(I don’t remember the sequence of events but it’s kinda like this.)

One day, while walking home from church with Jorey, we noticed how Singapore had so much birds and so many varieties. It reminded him of how, as kids, they’d shoot birds and eat them after. He said they used to shoot Mayas too and eat them. So I told him “Kinakain ba ang maya? Eh ang liit nun?” So that got me confused coz I never thought that the Maya was even edible. So one day, on the same road, this time I was walking with Jorey and his Dad, and his brother, I saw the little brown bird and said – “O, may maya din pala sa Singapore eh.” – which kinda confused me coz I thought national symbols should be more or less unique to your country. Jor laughed at me (I noticed his Dad smile) and told me that’s not the Maya but was what they call the malabalay (house bird) coz they usually nest in houses and they don’t eat them because those birds were full of worms.

This information was kinda hard to accept for me coz I’m pretty sure I learned that from school. It has been part of my knowledge foundation since grade 1. And I was pretty sure I was right because most of the people I know, know that brown bird as the Maya.

So last night over dinner with friends, we were talking about how you can differentiate probinsyanos from Manilenos. Promdi’s (not used in a deregatory way whatsoever) refer to dinner as supper (or maybe just in Pisay) and usually private school educated refer to elementary school as grade school… so this brought Jorey and I back to the Maya debate. He thinks ignorant city people like me think of that brown bird as the Maya. We even googled it and apparently a lot of Pinoys think the same thing I do which made it even harder for me to accept that Jorey could possibly be right.

He insisted that the bird in the Philippine stamp certainly did not look like the Maya that I know, but it looked exactly like the Maya that he eats. I even told him – maybe that’s because it’s just an artist’s impression.

So I did more research today and the answer is…

I was WRONG! And so are many many others.

That brown bird is the Eurasian Tree sparrow. It is not native to the Philippines but is in fact an introduced species.

So ignorant city peeps like me should make a tiny adjustment in our brains and change the association of the Maya bird to the correct one.

Check out these other sites:
http://www.bird-stamps.org/query/philip/maya.htm
http://www.birdwatch.ph/html/news/news20031214.html