Panama - birding with an expert guide - Part 3

I like to prepare for upcoming bird trips by studying the species I'm likely to find and by reading as much as possible about the natural and human history of the places I am going to visit. However, lately I have begun to suffer from procrastination and a kind of attention deficit where I start to study and research and then about 5 minutes later, go watch TV, or have a nap, or sweep the carport. The biochemical brain circuit that would allow me to concentrate upon my desired subject seems defective, unable to stand much strain, liable to give out after a short session of effort. I blame this on my former occupation, thirty years of teaching English in public schools.  All the after-school, before-school and during-school marking of students' written work took a toll, according to my theory. Some vital factor wore out in my brain.

This is self-justification for my failure to adequately prepare for Panama. I learned a handful of birds, some tanagers, a few raptors, particularly the hawk-eagles, a few of the more conspicuous looking hummingbirds like the White-necked Jacobin and the Black-throated Mango, the icterids, mostly the pretty birds, but there were whole families I failed to study even in the most superficial way. The result was ... well, that's the story I am about to tell you.
On our third day in Panama Carlos took us to the beginning of Pipeline Road. The Americans cut this road partway through the isthmus during World War Two to service a pipeline that was never used. The road has become "one of the best places to see tropical forest birds in the Americas, with a species list exceeding 400" (A Bird-Finding Guide to Panama by George R. Angehr, Dodge Engleman, and Lorna Engleman, 2008). Once paved, now it's a rough track through primary and secondary forest. It crosses several streams and one way birders have seen allusive species is to use these streams as access,  wading along them deep into the forest as my friend Mike Force did with shipmates back in the 1990s during a hurried in-port. He tells of encountering a hostile troop of Red-mantled Howlers that roared and threw sticks and other objects at the birders. For a naturalist, such an interspecies interaction would be a high point, something exciting to remember.

Carlos had just directed our attention to some Snail Kites circling with Black and Turkey vultures when his cell phone rang. Another Canopy tour guide and his clients had spotted an army ant swarm at km 2.5 and attending it were two very hard-to-see birds indeed.

"Quick, quick! Everyone into the truck. Army ants and ground-cuckoos at km 2.5!"

Ground what? Ground-cuckoos? OK, here's the first time my lack of preparation kicked in. Ground-cuckoo sounded like an interesting bird, and we all knew at least in theory that very large mixed flocks of birds often attend army ant swarms, but I didn't know that the sighting justified Carlos's obvious excitement. The man is wonderfully enthusiastic, but wasn't he overdoing it?

Fig. 1 Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo. Photo by C Siddle

Here's what I didn't know: the genus Neomorphus has four species: Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo, Banded G-C, Rufous-winged G-C, and Red-billed G-C, and you would be hard pressed to find a New World bird genus less known than this one. All of them are found in huge tracts of South America jungle. The Rufous-vented is the only species also found in Central America north to Nicaragua. All of them survive only in very large areas of forest, and all of them appear to be naturally scarce. When Lake Gatun was flooded for the operation of the Panama Canal, a very large forested hilltop became Barro Colorado Island, and a forest reserve and research station for scientists from around the world, the Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo was one of the earliest bird species to leave the island, that's how much the bird needs isolation from disturbance and development.

Aside from being long tailed, large billed ground birds about the size of Greater Roadrunners (which are also members of the cuckoo family), almost everything remains to be discovered about ground-cuckoos. Nests remain unknown for the Banded and the Rufous-winged ground-cuckoos, and all that's known about the breeding of the Red-billed Ground-Cuckoo is that the nestling had buffy hair-like down attached to tips of its growing contour feathers on its head and that its bill is black. Because it occurs in Central America as well as South America, the Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo is the best known of this mysterious bunch but that's not saying much. It was only within the past 40 years that this species was discovered to have a nest at all, as opposed to being a nest parasite as some expected it to be.

So there we were newly arrived in a cloud of dust at km 2.5 of the Pipeline Road watching an adult Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo trotting around the edges of the forest through which army ants were swarming, picking up large insects and feeding them to its one offspring, a slightly smaller, darker billed version of the adult. Since I hadn't prepared properly for this trip, I failed to appreciate just how special this sighting was, even with Carlos and Michael, the other guide, telling us how lucky we were. Imagine my excitement had I actually known at the time that I was looking at birds, rare to begin with, behaving - feeding a juvenile - as very few people had ever seen them behave before.

