River Prinia

Small finchlike bird, actually more closely related to tanagers. Male is uniform slaty gray overall with no contrasting plumage features. Female is paler grayish with some buffy tones on face and blurry streaking on breast. Best feature on both sexes is bill: fairly long and very pointy. A nomadic bamboo specialist, difficult to reliably locate because populations move around to follow seeding Chusquea bamboo. Usually seen singly or in pairs; typically stays on or near the ground. Listen for stuttering high-pitched song.

Drab, medium-sized flycatcher with a long slender bill. Endemic to the central and southern Philippines, from the eastern Visayas south to Mindanao and Basilan. Look for a warm rufous tail, white throat, and diffusely brown-washed chest. Inhabits lowland and foothill forests, where it forays from a low perch in the understory or forest edge. Generally unobtrusive and difficult to spot in dark understory, but listen for its song, a jumbled series of high and squeaky notes often interspersed with short buzzes. Formerly grouped with Crocker Jungle Flycatcher and Sulu Jungle Flycatcher under “Chestnut-tailed Jungle Flycatcher.”

A large bird of lowland and foothill forest canopy, often near rivers. Somewhat variable plumage but has a long tail, bare, pink, facial skin and blue eyes. Adult, usually has a dark bill and gray-brown plumage, darker in the wing with some iridescence. Juvenile is grey with a paler head and a pink bill. Torresian and Brown-headed Crows have shorter tails. Somewhat similar to Channel-billed Cuckoo but that species has a longer bill and barring on the tail. Voice, an uncrowlike, relatively high-pitch, nasal yelping.