Dupax as a Boy's Paradise

As a boy and the first-born grandchild, I lived mostly with my maternal grandparents in I-iyo (also called Surong; Daya in Isinay; officially Palobotan in the map), a hilly and riverside farming village upstream of my hometown Dupax del Sur, Nueva Vizcaya, in the northern part of the Philippines. It was normal parenting practice in the 1950s to the 1960s (hehehe... I'm now revealing how ancient I am) for kids like me then to be allowed to go outdoors for as long as they want, on the condition that they go home before lunch time and that they look after the carabao and see to it that it was brought to the river before the sun burned its back and cause the farm animal to suffer and probably die due to heat-caused exhaustion (termed masdo in Ilocano). It was also normal for boys in the barrio then to have as playthings (or accessories, if you may) small bolos, slingshots, and spearguns. I had all three.  But let me first describe my affair with the last.

No, sir, the speargun that I used to have was not the kind you see in the movies used to kill sharks and bad guys. It was rather just a small contraption consisting of a guava branch for bolt, the stem of a discarded umbrella for barrel, a piece of sturdy wire for trigger, a length of elastic rubber cut out of the interior part of a jeepney tire for driving mechanism, and sharpened steel fronds also taken from discarded umbrellas for “bullets” or arrows.

Locally called pana, we brought it when on hot summer days we go bring the carabaos to the river and, to make better use of the time while the farm animals enjoyed their bath, we would comb the calm and shallow parts of the water to spear shrimps, crabs, goby, and gourami. The more intrepid ones among us who have goggles went to the deeper parts to look for dalag (snakehead mudfish), paltat (catfish), and tilapia nesting under big rocks or feeding on tiny shrimps attracted to an overhanging bamboo clump. Occasionally, we used the pana to nail down an elusive  but edible frog (tukak in Ilocano; tadah in Isinay; palaka in Tagalog), to punish leeches (alinta or alimatek in Ilocano; bilavil in Isinay; linta in Tagalog) that sucked themselves full of our carabaos’ blood, or as weapon against the immanuy (spitting cobra) that threatened farm kids like us when we went to help our old folks in the uma (upland farm) or the taltalon (ricefield).

Prelude to Transformation

Don’t look now but, yes, to a certain extent I had my share of disturbing biodiversity. In fact, even when I was already in college and pursuing the B.S. in Forestry degree, I confess to having continued using spearguns, slingshots and air-rifles for fun and recreation each time I would go home at the end of each semester or during Christmas and summer break.

I also admit that as a teenager I preferred the company of my uncles and grandparents in clearing forest patches and tending to the resulting farm for growing upland rice, snap beans, string beans, winged peas, squash, bitter gourd, eggplant, sweet potato, cassava, papaya, banana, and yam.

In other words, once upon a time I was both a fisher and a bird-killer. 

Not only that. Once upon a time, too, when the kaingin (swidden farming) practice was still blamed to be the Enemy No. 1 of foresters, I had been a kainginero (slash-and-burn farmer).

I owe such destiny (if we may call it that) to my formation as a child, that is, growing up in a barrio that was relatively well-endowed by nature. Moreover, my grandparents and uncles who nurtured me were full-time land-tilling and forest-using rural folks.

Thus, it came to pass that, rather than play basketball all day long or going to pre-fiesta shows and dances at the town plaza at night (as was the norm for most of my peers and classmates in the central part of the town then), I preferred spending summer vacations in the barrio where my similarly outdoor-loving – or hillbilly -- friends and cousins had all the farms, the rivers, the forest glades, the bamboo groves, and the cattle-grazing hills for playground.

Even as once in a while there were cases upstream of the Ilongot (now called Bugkalot, an indigenous people of the Sierra Madre Mountain Range) getting out of their forest territory to collect the heads mostly of forest-using lowlanders, my barrio then was as child-friendly as could be. There were no fences then nor were there “No Entry” markers to discourage kids from sniping at the pirruka (Picnonotus goiaver) or the tariktik (___) that got attracted, respectively, to the luscious fruits of the bignay and kalumpit trees in one’s farmlot. 

