Wattled Broadbill
Definition
The Wattled Broadbill (Eurylaimus steerii) is a small, striking bird of the broadbill family Eurylaimidae, endemic to the islands of Mindanao, Basilan, Dinagat, and Siargao in the southern Philippines. Also called the Mindanao broadbill, it is unmistakable in its range: black plumage set off by a sky-blue bill and wattle around the eye and a bold yellow wing patch. It inhabits tropical moist lowland forest, where it forages quietly for insects beneath the canopy.
Identities (Wikipedia/Wikidata/DBpedia)
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wattled_broadbill
- Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q27075050
- DBpedia: N/A
Also Known As
Mindanao broadbill; Mindanao wattled broadbill; Steere’s broadbill.
Examples and Analogies
Broadbills are the forest’s quiet jewelry — rotund, big-headed birds that perch motionless like carved ornaments before sallying after insects. The wattled broadbill plays the same role in Mindanao’s lowlands that its close relative, the Visayan broadbill, plays farther north: the two were long treated as a single species, and their split into two is a reminder that the Philippines’ deep-sea channels have divided birds as effectively as they divided peoples.
Usage Scenarios
Birdwatchers seek the species in lowland forest reserves across Mindanao and increasingly on Siargao, where it is a star sighting of the island’s growing ecotourism. As an insect-eater of the forest interior, it also serves researchers as an indicator of lowland-forest condition, since it disappears quickly when the canopy goes.
Strategies
Conservation depends on retaining lowland forest — historically the Philippines’ most ruthlessly cleared habitat — through protected areas, indigenous community forests, and mangrove-to-montane corridor thinking. Because the species occurs across several islands, survey work on Basilan, Dinagat, and Siargao helps tailor protection where forest remains.
Security and Safety Measures
For the bird itself, the relevant safeguards are legal: it is covered by wildlife-protection law that forbids capture and trade, and by restrictions on logging within remaining lowland forest. For observers, standard field precautions apply in remote forest sites, from leeches to weather.
Historical Context
The species was described from specimens gathered during the nineteenth-century scientific expeditions that opened Philippine ornithology, honored in its scientific name for the American explorer Joseph Beal Steere. Twentieth-century collectors mapped its range across the southern islands, and modern genetics and voice studies confirmed its separation from the Visayan broadbill.
Challenges and Controversies
Lowland deforestation — logging, conversion to farms and plantations, and mining on Dinagat — steadily shrinks its habitat, and the species is regarded as vulnerable to these pressures. Its fate is a test case for whether the Philippines can conserve any substantial fraction of its lowland rainforest, not just the more easily defended mountains.
Related Topic
Visayan Broadbill