor” may be extremely important as passageways for the habitats that are biodiversity “rich.” The matrix within which the “poor” habitats are located may be of various qualities to support the necessary services for those habitats considered “rich” (Perfecto and Vandermeer 2008, 177).”
Atran writes that to be able to “understand people’s environmental values and behavior, (we must) first understand the way in which people conceptualize the natural world (Atran 2001, 157).” Wildlife undeniably influences the beliefs, attitudes and practices that constitute local cultures. Because of this, perceptions of various species, and observations of their characteristics and behavior can provide insight into how people in a community conceive of nature, their place within it and their roles in relation to its various processes.
As such, any intervention that seeks to alter relationships between humans and wildlife should necessarily take stock of the whole picture of attitudes, cultural context and dynamics (Hermann et. al. 2013, 1) in multiple areas within the matrix. This is especially true for urban and peri-urban areas such as those in Valenzuela City and Ilocos Sur, where a mix of values, ideas and interests inform the daily decisions made as regards the bird species that residents regularly encounter.
Following this framework, the belief in the old ones that watch over the birds as well as the perceptions of birds as pests that could cost a fish pen owner his season’s fingerlings, are equally important considerations for the design and implementation of wildlife conservation strategies. In this way, conservation can be better grounded in everyday realities, encompassing not only nature, but also the social and cultural worlds that give it meaning.
Data from Ilocos Sur, and portions of the analysis, were drawn from a paper co-written with Marian Brioso, and submitted under the Ateneo Cultural Laboratory program in 2017.
Sources:
Atran, Scott. 2001. “The Vanishing Landscape of the Petén Maya Lowlands” in On Biocultural Diversity, edited by Luisa Maffi. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press
Evans, Karl L., Stuart E. Newson and Kevin J. Gaston. 2009. “Habitat Influences on Urban Avian Assemblages.” Ibis (151): 19-39
Evans, Simon R. and Ben C. Sheldon. 2008. “Interspecific Patterns of Genetic Diversity in Birds: Correlations with Extinction Risk.” Conservation Biology 22 (4): 1016-1025
Hermann, Thora et. al. 2013. “Values, animal symbolism, and human-animal relationships associated to two threatened felids in Mapuche and Chilean local narratives.” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 9 (41): 1-15
Perfecto, Ivan and John Vandermeer. 2008. “Biodiversity Conservation in Tropical Agroecosystems.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1134): 173-200.
Smeedley, Richard. “Don’t Scare Away the Birds,” International Rice Research Institute – Rice Today April-June 2013. Accessed 20 June 2017 http://irri.org/rice-today/don-t-scare-away-the-birds
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