Nobody seemed to mind then if my playmates and I got sunburned as we spent hours in the river having friendly competitions as to who would catch the most bunog (minnow), bukto (goby), and buntiek (adolescent mudfish) using bare hands or the speargun. Nobody scolded us if we happened to step on some farmer’s peanuts or corn plants when we ran after the papa (wild mallard), the pugo (quail) and tukling (gallinules), or when we acquired scratches on our legs or kwantung (Amaranth sp.) thorns on our soles while climbing alukon (himbabao in Tagalog) trees in search of pirpiriw (bee-eater) and martin chicks to take care as pets. Nobody seemed to mind if we spent hours in the tropical sun creeping up to a hapless dragonfly to catch it either with our nimble fingers or with a bamboo stick at the end of which we placed super sticky sap from the jackfruit -- then later convert the poor insect into an airplane (complete with paper "wing" attached to its wings), and if it would not fly there was always a hen waiting to feast on it nearby.

As old folks in rural Philippines are wont to do, our elders would advise us not to stray too far, especially during agmatuon (high noon) when the unseen beings guarding the trees and the rivers are said to be in their most active mode. We were also told stories of malevolent spirits dwelling in geriatric trees, especially the balite (strangler fig) and any tree growing beside Spanish-era stone fences. And we were cautioned from using fire, playing with our slingshots, climbing starapple trees, harming the bambannagaw (chameleon) or any other lizard, catching fireflies, and doing raucous behavior during the Lenten season. 

Other than those warnings, we were free to swim in the river with carabaos as diving boards; we were free to chase grasshoppers and dragonflies to feed our pet martin birds; and we were free to paint our faces with the flaming-red seeds of the appatut tree (Bixa orellana) if we wanted to look ala-American Indian.

Blast from a Biodiversity-Rich Past

Indeed, among my favorite stories for my children when they were small was my closeness to birds and other denizens of the wild, and the paradise-like nature of my boyhood barrio. I told them guavas, mushrooms, ferns, palm piths, rattan fruits, bamboo shoots, and other edible plants in the wilderness were common property then. I told them I never felt squeamish playing with earthworms and caterpillars. I told them I never learned to play basketball and never went to dances because I grew up in a place where kids were at the time more at home with wild creatures and the joys of nature than with TV and Jollibee.

I also told my kids how I would escape household chores just to be able to try my slingshot skill on birds like the pirruka  that fed on the ripe fruits of the guava or the bugnay. I told them that my favorite pastime during mango season was to go escape the heat under mango trees, whistle for the wind to come, and be alert for ripe fruits that fall. I told them that my grandparents almost always built cogon-roofed farm huts under a bitnong tree that in turn was always abuzz with sunbirds and bumblebees. I told them how as a toddler I always went with my grandparents to the farm and there get lulled to sleep by the chatter of crows and monkeys and the song of cicadas in the forest glades and the reassuring gurgle of a mountain stream nearby.  

As a first grandchild, indeed, I had the luck of living under the wings of doting grandparents whose nutrition they provided me often reflected the biological richness and diversity then of our place. For instance, for breakfast, we had: frogs or mudfish that my grandfather caught using lampara (carbide-fueled lamp) the night before, along with pinakbet (a dish of mixed vegetables seasoned with salted fish-paste locally called bagoong) and aromatic upland rice. For lunch, we had a merry mix of freshwater fish, shrimps and crabs cooked with wild button-tomatoes, or jumping shrimps seasoned with sugarcane vinegar, or similarly fresh and raw fern seasoned with green mangoes (if in season) and bagoong, plus, again, pinakbet.

For snacks: we kids have all the Vitamin C-rich guavas, tamarinds, and mangoes we could munch while we were outdoors, otherwise we had tupig (a roasted native rice delicacy), boiled corn or peanuts, or bananas dipped in pulitipot (sticky sugarcane molasses). For dinner: we had bisukol (apple snail) cooked with squash or, when in season, de-winged and fried abal-abal (May beetles), plus the ever-present pinakbet. And before we call it a day after husking corn, peeling peanuts, sorting tobacco leaves, or pounding newly harvested rice in the kulluong (boat-like facility carved out of the solid trunk of a huge tree, usually narra), we shall have partaken some more of boiled corn, sautéed peanuts, or boiled camote (sweet potato).

I also recall that at least once a month an uncle or a neighbor would be lucky in his fishing or trapping sideline and, depending on his catch, we may feast on the meat of igat (eel), abuyo (wild fowl), mutit (civet cat), or banias (monitor lizard) all cooked adobo-style. When I was in grade school, I saw an uncle catch a pair of kebkeb in his ricefield, using a fishing-net and very carefully crawling on the side of an adjoining rice paddy to get near the long-necked, long-legged and chicken-sized birds. It was only years later that I got to know the hapless creatures were Eastern Sarus cranes. One time, too, a couple of hunters who didn’t speak our Ilocano language dropped by to cook and share to us the meat of a couple of kalaw (Rufous hornbill) they shot in a patch of forest near our village. I was hoping they would leave me one of the bright-red bills of their catch but they didn’t.