Ground-cuckoo behavior around an ant swarm is well described in Volume 5 of The Handbook of The Birds of the World:

In the interior of forests of tropical America, the ground-cuckoos follow swarms of army ants, using the ants as beaters to flush insects. The cuckoo appears to wait until an ant swarm enters its territory, whereupon it follows the swarm as it passes through. as the ants move along the forest floor and insects scatter in their advance, the cuckoo waits on the ground or perches on low horizontal branches near the ground. On the ground, it then runs at the edge of the swarm, snaps up an insect or other forest-floor arthropod, and runs away in active bonding movements, changing directions, or it spins away; only occasionally does it flap, to get over a vine or to gain an elevated perch, but extended flight is uncommon. These cuckoos feed separately, usually with only one at an ant swarm...They are the largest birds in the forest which attend these army-ant swarms, where they appear regularly along with numerous other kinds of birds" (pp 527-8).

Being unprepared didn't devalue the experience of seeing the ground-cuckoo for me; however, being unprepared did change the nature of the sighting. I didn't realize the special qualities of the experience until after it had happened, until after I had been told how lucky I was and until after I had done some research that revealed to me just how fortunate I had been.

The army ants scurried randomly over the forest floor and we had to watch closely where we stood for fear of being attacked. "If you do get them on you, take off your pants immediately!" advised Carlos, though he neglected to finish his instructions, his attention caught by birds moving through the understory around the ants.



"Plain-brown Woodcreeper!" he shouted, but the woodcreeper I focused on wore fine black bars on his underparts. When I mentioned this to Carlos he glanced at my bird and said, "Northern Barred Woodcreeper too!" Eventually we added a Cocoa Woodcreeper to our list of the mixed species attending the ants. I had especially wanted to see woodcreepers, and three species in one flock exceeded my expectations.

Bicolored Antbirds of both sexes were common. Right in front of me a Spotted Antbird grew agitated for some reasons, flared its tail, raised its crest and revealed a pale area on the centre of its back. What's that about, I wondered. Nearby were three larger, much calmer appearing birds standing still on the leaf litter. These were Ocellated Antbirds, much larger than the Bicolored Antbird, Spotted Antbird and Dot-winged Antwrens, with pretty blue elongated spectacles and handsome black back feathers scalloped with fine buff edgings.

While the ants swarm over the ground, the birder is busy, really busy. He might be watching a bird through his binculars, letting them hang to take notes, making sure he has written, say, Bicolored AntBIRD and not AntWREN nor AntTHRUSH, lifting his camera to take pictures of any bird tame enough to stand still for a moment, checking the resulting images in the viewer of his camera, making sure he's standing clear of the ants, lifting binoculars again to peer into the shadows and between the branches for more birds, trying to untangle the binocular strap which has twisted around the camera strap, all the while craning his neck and his back at torturous angles to try to see around leaves and other objects that obscure his view, and avoiding bumping into other birders who are also attempting to do two or three things at once.

Fig. 2 A Spotted Antbird. Photo by C Siddle

On a sapling above me a Northern Barred Woodcreeper paused in its hitch upwards to flick its left wing partially open. This movement scared the ants scurrying down the stem over to the right side of the bark. Then it flipped open its right wing to send the ants back to the left side. It swiftly picked something - a little bug, an ant? - off the stem. Was it in effect herding the ants or had I just seen a couple of random wing twitches? Was this a hunting technique or was the bird just twitchy? Here was something else to make note of and search for in the reference books. (But that's for some other post.)

We ended our visit to Pipeline with sightings of White-shouldered Tanagers, a Scarlet-rumped Cacique, and a Slaty-tailed Trogon, among other birds.

In the mid afternoon we visited the former zoo at Summit Hill, now an animal rehab centre. Three caring volunteers brought out their young animal charges, a Tamandua looking very clean and smart in his brown and soft gray pelage, as if he were wearing brown bib overalls, a Geoffroy's Brown spider monkey wearing his Pampers, and a sleek dark brown Kinkajou, an arboreal relative of the Raccoon.
While we listened to the rehabilitators' stories of the difficulties of caring for wild animals in Panama which has no history of animal rehabilitation, and until recently, little history of conservation, we were cautioned not to reach out to the animals. With so much cuteness right in front of us, it was hard for some of us to resist, especially when the animals observed no such ban on touching and reached out various furry arms, legs, and noses to us.



After some of us cleaned out our wallets in donating to the animal's expenses, we moved next to a palm , the bottom edge of its canopy drooping a little. Here Carlos showed us four Common Tent-making Bats, small dark bats with thin pale stripes on their snouts. In order to make themselves a suitable roosting place the bats chew at specific points on the undersides of palm fronds. The fronds droop, the bat has a temporary home in the shade. Researchers theorize that tent-making allows small bats to save energy. Instead of flying long distances to the plants they are feeding on which are scattered through the forest, the tent-makers can spend the day hidden near their food source.

