For nearly 40 years: Obu Manuvu leader dedicating his life to protect critically endangered PH eagle

The long and broad wings of Philippine Eagles are adaptations to soaring and gliding flights.
Photo courtesy of Jayson Ibañez / PEF

(This article was first published by Mongabay, a US-based non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform.)

• Indigenous peoples’ leader Datu Julito Ahao has dedicated nearly 40 years of his life to protecting Philippine eagles, a critically endangered national bird, in the wild.
• Considered an “unsung hero” by conservationists, he has ensured the survival of 16 juvenile eagles in the wild and founded the Bantay Bukid forest guard program to conserve the raptor’s habitat around Mount Apo, the country’s tallest peak and frontier of the bird’s conservation.
• There are an estimated 400 pairs of Philippine eagles left in the wild, with their existence under persistent threat from deforestation  and hunting or trapping.
• Ahao is a trusted partner of the nonprofit Philippine Eagle Foundation, a leading conservation organization in the southern Philippines that hatches and breeds the eagles in captivity.

DAVAO CITY, Philippines (16 October 2024) – To his fellow tribal members, Datu Julito Ahao is jokingly called matanglawin, which literally means “having an eye of an eagle.”

Aptly so.

Under the watch of the 64-year-old chieftain, more than a dozen critically endangered Philippine eagles, the country’s national bird, have hatched and survived in the wild since the mid-1980s. He was in his 20s when he first encountered a pair of Philippine eagles (Pithecophaga jefferyi) within Mount Apo Natural Park on the island of Mindanao, home to his people, the Obu Manuvu, and the Philippines’ highest peak.

“It was fascinating to see the majestic bird,” he tells Mongabay at his home in the remote village of Salaysay. The blue-and-gray-eyed bird can grow to almost 1 meter (3 feet) in height, with an impressive wingspan of 2 m (nearly 7 ft).

It was a love-at-first sight affair for the raptors, Ahao says, one that continues today. The skinny elder wears many hats. He earns a living planting corn and vegetables, but continues to regularly scour the forests for eagle nests and protect them from logging and hunting. He founded a group of forest guards, known as Bantay Bukid, to protect the species’ diminishing habitat. And as a pastor, he preaches biblical verses about the protection of living beings to push his advocacy.

To conservationists, he’s an “unsung hero.”

Although he reached only Grade 1 school level, Ahao can read and also uses the Bible to push his advocacy. Image by Bong S. Sarmiento

There are only an estimated 400 pairs of Philippine eagles left in the wild, according to the Philippine Eagle Foundation (PEF), a nonprofit that closely works with Ahao due to his unwavering efforts to preserve the raptor. However, little is known about the extent of the eagles’ population, most of which are found on Mindanao. Once called the monkey-eating eagle, the species is being pushed to the brink of extinction due to deforestation and unsustainable hunting, say conservationists.

One of the rarest raptors in the world, a pair of Philippine eagles needs at least 4,000 hectares (10,000 acres) of forested land to survive in the wild. These pairs also only lay one egg every two years, the period it takes for an offspring to become independent, the PEF tells Mongabay. Partly because of how much forest they need, the birds themselves are seen as indicators of forest health.

But Mount Apo isn’t an intact forest, according to the Ecology and Conservation Research Laboratory (Eco/Con Lab) at the University of Southern Mindanao. Deforestation due to logging, forest fires and slash-and-burn farming, known locally as kaingin, has eaten away at the forest cover in the park, which is also an ASEAN Heritage Park. From 2001 to 2023, the protected area lost 1,280 hectares (3,163 acres) of tree cover, equivalent to a 2.9% decrease over that period, according to the Eco/Con Lab.

Ahao ventures deep into the forest alone three times a month, every 5^th, 15^th and 25^th, to monitor a pair of Philippine eagles and any human activities that indicate a threat to the raptors.

It takes him at least two hours to walk from his house to an observation deck built by the PEF inside the dense jungle where the eagles like to nest. “I feel sick if I don’t scour the jungles to monitor the eagles. Sometimes I go hungry in the forest as I have no money to buy food to bring,” Ahao says.

Ahao with a PEF staff in 2014. They captured and implanted a tracking device to the eagle. Image courtesy of PEF

A movement

This has been his routine since he found his first juvenile Philippine eagle in 1986.

For much of the 20th century, the raptor received little attention from global conservationists. That changed when Charles Lindbergh, the renowned U.S. aviator, championed the protection of the species in the 1960s. But following his death in 1974, interest in the bird waned once again, and the Philippine government’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources abandoned its studies on the Philippine eagle.

But when Ahao came across his first eagle in 1986, he started engaging with conservationists who would go on to found the PEF the following year to revive the studies that were shelved in the 1970s. From then on, Ahao was a trusted partner.

The foundation established the Philippine Eagle Center (PEC) in the city of Davao, the biggest on the island of Mindanao. In 1992, the PEC caught the world’s attention after it produced the first two Philippine eagles bred and hatched in captivity. They were named Pag-asa and Pagkakaisa, meaning “hope” and “unity” in Tagalog. Pag-asa died in 2021 and his preserved remains are on display at the center.

Since its establishment, the PEC has bred 29 eagles in captivity, 17 of which are still alive. The center also hosts Philippine eagles rescued from the wild, PEF data show.

As he has for decades, Ahao continues to share reports of his sightings of new eaglets or nests with the PEF, and receives an allowance. In July 2023, Ahao reported discovering his 16^th juvenile eagle in the wild, at a decades-old nesting site. He named it Pabilin, meaning “lasting” in the Visayan language that’s spoken across much of Mindanao.

