Siloy Festival in Alcoy, and the Bird Cebu Almost Lost

At sixteen minutes past six in the morning the road to Nug-as is still blue. Not dark, blue. There is a small white chapel on a rise with one tree behind it and a line of power cables cutting the sky, and the light has not decided yet whether to be night or day. Alcoy is asleep on the coast below. The forest is another half hour up.

This is the drive most visitors never make. They come to Alcoy for Tingko Beach, they stop at the white sand, they go home. The town’s own festival is named for something that has never once been seen from a beach chair.

When is the Siloy Festival in Alcoy?

The Siloy Festival is held on the last Saturday of August. In 2026 that is Saturday, 29 August. The 2025 edition ran on 30 August, the same rule applied to a different calendar.

One caution before booking anything. Alcoy publishes its program late, and the dates circulating online in mid-August are frequently wrong, including dates that fall on a Sunday. Confirm with the municipal hall: (032) 483-9183 or 0942 874 9724. Checked August 2026. If the town shifts the street dancing to sit inside fiesta week, the hall will know first and the internet will know last.

The day itself is what a Cebuano town festival is. Street dancing in costume through the poblacion, a ritual showdown, food, and a coast road busy from morning. The costumes run black and dark blue, because the bird does.

What is a siloy?

Siloy is the Bisaya name for the black shama, Copsychus cebuensis. It is a small dark songbird, black shading to deep blue-black in good light, with a long tail it carries cocked. It exists on Cebu and nowhere else on earth.

You will hear it long before you see it, and most visitors only ever hear it. The song is a run of long, slightly out of tune, quavering whistles thrown from cover, and it has a habit of stopping the moment you turn your head toward it.

Which is the quiet joke sitting at the center of the whole festival. A town of nearly seventeen thousand people dances every August for a bird most of them have only heard.

The siloy is not endangered any more

Almost every page written about Alcoy calls the black shama endangered. Some say critically endangered. Both were true once and neither is true now.

The black shama was reassessed and downlisted to Least Concern in 2023. Population estimates now sit between roughly 10,000 and 16,500 birds. It survives in the Central Cebu Protected Landscape, in the forests of Alcoy and Argao, at Dalaguete, Tabunan and Boljoon, and in scrub around Casili and Consolacion.

That is not a technicality. It is one of the few genuinely good conservation stories in the Visayas, and it happened because people in barangay Nug-as decided to stop cutting and start guarding. A warden who used to hunt these birds put the change plainly: for fifteen years the shama and the hawk-owl stayed deep inside the forest, and now they turn up near the road.

The festival is not marking a loss. It is marking a recovery, which is rarer.

Nug-as, the forest holding it up

Barangay Nug-as is the largest of Alcoy’s eight barangays at 2,877.20 hectares, close to forty-seven percent of the municipality’s total 6,184.70. Inside it, the Nug-as and Boljoon secondary limestone forest runs to roughly 1,200 hectares and is the largest remaining forest patch on Cebu island.

It sits at around 750 feet. Standing under it at 9:23 in the morning, the canopy is high and thin-trunked and lets a lot of sky through, more cathedral than jungle, with vines hanging in curtains off the taller trees and red flowers in the understorey.

From the air the shape of the problem is obvious. The dark green forest is a patch, and everything around it is terraced farm, cut ground and roofs. Cebu did not lose its forest in one blow. It lost it in fields.

The part most visitors do not know is that this forest is not a declared protected area. It is held under a community-based forest management agreement with the DENR, which in practice means it is guarded by a local organization whose members are farmers. Around twenty-two wardens run monitoring patrols several times a week. Teodoro Amaca, a pioneer among them and a guide here since 2002, has explained the arrangement about as well as it can be explained: they have farms to attend to, but if they do not protect the forest now, who will.

A survey inside Nug-as logged 36 bird species and 14 separate black shama territories. Three of the birds there are found nowhere else on the planet: the Cebu flowerpecker, the Cebu brown dove and the Cebu hawk-owl. The flowerpecker is the one that matters most and the one you almost certainly will not see. It was considered extinct for most of the twentieth century.

How to go birdwatching in Nug-as

This is not a walk-in. Nug-as has no phone signal, so everything is arranged before you leave the coast. The forest sits at 9.7213° N, 123.4444° E, inland and uphill from the poblacion.