Oh yes, at least once or twice a year, the Ilongots would come downhill to barter-trade their split rattan, beeswax, dried meat of deer or wildboar, betel nut, and sweet potatoes with salt, sugar, bolos, canned goods, bagoong, matches, sweaters, threads and needles, colored beads, and blankets. On their return trip to their mountain villages a couple of days hike further upstream, they would drop by my grandparents’ house, stay for a night or so, partake of my grandfather’s basi (sugarcane wine) and tobaccos, chew betel nut and betel leaf with my grandmother, and ask for carabao horns or broken plow shares or other such items they could make into knife handles and spears. One time, they asked for my pet puppy which their interpreter said they would train to hunt deer. In return, when they depart, the Ilongot womenfolk would leave their unsold deer meat and beeswax to my grandmother. The men would leave their split rattan and the chieftain would give tips to my grandfather on which mountain streams and trails in the hills to follow to get to where he could find all the rattan he could gather.

That was in the ‘50s up to the ‘70s. Our town, as well as its neighbors, is no longer as nature-rich as it used to be. Its formerly deep-green forests that were very much coveted for their dipterocarp and narra (Pterocarpus indicus) timber, rattan, and wild pigs, among other resources, have since been over-exploited by loggers and farmers, many of them new faces. The Ilongots, who have changed their tribal name to Bugkalot, no longer hunt Christian heads, and have also stopped coming down the hills to trade their forest products. My boyhood hills no longer sing with birds and the rivers that nurtured me have not only lost their fish but now turn murky and ferocious when it rains, and almost dry and lifeless when there are no rains. 


In fact, the last time I went home and tried to renew my friendship with them hills, fields, and rivers, I felt very sad. Somewhere deep inside me, a voice was asking: Where have you gone? At the same time, I was also asking: Do kids in the barrio still do what I did as a child? Does anybody around, boy or girl, young or young once, still talk to you hills and rivers and fields and call you “friends”?

Aside from the fact that the hills and valleys are now mostly vegetated with yemane (Gmelina arborea) that certainly were not there when I was a boy, there are now more houses and countless faces that I no longer know. The birdy and breezy hills that I used to climb to enjoy the panorama of ricefields and rivers and blue mountains and carabao roads in the distance now have houses. The bamboo groves and verdant forest glades by the banks of the streams and rivers where I used to catch cicadas or snipe at sunbirds all day are no longer there. The sylvan and fish-rich river by the barrio that I loved to go cool my young body in, the lipnuk and the pual where I used to swim with my cousins and barrio friends, the river bend where I got circumcized -- all of them have been totally obliterated and gone!

I felt like I was already a stranger! -- CHARLZ CASTRO

Some Isinay Birds Revisited

A chance remembering of such Isinay birds as Teyay (panal in Ilocano), Tittiwaddon (kinkin-od), Plepplew (pirpiriw), Siggu^(sakuk), Tulin (billit-tuleng), and other feathered creatures

“Listen to the man on the forest trail for he too has good stories to tell.” This line, I guess, has not been used before by any author. So if you try to Google it one day and find nothing of exact wording, it would help unknown authors like yours truly if one of these days you please remember that you encountered it first in this essay.

I used a similar line a little over two decades ago in a piece I wrote about indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) for the Tropical Forests magazine (“It’s high time we listened to people in them thar hills”) and then again in a paper I presented on IKS (“Beware of Trees with Fireflies”) where I mentioned something like “If you meet an unlettered man on the mountain trail....”

I happened to think of that line when I ruminated on a brief talk I recently had about Isinay birds with a distant relative, Bonifacio "Bob" Campo. The guy may not exactly be a mountain and unlettered guy but as an Isinay-raised fellow when he was young (even as his mother was Tagalog), I think I find him a good resource person for the Isinay-English dictionary that I’m working on, particularly on the taxonomy of birds, insects, snakes, trees, herbs, vines, etc. that Isinay kids in our part of Dupax were supposed to know by heart.

