Upon arriving in Panama City just after one in the afternoon on Saturday, following a two-leg flight that began as a red-eye out of Portland, I was met at the airport by Lorenzo from Canopy Tower who loaded my bag into the bag of a van and off we drove toward what I expected might be a little “down time” in my room at the tower.
Then the call came in. It was Carlos, the chief guide at Canopy Tower. He was up on Pipeline Road with Jeff Bouton and the other participants of the Leica Digiscoping Workshop being held during the upcoming week at Canopy Tower. He had spotted a group of Western Night Monkeys huddled in a tree and knew I’d want to get a look at them.
In no time at all, I was swapping my travelling Birkenstocks for my “jungle Birks,” digging through my opened camera case in the back of the Canopy Tower van parked along Pipeline Road, and was off on into the forest.
Thus it began. Only two hours on the ground in Panama and I was already in the field staring through a Leica APO Televid 82 at a tree hollow out of which peered a furry face unlike any I had ever previously seen. The temperature was above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity was just a smidge below 100%, I had already been bitten by half a dozen things I couldn’t identify, and I couldn’t have been happier.
However the night monkeys weren’t to be the only treats that day. Stepping only across the forest trail, we found and photographed White-whiskered Puffbird (shown above) and made an attempt to call out a manakin or two. Hearing their sharp, popping wing-noises from just out of view in the dense foliage was a treat in itself – even if they were not to be tempted to show themselves to us this day. Not long after that, the assembled group was all staring in amazement at a Semiplumbeous Hawk that had perched ever-so-obligingly on a tree just off the road and thrilled to the sight of it suddenly bursting form its perch in pursuit of a passing flock of parrots.
Not content to visit just one of bird watching’s world class sites that afternoon, we drove over to the famous ammo dump ponds where we were able to view such superb birds as Rufescent Tiger-heron, Wattled Jacana, Yellow-headed Caracara, and more different species of flycatchers than I had previously seen in my entire life.
As evening fell, we headed to the tower for a delicious meal and the reading of the daily checklist of all the species we saw. Even with only entering the field in the mid-afternoon, I had personally seen forty-eight different species of birds that day. How many of these were life birds I do not know as of this writing; such calculations can wait until my return home. Sleep was foremost in my mind by this time and it was off to my room to feel the gentle cooling breeze of the electric fan blowing across by exhausted prostrate frame, there to drift off to a deep and much needed sleep listening to the frogs and geckos peeping just outside my window.