Summit Hill has a captive Harpy Eagle, possibly the most magnificent bird of prey in the world, certainly one of the world's rarest raptors. Like ground-cuckoos, the Harpy Eagle needs huge areas of undisturbed forest in which to hunt sloths and monkeys. With resource exploration and extraction, such isolation from human development grows ever more rare these days. One of the causes of Harpy Eagle decline is shooting. Such a huge bird offers a target that many people find hard to resist. Fortunately through the efforts of several organizations such as the Peregrine Fund, people throughout the Harpy's range are being educated about the value of this wonderful bird.

The Harpy Eagle at the Summit enclosure has a large flight cage but today the bird, a captive-bred female originally hatched in Florida, was perched next to the viewing platform. Unlike most hawks and eagles the Harpy has facial disks, rather like those of an owl, which aid in pinpointing sounds of potential prey. The Harpy Eagle hunts from within the canopy; it is not a bird that soars high over the forest like a Red-tailed Hawk would soar over forest edges back home.

Fig. 3- Captive Harpy Eagle at Summit Hill. Photo by C Siddle

We toured the grounds and added a pair of Masked Tityras, Lesser Kiskadee, and Yellow-headed Caracara to our lists before being driven back to the Tower for supper.

On 18 February a real treat was seeing a wild Tamandua climbing through the forest trees next to the Tower first thing in the morning.

We spent the morning walking the Plantation Trail which is accessed from the bottom of Semaphore Hill Road. Along the trail we saw White-tailed and Black-tailed trogons, a Broad-billed Motmot, a Crimson-crested Woodpecker, Chestnut-backed Antwrens, Western Slaty Antshrikes and an adult and a juvenile Sunbittern. On our return to the Tower we saw a Double-toothed Kite perched near the building.

In the afternoon, after a short visit to the Canopy Bed and Breakfast in Gamboa, we birded around the Gamboa Rainforest Retreat on the shores of Lake Gatun. Here we saw Variable Seedeaters, Greater Kiskadee, Gartered Trogon, and two Southern Lapwings along the lake shore.

On 19 February we spent the day along Pipeline Road, eventually having a picnic lunch several kiometres in at Rio Mendoza. Special finds included a Speckled Mourner, a rusty colored forest species that vaguely resembles a cross between a small thrush and a flycatcher. The Birds of Panama, A Field Guide categorizes the mourner, along with becards, tityras, piprites and the schiffornis as "incertae sedis" or of uncertain relationships within the passerine (perching birds). One thing that a person quickly learns about Neotropical ornithology is how much remains to be worked out. Take the tribe of woodcreepers for instance. There are many widespread species, like the Olivaceous Woodcreeper, that have several subspecies. In the case of the Olivaceous Woodcreeper there five groups of subspecies. Many of these populations look alike but have distinctive vocalizations. It is likely that as research continues the Olivaceous Woodcreepers, and several other species including the widespread Buff-throated Woodcreeper,  will be "split" into multiple species.

Our best bird of the 19th was, in my opinion, not the Purple-throated Fruitcrows nor the Black-striped Woodcreeper which were both good, but the Great Tinamou which Karl spotted as we were getting out of the vehicles at one spot. The bird was a couple of metres inside the jungle edge, all but invisible in its gray-brown plumage. It was absolutely still. Most of us managed to get decent photographs of the bird by searching for "tunnels" in the vegetation down which we could focus our lenses. I was also happy that we didn't flush the bird. It was still in its original spot when we finally drove away.

Other new birds included a strange flycatcher called the Brownish Twistwing, which turned out to be singularly well-named for it was brownish and it occasionally flipped one wing at a time up above its back, perhaps to startle insects into revealing their locations. Apparently at least four other flycatchers share this wing-lifting behaviour including the Ochre-bellied, Olive-striped, Sepia-capped and Slaty-capped flycatchers. Lunch was enlivened by a tanager flock that included Tawny-crested, Bay-headed, and Carmiol's tanagers. My big miss was dozing in Charlie's Toyota pick-up while the some of the people in the open-canopy birdmobile ahead of us spotted a Great Currasow fly off the road during our return to civilization.

Fig. 4 - The young orphaned Tamandua at the Summit Hill rehabilitation facility. Photo by C Siddle. 

Send comments to my email ay chris.siddle@gmail.com

Panama - birding with an expert guide. Part 2

Panama - birding with an expert guide. Part 2.

16 February 2014 - the second day of Avocet Tour's Panama expedition, with Carlos Bethancourt as our guide. This morning was our first opportunity to watch the sun rise. I was so eager for the experience that I crept up the Tower's staircases just after 5 AM. The building was dark. I was too early even for the staff - the fourth floor was pitch dark and the kitchen was empty. No coffee. I like to start my day gently with silence (of which there was plenty), a good book or my journal (I had both clutched in my hands) and a cup of strong, sugary coffee. Clearly I would have to wait for the coffee.

