FLYING THROUGH HARD TIMES
Life was not so good for Kalabugao nine years ago. Barely a year old then, she was trapped by a local farmer who kept her as a helpless pet. When the Philippine Eagle Foundation (PEF) and environment officials rescued her, she was a sickly, malnourished eaglet tethered on one leg to a piece of log surrounded by her own feces.
After a year of medication, care, and rehabilitation at the Philippine Eagle Center in Davao City, she recovered and was ready for the wild. In October 2009, she was released in the protected forests of Mt. Kitanglad Range Natural Park.
A GPS transmitter was harnessed to her back, allowing field workers to follow her tracks. Like many immature eagles with no mate and territory yet, she wandered outside of the protected area and into hostile human landscapes. Luckily, forests along deep ravines provided food and safe passage. Acting as her guardians, PEF field crew also kept her away from human harm by telling villages ahead of her path to spare the bird from shooting and hunting.
Keeping a close watch on Kalabugao was a prudent strategy. Six years after crossing over to a new-found territory at Mt. Tago, she paired with male eagle Guilang-guilang and laid her first egg. But like many new breeders in the wild, her first nesting attempt failed. The egg did not hatch.
In 2017, the pair was in their usual courtship rituals again, and the renewed pair bond resulted in another nesting. After two months of full-time incubation by Kalabugao, matched by faithful food rations from Guilang-guilang, the eagle pair finally hatched their first young.
Since then, this milestone became the world’s first case of a rescued, rehabilitated, and released juvenile Philippine eagle surviving to sexual maturity and breeding in the wild, proving that human wrongdoings could be corrected, and that we should not give up on people.