He says his concern for the banog, the local name for the eagle, is part of an ancestral legacy going back generations: that people should not hurt it, but rather protect it.

Ahao tells of a legend in which a mature Philippine eagle caught a hunter in its claws and kept him in a nest together with its offspring. When the offspring, an eaglet, finally became mature and strong enough to carry the hunter, it brought him back to his community while its parent was out looking for food.

“Take care of the eagle” is the message Ahao says his people have passed on since then in honor of the young eagle that saved the hunter.

Julito Ahao (right) with a Philippine eagle researcher in 1986. Image courtesy of PEF

A brigade to save the eagle

Ahao says he takes his elders’ request to heart. Since 2014, he’s led a volunteer brigade of community forest guards, known as Bantay Bukid, to protect the Philippine eagles and their forest habitat.

They initially worked as volunteers, and didn’t start getting paid until 2017, thanks to lobbying of the Davao municipal government by the PEF and other environmental groups. Since last year, each member now receives 3,500 pesos ($61) a month. The rangers work 10 days out of the month: five days inside the forest and the rest doing community service, including collecting waste from nearby rivers.

There are now 28 Bantay Bukid members in the village. Seven of them are women, including Melinda Ahao-Torres, Ahao’s daughter and a local community organizer for the PEF.

“We roam the forests for signs of poaching, which could threaten the Philippine eagles in Mount Apo,” she tells Mongabay.

Tribal members sanctified the first nesting site that her father protected for over four decades as a pusaka, a declaration to help protect the forested area while also preserving the Obu Manuvu culture.

“Unless we Indigenous peoples give our consent, the pusaka must be left untouched,” Torres says.

Two years ago, the Bantay Bukid volunteers alerted authorities to logging activity, and helped stop it, around the pusaka, which is also within the Makabol-Alikoson Conservation Area (MACA), according to the PEF.

Since then, they’ve been fierce protectors of the region. In 2022, armed with only his jungle knife and a VHF radio, Ahao went into the forest to check on reports of chainsaw sounds, and found several trees that had already been felled. He and a concerned local immediately reported the incident to the PEF, which in turn notified government authorities.

It turned out the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) had granted a logging permit, known as a PLTP, covering 12 hectares (30 acres) to a private landowner near the pusaka. Only after an uproar by the Indigenous community and environmental NGOs did the DENR cancel the permit, which allowed the cutting of 121 century-old trees for land development.

Another threat to the habitat of the Philippine eagle inside Mount Apo Natural Park is

deforestation, including the burning tradition known as kaingin, according to the PEF. Though widely understood to mean slash-and-burn agriculture, in this particular region kaingin refers to the felling and burning of trees to produce charcoal as fuel for cooking. The practice isn’t always destructive and can be used to fertilize soils, but Ahao says the way it was practiced here was unsustainable. Sources have not shared how much deforestation kaingin has caused in the region.

“We managed to stop that illegal kaingin practice in our community and its fringes by banning it, and educating and talking to our people,” Ahao says. Villagers now collect wood from fallen trees or twigs, invasive trees that grow on farms, or corn cobs to make charcoal.

Melinda Ahao-Torres points to the direction of their “pusaka,” a sacred place for the Indigenous peoples. Image by Bong S. Sarmiento

Hunting the raptor

Hunting still remains a threat to the Philippine eagle in the national park.

In August this year, volunteer forest guards in nearby Bukidnon province rescued a 3.1-kilogram (nearly 7-pound) juvenile Philippine eagle with what appeared to be a gunshot wound.

The bird, which they named Kalatungan II, had to have its left wing amputated. When Ahao visited the injured eagle several days later, he says he felt both angry and sad.

“Some humans are so cruel, why do they have to shoot the bird? I pity the eagle. It could no longer fly to feed itself,” he says.

Under the Philippines’ 2001 Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act, the hunting or killing of critically endangered species such as the Philippine eagle is punishable by a jail term of six to 12 years, and a fine of 1 million pesos ($17,400).

In the past five years, the PEF has recorded at least 11 Philippine eagles wounded by shooting, either by air guns or improvised marble guns.

Ahao is now no longer officially a part of the Bantay Bukid, having passed on his spot to his daughter, which means he doesn’t receive a monthly allowance from the municipal government.

Still, he regularly goes deep into the forest, sometimes without bringing any food with him. Not being able to check on the eagles, he says, makes him feel sick.

Jayson Ibañez, the PEF’s research and conservation director, says Indigenous people who have spent their lives close to the forest are important stewards of both the forest and eagles.

“Their traditional kinship and culture are also tied with forest lands, so that they have the spiritual, cultural and social reasons to care for their ancestral domains beyond the material reasons,” he says.

Ibañez, who holds a doctorate degree in natural resource management from Charles Darwin University in Australia, says the Philippine eagle plays an important role in keeping the ecosystem in balance and provides an umbrella of protection to all other lifeforms in its territory.

Datu Julito Ahao scours the horizon in search of Philippine eagles from their community in the village of Salaysay, Davao City. Image by Bong S. Sarmiento

Today, anyone who finds a Philippine eagle nest is eligible for a Php6,000 ($104) reward from the PEF, which collects the information to keep tabs on breeding eagles and ensure they can contribute to growing the species’ population. To date, the foundation has confirmed sightings of at least 44 Philippine eagle pairs across the island of Mindanao, with Mount Apo the hotspot, Ibañez says.

Now in his senior years, Ahao says he’ll continue looking after the eagles and their habitat, as he promised his ancestors.

“Until I have the strength,” he says, “I will be protecting the eagles.” (Bong S. Sarmiento / Mongabay / MindaNews)