Buasao Forest: The Last of Cordillera's Pine and Mossy Forest Ecotome By Michael A. Bengwayan

Buasao Forest: The Last of Cordillera's Pine and Mossy Forest Ecotome

By Michael A. Bengwayan

You never know when you take a quantum leap. It just happens. When you are called for it. Most often, it  provides you with some of the most unexpected challenges, education and pleasures.

On the early summer of ’99 after a stint in Nepal, I read a letter  handed to me twice, then thrice. “Your application for a grant was approved. You hereby instructed to start doing an eco-profile of Buasao watershed”, the letter  from the Foundation of Philippine Environment (FPE) said.

I handed the letter to my assistant Richard “Dick”Botengan, a childhood friend since we were 7. He read and looked at me with an unsaid question “ So?” I knew what was in his mind. Buasao watershed, cradling the untouched pine and mossy forests of Besao, Mountain Province and Tubo, Abra, is bastion of the New Peoples’ Army (NPA). But then Dick and I have been in many risky places.

“Let’s do it”, he answered his own query..

Wasting no time, I gathered a team of nine people (I and Dick included)—foresters Danilo Killip and Arlene Cid, Johnny Budod, late Bonel Walsiyen, photojournalist Ernesto Raguro, Innocencio Estangki and our guide Michael Tauli.

We went to an adventure that changed our lives.

High in the mountains of the Gran Cordillera, swathed in mists and forests, a long-forgotten movement of the Earth caused lime and basalt rock to protrude, and over the millennia  became covered with moss morphing beyond lichens and liverworts to quietly evolve into its own unique ecology.

The people of Besao, when they discovered it, called it  Buasao where only a few birds sing because of the cold harsh weather. Alas, not too many wildlife venture into the place to break the mirror of smoothness of the waters coming out from a rock that spells life for many villages until Abra..

But other creatures live in and around it, and a rich variety or plant life nourishes in its environs. The water of a small pond,  the swamp surrounding it, the narrow belt or tableland between the  mountain slopes, and the slopes themselves, all provide fertile and varied habitats.

It is the richness or this plant life which has been chiefly responsible for its declaration as a specially protected area watershed  by the government.  Conservation of forest in the Philippines benefits from the circumstance that about a third of the Cordillera region’s area are still forested, and so fall under the jurisdiction of the state, which is also responsible for conservation. In 1986  Buasao was declared one of the eight specially protected areas of the region.

 The nearest point of departure for Buasao is  Gueday to Agawa from Kin-iway. From here, I led my team to a two day 16 hour mountain climb, to a almost a month immersion….explaining to Dick and the rest, our work and providing information about the environment that was ahead of us.

There is freedom when you are high up in the mountains. The air is marvelously fresh and fragrant with the late afternoon smell of damp pine woods. The scene  commands a splendid view overlooking the confluence of two rivers and endless pine forests.

Early the next morning we climbed  up a ridge and began the tortuous ascent to the top where water gushed out fro a precipice itself. Soon the previous night's lodging is lost in the folds of the mountains and the river becomes a whisp of silver. The only access to the small  lake is by a bush and clump of thorny forest shrubs inhabited by small green leeches that get into any hole in your body. The mountains surrounding the promontory are mostly clad in Pinus kesiya and fir-like Cryplomeria japonica which grows faster than the indigenous  cypress Chamacypans philippeninsis and yews Taxus sumatrana, although large stands of virgin forest, a mixture of the pines and hard woods, still remain.

Around the headwaters itself is an untouched pine forest of close to 1,000 hectares with trees aging about 500 years old and can only be embraced by five people. This natural mixed forest is nourished because it  never lacks is water. It rains in these mountains almost 200 days of the year, and even when it is not actually raining the clouds often settle on the mountain tops and drift into their folds and clefts..

But we were lucky. The climb to the peak was in bright sunshine, the deep green of the forests growing brilliantly against the clean blue of the sky with a few white clouds; the air, when we broke our journey now and then, was intoxicatingly fresh. The sun was still shining on our second day of climb and right to the cave which produces the water that gleamed in perfect stillness between tree-covered mountain slopes.

We stood in  a small wedge of ground, 5,500 feet above sea level, surrounded by peaks which soar to nearly 8,000 feet. There was a small pond about a hectare big where the stream which feeds it trickles gently through the high grasses. The margins of the pond are shallow, revealing through the limpid tea-brown water, stained with acid from the encircling trees, the soft, muddy bottom and the underwater plants. A few steps, it seems, would take us to the farther side. Yet the center of the pond, the cleft between two mountains, was surprisingly deep.

No bird sings. Hardly a leaf rustles. Only the intermittent stirring of the water gives a hint of motion, and the tendency to speak in whispers is almost overwhelming. Wild goats,  boars,  monkeys, even black civet cats—as well as a host of lesser animals such as rats, mice, and squirrels—are supposed to live in these mountains, but there is no sign of them. Nor of the ducks, hawks, doves, and other birds found in the region.

Soon a cloud descends, but even before it engulfs us, we get some inkling of the perpetual dampness of the region. The path beside the brook runs under trees heavily bearded with hanging mosses and covered with minute ferns. Despite the sunshine, moisture drips from the trees and miniature forests of inch-high seedlings of the mighty pine trees that nourish on the rotting trunks of parent trees.

The mosses are fascinating. So many varieties grow in so small an area. Plump, velvety cushions compete for space with colonies sporting tiny red masses atop quivering fillaments, and others with serrated outgrowths make them difficult to distinguish from the smallest of the ferns, some with fronds only half an inch long.

Trees covered in heavy moss look as though they have caught algae from a receding tide.

Of the species of the trees which grow either around the lake or on the slopes above it, the yew is probably the most impressive. They are very long-lived and thousand-year-old trees are quite common. The Illicium tashiroi, a relative of the magnolia and star anise, and the hemlock-not the small plant whose juice Socrates was condenmed to drink for teaching the youth of Athens to think, but the evergreen tree Tsuga chinensis—are also part of the forest community. Rhododendrons and berberis grow wild here as does a smooth-leafed cousin of the holly, the Ilex mutchagara. And tangled by the very margins of the lake are delicate pink roses, Rosa Philippeninsis, looking as if they had strayed from someone's garden.

It is the small river from the cave,  itself, however, which produces the strongest sensation. Among the  plant species living in its waters was found one hitherto unknown to man, the Sparganium fallax, an unassuming little plant that looks like a sturdy grass with tufts of seeds in the axils of its triangular stems. Around the lake and in the strip of tableland are many plants which look familiar—close relatives of plants found in other parts of the world. Oxalis and pellonia, wild raspberry, viburnum, woodwardia, polygonia and wolfs foot.

The cloud turns to rain and the wind picks up. All trees are "wind-trained,"  a reminder that despite the calm of our arrival this is a high mountain forest beaten by the elements where the tropical plants of the lowland would soon perish.

Here, for three weeks we  stayed—collecting and identifying flora and some fauna. Three weeks of cold and chilly days but warm sunshine.

Did we see or talk to any of the NPAs?

That is another story./michael bengwayan