State of the art report on the Philippine birds

The report brings together and summarizes what is known of Philippine birds in terms of the various works on their taxonomy, distribution and conservation status. It identifies gaps which can be acted upon by various institutions already involved in wildlife research and conservation in order to contribute to the global efforts of preventing the extinction of birds. Dickinson et. al. have recognized 556 species of Philippine birds, 169 (30.4 percent) of which are endemic species and 708 out of 1,019 subspecies (69.5 percent) are endemic subspecies. A new species has just been described from Panay and another new one reported by Kennedy from Mt. Kitanglad. Steere, in his zoogeographic analysis of the resident Philippine land birds, proposed the Philippines as a whole as a "zoological province" with six "subprovinces". Worcester proposed 12 avifaunal regions which was also supported by Macgregor based on ecological and distributional analysis. Bibby et. al. of ICBP, by analysis of information on patterns of distribution and endemissism, showed that species of restricted range (10,000-50,000 sq.km) tend to occur together in places which are often islands or isolated patched of a particular habitat, especially montane and other tropical forests, and divided the Philippines into nine Endemic Bird Areas (EBA). These EBAs are being subdivided into Important Bird Areas (IBA) which can be approximately managed for wildlife conservation and provide all the requirements of the birds, especially the globally threatened and endemic species. Collar et al. using the new IUCN criteria, came up with an alarming analysis which put the Philippines number one over all other countries in terms of endemic threatened birds with 40 species, 14 of which are critical. Of the 86 species of threatened Philippine birds, 16 species are critical (50 percent chance of going extinct in 5 years), 29 are endangered (20 percent chance of going extinct in 20 years) and 41 are vulnerable (10 percent chance of going extinct in 100 years)