The Joy of Birding: Inside Leg 1 of the QC Bird Race 2026 at La Mesa Eco Park

CameraHaus · Community & Events

The gates at La Mesa Eco Park open before most of Quezon City is awake. By the time the first buses are grinding down Commonwealth, a quieter kind of traffic is already moving through the trees — footsteps soft on the trail, a tripod balanced over one shoulder, a lens the length of a forearm cradled in both hands.

No one is in a hurry to talk. Ears go up before cameras do. Somewhere in the canopy, a call cuts through the morning, and a dozen photographers freeze mid-step at the same instant. This is what the start of a bird race actually looks like: not a gun and a sprint, but a held breath.

What the QC Bird Race Actually Is

The first leg of the inaugural Quezon City Bird Race 2026 was hosted by the Manila Water Foundation, the Quezon City Government, and the Wild Bird Photographers of the Philippines (WBPP), gathered under a single, disarmingly simple theme: The Joy of Birding.

It's a three-leg series, and it isn't really a contest in the usual sense. The race is built as a conservation project wearing the clothes of a competition — a way to celebrate Philippine birds, push ethical wildlife photography, and remind a fast-growing city how much life still lives inside its last green spaces. La Mesa Eco Park, thirty-three hectares of reclaimed forest on the edge of the watershed, is the kind of place that argument was made for.

Five Hours, One Forest

For five hours, more than 49 teams — over 100 individual racers in all — worked their way through the park's trails. The format is friendly but focused, judged in two categories that tell you everything about the culture behind it: Paramihan, for the most species photographed, and Pagandahan, for the single most beautiful bird photograph.

One rewards patience and legwork. The other rewards the one frame you waited an hour for. Together they capture the two halves of every wildlife photographer's brain — the collector and the artist — and for one morning, both had somewhere to go.

What the Morning Turned Up

By the time the teams came back in, the numbers told their own story about how alive this pocket of the city really is.

• 60bird species recorded
• 35avian families
• 17Philippine endemics
• 7migratory species

Thirty-six of those were resident species — the everyday regulars that form the park's ecological backbone. Seventeen were endemics found nowhere else on earth. And seven were migratory birds passing through, using this small forest the way travelers use a good stopover.

The morning's standout wasn't the loudest bird or the flashiest. It was the Ashy Thrush, a globally vulnerable Philippine endemic, recorded seven separate times across the day — a quiet, ground-loving bird whose repeated appearances are exactly the kind of sighting that makes conservationists sit up.

There were rarer, single-record surprises too: a Purple Needletail knifing across the sky, a Cinnamon Bittern tucked into the reeds, a tiny Pygmy Flowerpecker working the branches. And, holding it all together, the birds nobody drives across the metro for but everybody loves anyway — the Yellow-vented Bulbul and the Eurasian Tree Sparrow, thriving in plain sight.

You don't have to leave the city to find the wild. Sometimes you just have to get up early enough to hear it.

Learning the Craft

Between sightings, the race doubled as a classroom. WBPP ran a series of hands-on workshops through the day — an Introduction to Philippine Birds for newcomers, a Birding 101 session built around wild bird photography, and a walkthrough of post-processing techniques for getting the most out of a bird image after the shutter clicks.

It's a telling detail. This wasn't a race that only rewarded the people who already knew what they were doing — it was designed to bring new photographers in, hand them the fundamentals, and send them back onto the trail a little sharper than they arrived.

Beyond the Race: The "Birds of Quezon City" Exhibit

The learning didn't stop at the trailhead. Running alongside the race was the "Birds of Quezon City" Photo Exhibit at the La Mesa Eco Park Exhibit Hall — 33 photographs of endemic species captured across La Mesa, the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center, and the UP Diliman campus.

It's a smart pairing. The race sends people into the forest to look; the exhibit gives everyone else a reason to care. Seen together, they make the same point twice: Quezon City is home to 77 resident and 47 migratory bird species, and most residents walk past that fact every single day.

The Community That Shows Up

What doesn't fit into a species count is the feeling of the place. Birding looks solitary from the outside, but a race like this is loud with quiet generosity — a stranger stepping aside so you can get the angle, someone whispering the direction of a call, a screen turned around so a total newcomer can see their first endemic up close.

And the teams weren't only local. Racers had flown in from as far as the United States and India, all working the same trails toward the same birds — a small, telling sign of how far this community already reaches.

By the time the teams filtered back, the trailheads had turned into open-air editing bays: laptops out, photographers hunched together, comparing the frames they'd spent all morning chasing. That's where the scorecards quietly stopped mattering and the "did you get it?" took over.

CameraHaus on the Ground

CameraHaus spent the morning in the middle of it — not behind a counter, but out where the community was. That meant the small things that keep a five-hour race going, like snacks passed around to fuel the teams between sightings.

The part that mattered most to first-timers, though, was the gear. CameraHaus brought free demo units to the event — Pentax cameras and Kenko binoculars for birding — set out for anyone to pick up and use during the race.

It's a quietly big deal. Long reach and good glass are the whole game in bird photography, and they're also the biggest barrier to getting started. Handing someone a proper birding setup for the afternoon means a newcomer who has never held a super-telephoto or a pair of birding binoculars can step onto the trail and watch a distant bird pull sharply into focus for the first time. That first look tends to be the moment people are hooked for life.

Free to borrow on the trail: Pentax bodies and Kenko binoculars, plus the rest of the gear CameraHaus brought for participants to try.

Watch: Leg 1 in Motion

Some things a still frame can't hold — the sound of the forest, the scramble when a bird finally shows itself, the quiet focus of a full team working the trail. Here's the day in motion.

The full Leg 1 recap. Watch on YouTube →

A quick look from the trail. Watch the reel on Instagram →

Why It Mattered

It's easy to read "urban biodiversity" as a slogan. Leg 1 turned it into a headcount. Sixty species in five hours, in a park you can reach from the middle of Metro Manila, is not a small thing — it's evidence that a city can make room for the wild if it chooses to, and proof of what's lost when it doesn't.

That's the real work underneath the race. Every photographed bird is a data point. Every endemic logged is an argument for keeping this forest exactly as it is. The competition is just the hook that gets people to make the case with their own two feet.

On to Leg 2

Leg 1 set the bar high, and there are still two legs to go. If the first morning proved anything, it's that the appetite for this — for slow mornings, sharp glass, and a city worth protecting — is bigger than anyone expected.

Whether you're a seasoned wildlife shooter or someone who has never once pointed a lens at the sky, the next leg is an open invitation. Bring your patience. Bring your longest lens. And if you're still figuring out what that lens should be, that's exactly the conversation we love to have. See you on the trail.