Figure 1. This whiskery cutey is a White-whiskered Puffbird waiting for a lizard or large insect to make itself known so he can snap it up and beat the living bejesus out of it and then swallow it. Semaphore Road, 16 Feb. 2014 Photo by Chris Siddle

About 5:30 the first noise reached my ears. It was a roaring, a drawn out guttural, rageful bellowing. Howler Monkeys! These are fair-sized New World monkeys, the males equipped with enlarged throat sacs and cartilages in their tracheas that resonate and amplify their voices all in the service of marking the troop's territory. "We've got this patch. Stay away!" the males seem to be roaring from the tree tops at other distant noisy troops. One morning I could hear four troops roaring in the national park around the Tower, three to the north and one to the south. Back in the Okanagan I'm pretty sure two of my neighbours who succumbed to boomer-lunacy and bought Harley-Davidsons so big they can barely them hold upright are going for the same audio effect each morning and evening when they rev their engines.

I returned my books to my room on the still silent second floor and climbed all the way back up to the roof. Dawn was diluting the dark. Birds were beginning to stir. This was it!

I am afraid that I have fallen victim to the hype that generally surrounds canopy walkways and towers. I fell for the promos in tropical Queensland and I fell for them in Peru. Now, once again, in Panama I had set my sights too high. It's like I expect dozens of species of exotic jungle birds to flutter around me in blissful ignorance of my existence like several pages of the local field guide come to life. The reality, that of some birds flying by and a few birds feeding in the canopy depending upon which flower is in bloom or which seed or fruit is ready to eat at the moment, always disappoints me a little. However, with several opportunities to view sunrise or sunset, I felt the Canopy Tower over the course of a week came closest to satisfying my elevated dreams.

Each morning and evening a pair of bright green Mealy Parrots would fly by closely together, one individual slightly ahead of the other, obviously more deeply attached to each other than your average pair of birds. I am not a romantic. I don't care a fig whether a pair of birds mates for a lifetime or for three seconds. In fact, one of the most irritating questions non-birders ask me is "X species (swans, eagles, small-vented scaley plodders, etc.) mate for life, don't they?" as if expecting birds to be more capable of long term monogamy than we are. My answer, "Hey, if most humans can't manage to stand each other for a lifetime, why do you think birds can?" never seems to satisfy the person who asked the question in the first place. That said, I have to admit I do have an soft spot for parrots. Long-lived, individualistic, and cranky, when one parrot pairs with another often their mutual bond touches my heart. They stick so closely together. This pair of Mealy Parrots, flying in such proximity that it seemed as if their wings must touch, skimmed over the canopy following the same route as they had yesterday morning and will follow tomorrow morning crying loudly their croaky, squeaky ode to joy.

Figure 2. Fasciated Antshrike, a slow and deliberate forager of the understory. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

By 6:30 other guests were joining me on the roof. The Green Shrike Vireo began his three note chant. A Blue Cotinga was a beautiful surprise. A female Summer Tanager, uniformly yellow-green, appeared briefly but a Golden-headed Tanager, much more elaborate in various colors, stuck around for a while. Other birds included Red-lored Parrots, slightly smaller than Mealys, a Squirrel Cuckoo, a Violet-bellied Hummingbird, White-necked Jacobins from the feeders four floors below, and a Dusky-capped Flycatcher.

We spent the morning walking down Semaphore Hill Road. We progressed until the something interesting - a stream of leaf-cutter ants, the large earthen-looking arboreal nests of the Aztec Ant, the national tree of Panama, a Morpho butterfly-  caught our interest. Life forms were so diverse and so amazingly abundant than we walked only 400 m in four hours!

The forest was is a mix of huge veterans standing among much younger jungle. One could almost hear the plants competing for light. Vines climbed and draped and hung, some so large they matched the thickness of small trees back home. Airplants grew luxuriantly from every possible coign. Some leaves were huge, bigger than umbrellas.

Snuffling in the leaf litter was my first Nine-banded Armadillo. A few metres farther down the shaded green road a mother White-nosed Coati and her baby crossed the narrow pavement. The kitten or cub or whatever a young coati is called was missing half its tail. On the downslope a small troop of White-faced Capuchins moved through the mid-canopy, avoiding our party.

Birds included an Olivaceous Woodcreeper, a Southern Bentbill, two male Slate-colored Grosbeaks, a Black-crowned Antshrike, a Ruddy-tailed Flycatcher, a Blue-crowned Manakin, Dusky Antbirds, a Spotted Antbird, a pair of Dot-winged Antbirds, a Broad-billed Motmot, White-flanked Antbirds, a squat and stolid little White-whiskered Puffbird, a loudly singing Black-bellied Wren, and a Gartered Trogon. It was Tropical Birding 101, the introductory course, with a wide and diverse selection of birds that previously we have seen only in field guides or possibly not at all.