I wish Bob would be re-admitted as an employee at the Hamada’s Baguio Midland Courier soon or at least be accepted as Barangay Tanod (or “Barangay Tagay” as he said) in the Kisad and Gen. Lim area of Baguio City currently headed by Barangay Chairman Billy Hamada. For then I would have a ready person to consult for Isinay flora and fauna and other terms that I would need help with.

For instance, if Bob didn’t come to the house along with my sister Nenette and her two boys for the chicken adobo dinner we organized to celebrate Beia’s and my birthday, I would not have been able to talk with the native Isinay speaker and include the terms teyay and siggu^ in my Isinay dictionary. Not that I didn't know the birds they were referring to, but sometimes not using the names for a long, long time has a way of making one forget them unless resurrected by another fellow who remembers them.

I have yet to verify what bird Bob was referring to with the teyay he mentioned. But based on his descriptions -- it’s brown and as big as the pinuu^ (bulbul; pirruka in Ilocano; scientific name: Pycnonotus goiaver) -- and cross-checking them with what I remember in my slingshot-using days with the Calacala brothers Oret and Base, the teyay may be the migratory bird panal (shrike; scientific name: Lanius lanius cristatus).

Siggu^ is of course the chocolate-colored and long-tailed cuckoo or coucal (Centropus bengalensis). We called the bird sakuk or chakuk and my then uncircumcised friends and I hated it so much because each time it crowed ku-ku-ku-kuk in the thickets and following this with sup-put… sup-put, our uncles or circumcised older playmates in the barrio would tease us to go undergo kugit (circumcision) next Huebes Santo (Holy Thursday).

Bob was not sure of the manaleban (a term I heard our former Calacala neighbors use when I was little). He nevertheless suspected it was the Isinay name for the Ilocano tiktikrubong (warbler; scientific name: Megalurus palustris) and even recalled that this was  the bird that follows the carabao each time the big animal grazed thick lomo^ (grass). I surmise the bird was after the grasshoppers and other grass-dwelling insects driven out of their hiding place by the incessant "mowing" of the carabao.

The Isinay in Bob went on to discourse on other Dupax birds (amid the interruption of my Red Horse beer- and Ginebra San Miguel-tipsy bayaw or brother in law Edward Fiadchongan who I requested to come cook four of our old and ayam- or mite-infested Chinese chickens). For instance, when I asked him the Isinay for tukling (barred rail; tikling in Tagalog; scientific name: Rallus torquatus), he took time to jog his brain in vain but nevertheless recalled the bird ran so fast and was colored mandirito^ (red). When I tested his bird knowledge by suggesting the Isinay for tukling must be tulin, he said "Mari ah.. sare tulinar ya man-oj an mantetteyav and mangan si pahoy ot sare tuklingar ya mangan si dalaj." (Translation: "No, the tulin is a tiny bird that feeds on rice while the tukling is a fish-eater.")

Tulin, indeed, is the ricebird that flies in droves -- sometimes by the hundreds -- and are considered pests in many rice-growing towns of the Philippines. Called maya in Tagalog and billit-tuleng in Ilocano, these birds are the targets of the rag-clothed scarecrows (bambanti in Ilocano; tinahutahu in Isinay) one sees in the taltalon (ricefield; payaw in Isinay) specially when the rice start to become "pregnant" with grains. I heard someone say there are two types in Dupax -- one brown and one black. I guess these are the chestnut munia (Lonchura malacca) and the scaly-breasted munia (Lonchura punctulata).

Bob also mentioned a brown bird similar to the tukling and a “burik” (striated/speckled) one called kebkeb. I knew the latter so I said kebkeb was a lot bigger than tukling. As for the brown bird, he imitated its head’s upturned position and said the bird stood still when it sensed somebody going near. I told him that that bird is named tangad (cinnamon bittern; scientific name: Ixobrychus cinnamomeus). Incidentally, the Ilocano name for this bird is teggaak, this I learned later from Boni Calacala (another mestizo Isinay who, like Bob, is still a bachelor and prefers a wife-free and hand-to-mouth life like birds).

He was at a loss as to the name of the blue birds that rejoice and fly in the sky at the onset of rain. I told him they were called plep-plew in Isinay and pirpiriw in Ilocano (blue-tailed bee-eater in English; scientific name: Merops philippinus) and were often around whenever there are many honeybees (he interjected iyuan when I pretended not to know the Isinay for the Ilocano uyukan).

