Tikling
My family and I live in a semi-rural part of the Philippines, in Bacong, a town just south of the provincial capital of Negros Oriental, on Negros Island. It’s an area where many folks still grow bananas, papayas, some sugar cane and raise chickens and pigs, but it’s also residential, with many commuters to Dumaguete.
For a while I have noticed that there are Tikling (the Visayan name), or Barred Rail (Gallirallus torquatus), behind our house. They are hard to photograph, shy, and live in ill lit shrubbery. Today my sweetheart and my mother in law called me over when they saw several of them running around, and the light was just right to get some decent shots.
It seems that the birds are breeding. The adults were running around the banana plantation next to our house, and when they found a worm they would race back to the denser shrubbery on the left, where I assume the nest is located.
On a few occasions the young birds even came out! Happily I caught that with my camera as well.
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I used my old Canon 5DII, with the Canon L-series 300 mm f4 lens. Still a great combination.
Unfortunately the birds’ foraging trips ended when one of the too many semi-feral dogs of the area ran into the banana plantation. These dogs don’t just annoy me with their moronic howling at odd hours, they are also quite a threat to the bird fauna. The neighbor’s cow, in contrast, didn’t bother the tiklings, they ran right up to it.
I put my observation of the birds on iNaturalist, and also looked at the distribution map of this species:
The map is under-sampled, no question about that, but there is still a pattern emerging which isn’t too unexpected: The rail occurs in the Philippines BUT for Palawan. It also occurs in neighboring Sulawesi, but not in Borneo. As far as I know Borneo and Palawan were one land-mass during the last ice age, and they share a fauna which is closer to each other than to the rest of the Philippines. My bird ID book (“Birds of the Philippines”, M. Tanedo et al., quite a nice book) says the bird is found all over the Philippines, so I am not sure if my biogeographic speculation really holds. I’d like to hear from you if you have seen a Tikling in Palawan!