Our afternoon was equally amazing but with an emphasis on wetlands. Carlos took us to the famous (in Panama birding circles) Ammo Ponds, which is to say that we stood on a paved road crossed by a closed sliding chain-link gate controlled by a man in a uniform inhabiting a guardhouse. He ignored us and we were too busy looking at the birds to pay much attention to him. Occasionally an official looking pickup truck pulled up, he opened the gate to let it in, but always the gate closed soon after.

There was one pond to our left with a 20 metre buffer of thickets and trees between us and the water. To our right was a fringe of jungle and ahead to our right was a second pond, but overgrowing with thicket grasses and brush. We could see only one end of it by peering around the corner of the gate. This small, fenced in spot may seem like a poor excuse for a birding spot, but it wasn't. As in the morning, we were once again busy keeping track of the birds we saw: Red-crowned Woodpecker, like a small Red-bellied Woodpecker, obvious a member of the large Melanerpes genus. Panama doesn't have many woodpeckers. As far as I could see in our limited travels, the Red-crown was the most frequently encountered.

Figure 3. Rufescent Tiger-Heron. A juvenile at Ammo Ponds 16 Feb. 2014. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

As with any damp and semi-open spot flycatchers crowded in: Boat-billed, Social, Piratic, Streaked, and Dusky-capped flycatchers, as well as flycatchers called by other names such as the ubiquitous Tropical Kingbird and Great Kiskadee. The tyrant flycatchers are the largest family of birds in the New World and the largest family in Panama with at least 93 species present. Many are named for the colors: white, gold, sulphur, yellow, yellow-green, greenish, ochre, ochraceous, sepia, rufous, vermilion, olive, olivaceous, yellow-olive, bronze-olive, tawny, ruddy, rufous, rusty, brown, brownish, gray, slaty, sooty, dusky, black, and my favourite, the ever-so-specific 'bran-colored".  Many have 'flycatcher' as a common sort of surname, but others are named for their vocalizations like pewees, phoebes, and kiskadees. Several are named for the family's tendency to be bossy: tyrants, kingbirds, attila, and piratic flycatcher, while some are bossy but small: tyrannulets, and another favourite, pygmy-tyrants. Pygmy-tyrant! In a mere two words a character has been created. Some seem to have been named for accidental injuries: flatbill, bentbill and twistwing, but, of course, there are morphological and behavioral reasons for these names. Sometimes, and I love this, the species' name seems to reflect the taxonomist's exhaustion at dealing with so many drab little flycatchers. Take the Mouse-colored Tyrannulet. What colour is mouse-color, pray tell? Or how about the peevishness reflected in naming a bird the Paltry Tyrannulet?

Figure 4 - Green Honeycreepers, commonly seen from the top of the Canopy Tower. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

Variable and Yellow-bellied seedeaters flew to the marshy edge, while an adult Green Heron perched quite still above the water. Orange-chinned Parakeets rocketed overhead. We were to get good looks at the parakeets a few days later. A pair of Mangrove Swallows were investigating and open pipe on the gate as a possible nest site and a newly fledged Black-throated Mango juvenile was visited by a female. I overheard a couple of British birders discussing a "ruddy huge bittern" so I wasn't completely surprised when I spotted a pale juvenile Rufescent Tiger-Heron not long out of the nest. It still had a few downy feathers clinging to it. In the marsh edges were a Greater Ani and several Smooth-billed Anis, as well as Great-tailed Grackles and a Northern Waterthrush.

Rod Wark spotted a large mammal walking into openest part of the overgrown pond. This turned out to be a Lesser Capybara, likely the second largest rodent in the world (the Greater Capybara beating it by some pounds). It looked like a square-headed light brown beaver atop four long legs. It had a short mud bath then disappeared into the brush.

On the roadway and its edges were a few Buff-throated Saltators, Clay-colored Thrushes, Ruddy Ground-Doves and a White-tipped Dove, the same sad-voiced little pigeon common along the Lower Rio Grande in Texas.

Overhead were the ever Black and Turkey Vultures, and Gray-breasted Martins as well as a few Short-tailed Swifts and two Ospreys. Jen spotted a very large multi-colored squirrel - a Variegated Squirrel.

Before we left we added Crimson-backed Tanagers, Blue-gray Tanagers, Yellow-rumped Caciques, Rufous-tailed Hummingbirds, Baltimore Oriole, Tennessee Warblers, Red-legged Honeycreepers, a Common Tody-Flycatcher, two Golden-fronted Greenlets, two Blue Dacnis, a Mourning Warbler, and a Yellow-crowned Euphonia to the list.

