Birding PICOP
With our guide, the legendary Felizardo Goring (second from right) I certainly did not know that a Sunday afternoon at the bazaar with PH native tree champion Cel Tungol would lead all the way to the forests of PICOP in Bislig, Surigao del Sur, Mindanao. PICOP is the acronym for the Paper Industries Corporation of the Philippines which held dominion over 2000 square kilometers of lowland rainforests in eastern Mindanao. Awarded a logging concession in 1952, it grew to become a multibillion peso industry and operated the only fully integrated pulp and paper mill in Southeast Asia. Political and economic conditions exacerbated by a host of other problems, however, caused its demise in the early 2000s, leaving in its wake a forest landscape decimated and destroyed. The shutdown of PICOP opened the floodgates to illegal loggers, slash and burn farmers, subsistence woodcutters, poachers and smugglers, allowing the plunder of the forests to continue unabate...