I think I also tested Bob’s avian knowledge when I asked him about the tiny bird (smaller than the maya) called kulipattung in Ilocano. He didn't have a name for it but surrendered when I said that the male is black with white parts on its wings (like that of a martines) while the female is brown. Yes, he said he saw such a pair and the male indeed looks like a martines.

In our animated conversation in Isinay, such names as gayang (crow), kalatan (wild chicken; abuyo in Ilocano and labuyo in Tagalog) and labban (hawk; kali in Ilocano, lawin in Tagalog) also came out.

Wagtail photo from Wikipedia

To keep my Igorot bayaw from feeling left out in the conversation, I mentioned to Bob the wagtail bird (scientific name: Motacilia cinerea) we called tittiwaddon in Isinay. In Barlig my wife says the bird is called tittiwad. And indeed, both Edward and Bob knew the bird (called kinkin-od in Ilocano) and went through the motions of describing its pumping action as it sunned along the bank of the river.


I also interjected that what we call amunin in Dupax Isinay refers to the wild cat but in Barlig amunin refers to the domestic cat. As for the buwet (cloud rat) I stressed that in Dupax it is called buwot, remembering the gandaw an sin-ammain si kuting (rat as big as a cat) once caught by the Reyes guys as it fed on coffee fruits or coconut flowers near that wooded solar (lot) near the Dampol Bridge. Bob said he had not seen such animal in his wanderings in Dupax while Edward recalled that we once had a pet in the house like that, to which I said it eventually escaped and must have been eaten by dogs in the neighborhood – "or it may have returned to the forest," the two gin-moistened guys dueted in Ilocano.

Bob also recalled a bird that came out and became noisy when it was about to rain. While writing this, my wife just said there are also birds like that in Barlig and flew with unmoving wings. That’s the glider they call pipingngaw in Isinay, sallapingaw in Ilocano, and layang-layang in Tagalog (scientific name: Collocalia troglodytes).

In English, the pipingngaw must be the swiftlet or the swallow which sometime back Dean Rex Cruz of the UPLB College of Forestry and Natural Resources (when I went to see him and other members of the College Executive Committee in their very first meeting at the North Phil TREES in Baguio) was telling as the tourist-attracting bird they once drove for in Cupertino (in California?) and on their long drive home to Arizona almost had a fatal car accident along with his now US-based bilas Roy Pollisco who, as a boy at the Makiling Heights area of the Forestry campus where I stayed in my senior year, came to see the fledgling Philippine falconet that I found – but which I later set free -- near Dr. Chito de Guzman’s swing one summer day.

In passing, I also mentioned to Bob the term immanuy, the venomous snake that bit the arm of his grandfather Pasio^ one time he was doing soppeng (swidden farm; kaingin) and he mistook it for a wa-ah (woody vine; lanut in Ilocano). Insisting that immanuy is not cobra, Bob didn’t seem to know that the python which is called beklat in Ilocano is called ine^eyaddang by Isinays.

I also quickly mentioned to him that his father Rogel still knew me the last time we saw each other in Dupax but his Uncle Pacual didn’t recognize me until I mentioned my name. Bob said his father and his Uncle Otong both know me but that his Uncle Pacual probably didn’t recognize me as he doesn’t go to town often from the formerly forest-rich and sawmill-site Banila, a barangay further upstream of my boyhood barrio Iiyo.

Oh well, the birds that "came out of hiding" as a result of this chance conversation and recollection are by no means all the birds you would find in Isinay country. I have not yet included the engah (wild duck; papa in Ilocano), the gayang (crow or raven; uwak in Ilocano), the taltaliling (woodpecker; tagtaga in Ilocano), the seya^sa^ (kingfisher; salaksak in Ilocano), the uwop (owl; puwek in Ilocano), the ammo^ (quail; pugo in Ilocano), etc.

Maybe in a future post I may have to mention the many species of titit (sunbird, flowerpecker, hummingbird; sitsitik in Ilocano) that competed with us free-spirited Dupax kids as we went climbing the fruit-laden sarisay (aratiles in Tagalog; scientific name: Muntingia calabura) of the neighbors. I may also have a separate piece on the ever-present osberd (housebird, tree sparrow; mayang-bahay in Tagalog; scientific name: Passer montanus) that were often the first targets of Isinay and Ilocano boys like me for trying their Olympian-class skills in using the baris (slingshot; palsiit in Ilocano). -CHARLZ CASTRO