Two of the final birds of our second day in Panama were a Ringed Kingfisher, the first of several we were to see, rattling over us at the foot of Semaphore Road and a Great Tinamou crying its weird, slightly Common Loon like quavering whistle from the forest surrounding the Canopy Tower at dusk.

Note - in my discussion of flycatcher names I omitted "elaenia" as one of the common "surnames'. The elaenias are common and widespread in the Neotropics and deserve mention but for the life of me I was unable to find out the derivation of the word "elaenia". Can anyone help me?

If you wish to comment on this post please do so via my email: chris.siddle@gmail.com

Panama - birding with an expert guide. Part One.

Panama - birding with an expert guide. Part One.

30 December 2013 - The forest was silent and full of snow. No movements, neither wind nor birds, disturbed the winter scene. I sighed and silently repeated the well known line from Richard III, "now is the winter of our discontent..." as so many other Canadians had done this season. Most people were unhappy with the unusually cold and severe weather that had plagued the nation, at least those parts east of the Rockies all the way to the last rock east of Newfoundland. To borrow from Shakespeare again, the winter winds had blown and cracked their cheeks, keeping at least nine of the ten provinces huddled beneath winter's frigid blasts, and even B.C. unseasonably cool for months.

Fig. 1 - The Red-mantled Howler Monkey, the species responsible for the impressive roaring that rose from the forest 30 mins. before dawn each morning. We spotted this male along Pipeline Road near the Rainforest Discovery Centre. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

As usual the Okanagan Valley had escaped real Canadian winter, whether its residents realized it or not. Oh, sure, there was the usual whining and whinging about how cold it was in Vernon, but, really, -20 or -25 C for a few days is nothing to complain about. But still I was unhappy, not because of any misconception that the winter was any harsher here than usual but because of one simple fact - the woods were almost empty of birds. Go for an hour's walk through the Douglas-firs and Ponderosa Pines and you would be hard pressed to find a flock of chickadees. Even Red-breasted Nuthatches which last winter were everywhere were hard to find. On a good day this winter one might turn up a couple of Golden-crowned Kinglets, maybe a Pacific Wren but there were few or no Pine Grosbeaks in the lowlands, no siskins, precious few goldfinches, only a scattering or individual Red Crossbills. The list of absent and missing went on and on.

And here I was deep in the woods along Highway 33 helping friends Mike Force, Tanya Seebacher, and Ann Gordon with the Big White Christmas Count. By the end of the day we could have written our complete day's list on a post-it note, and the day's best sighting was not of a bird, but of a Short-tailed Weasel which apparantly had taken up residence in a snow-covered pile of discarded Mule Deer bones. Happy is the weasel that can gnaw away all the winter long.

At the post-count gathering in a dingy pub in Rutland, the four parties compared their results. As usual Doug Brown had come through with the better birds, for he is willing to take on the longest and toughest routes, but even with Doug's list the count failed to stir any positive feelings within me. I was gloomily regarded the dregs in my cup of hot chocolate when Chris Charlesworth who runs AVOCET TOURS out of Kelowna said that he had to wait only six weeks before he was off to Panama.

Fig. 2 - Panama's Canopy Tower. Single rooms are on the second floor. Double-rooms are on the third. The fourth floor is the lounge, commons and dining area. Stairs led from the third floor to the tower's deck, around the big white soccer ball. Photo by Chris Siddle. 

"How many people have signed up?" I asked.

"Only four, but that's enough to cover my immediate costs. I'm really looking forward to those colourful Panamanian birds and some nice hot weather. I hate the cold."

Then I heard myself say, "Hey, would two more be a problem on the trip? I think I can talk Sonja into going."

This was a sudden high hope borne of desperation, but with only the minimum of whining, I was stunned when Sonja agreed that I should join the tour but that she wasn't interested in what she knew would be a hard core birding holiday. She checked Panama online but could find little that would offer her entertainment while I was stalking the rainforest paths. However, if I could find the money, I was free to go.

My copy of A Guide to the Birds of Panama by Robert Ridgely was a revised first edition from 1981. I could do better so I ordered Angehr and Dean's The Birds of Panama (2010) as well as Angehr, Engleman and Engleman's A Bird-Finding Guide to Panama (2008). I already had a subscription to the wonderful online resource, HBW Alive so I  spent the next few weeks printing colour plates of Panamanian birds based upon the plates from The Handbook of Birds of the World (16 volumes). All one has to do with HBW Alive is look up a bird family, apply the geographical filter, in this case Panama, and at the press of a computer key a plate of species is produced, with or without common and scientific names. It's a convenient way to learn one's birds before the trip, though I think flash cards made by cutting up an extra copies of a foreign field guide ultimately work better for me. (I can hear the shocked intake of breath. Cut up a book? Cut up a field guide! Yes, darling, they do print more than one copy of the book. Ever visited a book warehouse? Ever shopped in a bookstore that sells remainders?)

