Bilar Man-Made Forest: It Looked Like Home

The view

This is the Bilar Man-Made Forest, which lines the road on the border between Loboc and Bilar, in the interior of the island. As the name suggests, people planted it, mostly with mahogany, as part of a reforestation effort that began more than half a century ago.

Tall, straight trunks crowd the slopes on either side, and the leaves meet overhead. The surprise, such as it was, was my own doing: I had been down a great many roads like it, none of them in the Philippines. Perhaps a road lined with nothing but broadleaf trees is a rarer sight here than at home. I do not know.

Worth a photo

My guide was not the only one who thought it worth stopping for. It was a working road, with cars, motorbikes and tricycles coming through, and two people at the edge were waiting for one to pass.

Moments later, they were out in the middle of the road with their arms spread wide, and someone was taking their picture.

To them, it was worth a photograph, and that made sense to me. Back in Chiba, I suspect, people pose under the palm trees for much the same reason.

From there, we drove on to the tarsiers.

Looking it up

Later, I looked up the trees.

Big-leaf mahogany, the tree mainly used to plant this forest, is native to tropical America, from Mexico down to Bolivia and Brazil. It was brought to the Philippines to help put back forests that had been lost.

Ecologists have a word for plants and animals that people have carried to places where they are not native. The word is exotic, and in their hands it is not always a compliment: exotics can be hard on the native species around them. Researchers have been keeping an eye on the mahogany here by satellite.