• Register with the Alcoy tourism office first. Municipal hall, Poblacion, Alcoy, (032) 483-9183 or 0942 874 9724. Ask for a Nug-as birdwatching guide, and get the guide fee confirmed on the call rather than trusting a figure online.
• Go before dawn. The birds are active early and go quiet by mid-morning, which means leaving the coast around 4:30 AM.
• Keep the group to about five. More than that and you are a noise source, not a group of observers.
• Wear dull colors. Earth tones, olive, gray. Nothing bright, nothing that rustles.
• Stop talking. The single biggest reason people hear nothing is that they are still finishing a sentence.
• There is a campsite. A semi-concrete structure built in 2017 sleeps about sixteen, with space for tents. Confirm availability when you register.

Bring water, long sleeves and shoes with grip. Bring binoculars if you own them, because a twenty centimeter black bird in a high canopy is not a phone-camera subject.

Getting to Alcoy from Cebu City

Alcoy sits about 92 kilometers south of Cebu City on the east coast road, between Dalaguete to the north and Boljoon to the south.

• By bus. From the Cebu South Bus Terminal, take any Oslob-bound or Bato-via-Oslob bus and tell the conductor Alcoy. Departures run through the day. Expect roughly two and a half to three hours. Fares on this route have moved since they were last reliably published, so treat online figures as a floor and ask at the terminal.
• By car. The same coast road, about two hours without stops.
• Uphill to Nug-as. A separate leg by habal-habal or private vehicle on a paved but narrow mountain road. Arrange it with your guide when you register.

You will pass under the Welcome to Alcoy arch coming from the north, and you cannot miss the cement plant conveyor running straight over the highway beside it. Alcoy is a cement town as well as a forest town, and the arch tells you both at once.

The other half of Alcoy

Nobody should drive three hours for one bird and go home. The coast is why Alcoy is on most itineraries at all, and the two halves make a good single day. Forest at dawn, water by noon.

Tingko Beach is the long pale strip running through Poblacion and San Agustin. From above it reads as three clean bands: white sand, a wide shelf of turquoise shallows, then a dark reef line where the depth drops. It is a public beach with resorts along it, so what you pay depends entirely on which gate you walk through. Small entrance fees at some points, none at others, and cottages across a broad range. Those figures are older than we would like and should be confirmed at the gate rather than off any page, including this one.

The water is clear enough that snorkelling straight off the sand is worth it, and the reef starts close in. It also means Tingko fills on weekends and holidays. Go on a weekday, or go early.

Offshore, the shelf opens into a broad submerged reef platform, visible from the air as a pale plateau ringed by deep blue with Bohol on the horizon behind it. That is the part of Alcoy almost nobody photographs, and it is why the fishing here has always mattered. Inland and north, Mt Campetra gives the town its sea of clouds, and Osmeña Peak is an easy add if you are already this far south.

Why the festival is worth the trip

Because it is not really about a bird.

Alcoy is a small municipality with a cement plant on the highway and a forest at its back carrying a species the whole island can claim and nobody else can. Holding onto that forest has been a choice made repeatedly by farmers who could have made a different one. The festival is the town saying so out loud, in costume, once a year, on the last Saturday of August.

Go up before dawn. Stand under the canopy. Wait for the whistle. Then go down to the water and let the day finish itself.

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Frequently asked questions

When is the Siloy Festival 2026?

Saturday, 29 August 2026. The festival falls on the last Saturday of August each year. Confirm the schedule with the Alcoy municipal hall on (032) 483-9183 before booking, because the town publishes late and third-party listings are often wrong.

What is the siloy bird?

The siloy is the black shama, Copsychus cebuensis, a small black songbird found only on Cebu. It is about twenty centimeters long, black with a blue sheen, and known for a long quavering whistled song.

Is the black shama still endangered?

No. It was downlisted to Least Concern in 2023, with an estimated population between roughly 10,000 and 16,500. Most travel pages have not caught up with the reassessment.

Can you actually see a siloy in Nug-as Forest?

Yes, but it takes a guide and an early start. Register with the Alcoy tourism office in advance, go before dawn, keep the group small, wear dull colors and stay quiet. Many visitors hear the bird without ever seeing it.

How far is Alcoy from Cebu City?

About 92 kilometers, roughly two and a half to three hours by bus from the Cebu South Bus Terminal on an Oslob-bound route.

Is Nug-as Forest a protected area?

Not formally. It is managed under a community-based forest management agreement with the DENR and guarded by local forest wardens, which is a weaker legal footing than a declared protected area.

What else is there to do in Alcoy?

Tingko Beach is the main draw, with clear shallows and reef close to shore. Mt Campetra above the town is known for its sea of clouds, and Alcoy works as a base for Boljoon to the south and Dalaguete to the north.