On 14 February, 2014, Chris Charlesworth, Candice Eikermann, Rod Wark and I met at the Kelowna Airport for the first of the flight that would land us in Panama City the next morning at 8 AM. Shirley Coffin of Trail joined us in Seattle and we picked up the last three members of the tour at a hotel near Panama's Tocumen Airport, Margaret Bryan of Kelowna, and Karl Brunner and Jen Dusting of North Vancouver. Candice, Rod, Margaret and I were old hands with Chris's tours, while Shirley, Karl and Jen were new clients. Karl and Jen were new to the world of birds and birding. Boy, were they in for some surprises!

Chris Charlesworth had put two years of planning into this trip and it showed. He had booked our accomodations with the famous Canopy Tower company, who picked us up at the airport and looked after us for our entire stay. No details were too small for the staff. We had excellent food, good rooms, good transportation and a world-class bird guide as well as several other bird and nature guides at our disposal every day.

The Canopy Tower has been covered so frequently in the media that I won't go into detail about it here. If you're interested, check out the company's website which includes a profile of the company's president, Raul Arias de Para, a gracious man who ate several meals with us at the Lodge. After his purchase and conversion of the United States radio/radar tower in Soberania National Park into a hotel in 1995, he built the Canopy Lodge near El Valle in the highlands west of the canal. We stayed in the Canopy Tower for 7 nights and the Canopy Lodge for 4 nights. The only disadvantage to such first-class treatment where a highly efficient staff looked after us is having to return to everyday life at the end of the vacation. (And, of course, having to navigate the petty officious complexities of grubby airports makes one's return to everyday life just that extra bit nasty.)

When we arrived at the Tower we met out bird guide Carlos Bethancourt. Carlos is Panamanian and proud of his country. He's also very personable. Over the next 12 days he was to prove to be the consummate professional. I have never seen anyone as able to spot birds, often very small green or brown birds, in the dense understory or high in the canopy of the forest and get a  scope trained on them as quickly as Carlos does. And I swear he is a bit of a magician for once a bird was visible in the scope, it usually stayed still long enough for 7 other people to see it. I have done my share of guiding and I have carried a scope since 1976 but in the three days that I attempted to find tropical species alongside Carlos I was an absolute failure. I was still adjusting tripod legs and hadn't even tried to find the bird in the scope yet by the time Carlos was set up and showing people the Purple-legged Scalp-tingler or whatever. From Day 4 onwards, unless we were scheduled to go near a pond or to the coast, I left my scope in my room and trusted Carlos would find the birds far faster than I could. However, I did notice that Chris Charlesworth was rapidly learning Carlos's techniques and by the middle of the tour we could count on at least two scopes on the bird. In addition, other guides from the Canopy company, like the excellent Moyo or Cesar, the raptorphile, were often along to provide an additional scope and excellent identification advice.

The great thing about the tower, aside from the good food and excellent service, is its flat roof-deck poking up in the middle of an otherwise unbroken forest canopy atop Semaphore Hill in Soberania National Park. At the very least one one can witness the fast dawn of the tropics, see the distant city of Panama and the Canal and hear the deep roaring of Red-mantled Howler Monkeys, the frog-like croaks of Keel-billed Toucans, the screechings of Mealy  and Red-naped parrots, the vireo-like song of the Lesser Greenlet, and the three clear whistles of the devilishly hard to spot Green Shrike-Vireo. Some of the easier to spot birds might include the Plain-colored Tanager, Green Honeycreeper, and a wintering Bay-breasted Warbler or two. A pretty and loud song might be coming from a Palm Tanager, three of which liked to forage around the railings of the deck. As the day warms Black and Turkey vultures pass overhead, a local Short-tailed Hawk often hidden among them. It always pays to check vulture kettles: on our first day I spotted an adult King Vulture among them and the next day at noon figured out that the very large raptor high above, showing only traces of light color in its wingpits, was an immature King.

For the next two hours every dry morning it's one surprise after another, depending, I suppose, upon the season and which trees are flowering or bearing ripe fruit near the Tower. Mammals that we spotted in the canopy during our seven day stay included a Northern Tamandua, a Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth, a Variegated Squirrel, and Geoffrey's Tamarins, bare-faced little primates with naked dark faces and extravagant chestnut mullets.

The staff at the Tower feed hummingbirds with a series a feeders near the main entrance on the first floor. While we were there the most common hummingbird was the large White-necked Jacobin. We got used to seeing the purple-headed males flashing the large white tail patches at each other while they competed for places at the feeder. Since most Panamanian hummers are predominately green, I greedily tried to turn the green female jacobin into a new species for my checklist, but more knowledgeable birders prevailed and corrected my misidentification.

A single Long-tailed Hermit appeared at the feeders once every 30 minutes or so. This hermit is the Long-billed Curlew of its tribe with a long thin impressively curved bill as well as long white central tail feathers. What a beauty.

Fig. 3 - Most tanagers are colourful but not the well named Plain-colored Tanager, common around the Tower. Photo by Chris Siddle

I was lucky enough to be one of few guests to glimpse a White-vented Plumeleteer, a medium-green hummer with a black tail and white undertail coverts.

After a day to recuperate from our all night flight from Las Vegas to Panama, we were ready for Carlos Bethancourt to lead us on our first full day of birding in the field.

To be continued.

Send comments to chris.siddle@gmail.com

Our Hunt for the Daffy Duck

This is the story of a twitch and the lessons that emerged from it.  Most of you know what a twitch is but for those who think it means an involuntary muscular movement usually of the face, please know that a twitch in the birding world is a fast trip to see a rare bird. The bird is usually one that is out of its usual range, a stray, a "vagrant" as we call it, and though some rare strays adapt to their new homes and stay put for long periods of time, most vagrants occur at the location of discovery only a day or two and then disappear for places unknown. Thus speed is of the essence. That's why the decision to make a twitch must be done quickly and why the trip almost always has a rushed feeling.

OK, it's not a Baikal Teal. It's a male Cinnamon Teal near Vernon in June, just beginning to lose his spring finery as he starts his molt into female-like eclipse plumage. 

My friend Chris texted me Saturday morning, 8 March just as I was starting my exercises in the basement of my Vernon home. "I'm feeling twitchy" he texted, and since I had checked the B.C. Rare Bird Alert the night before I knew he was referring to a Baikal Teal that Russ Cannings had spotted near Nanaimo Friday. I shared the text with my wife Sonja who immediately pointed out that it was March, a relatively quiet time for birds in the Okanagan and that I didn't seem to have anything important on for the weekend, so why didn't I go for it. "You'll travel thousands of miles for a Colima Warbler. What's 1000 km for a Baikal Teal?"

Indeed, why not? I texted Chris that I would pick him up at his apartment in Kelowna in about an hour and fifteen minutes, which I did. And sharing the driving of my wife's trusty 2000 Subaru we braved the Coquihalla Connector which was nice and dry and then Highway 5 where the rain began, as usual, where the toll booths used to be. As we descended into the Fraser Valley, the rain moved through a sleety state of steadiness, through heavy to a monsoon deluge and for the next three and half hours the wipers were slapping away on high while we hydro-planed down Highway 1 to Horseshoe Bay where we were lucky enough to squeeze onto the 5 PM ferry to Nanaimo.

Once snug in our hotel room, Chris phoned Russ who arranged to meet us the next morning at a coffee shop not far from the fields where he had spotted the teal Friday and early Saturday morning. The good news was that the rain was forecast to stop overnight.

Sunday was time change day. This event threatened to rob Russ of an hour of the sleep that young men find so sweet, so he postponed our meeting. No problem: we followed the instructions on the B.C. Rare Bird Alert to the farm lane which led to the field where the Baikal had been feeding with North American Green-winged Teals. A large yellow front-end loader blocked the lane. Propped against the machine was a piece of cardboard requesting people to stay out because the farmers' cows were calving. As Chris and I regarded the sign two shotgun blasts originating from the very field we sought ripped the early morning peace asunder. Interesting cows, I thought, that can be lulled into giving birth by surprise gunshots but abort upon the sight of a scope-lugging Tilly-hatted birder. Curious country ways.

So no guide, no access, and waterfowl taking fire from unseen sportsmen. We consulted our B.C. Rare Bird notes again and walked  rocky path down to a lookout overlooking the Nanaimo estuary from the side of Highway 19. In the next hour we were joined by about 25 other birders, most of them on a Brant festival trip from Victoria who had stopped by as the news of the errant teal spread so that even 70 year olds without computers were hearing of its occurrence. Russ appeared and addressed many of us, telling us the story of the teal. Then as gently and diplomatically as possible Russ dropped the H Bomb.

H stands for hybrid, and a hybrid is the very bad news indeed for a lister. A hybrid may be the product of the mating of two attractive and fascinating fowl, but it counts for naught, because it isn't pure one thing or the other. Hybrids are freaks, unvalued violations of our unwritten code that species should stick to their own kind. Say a Spotted Towhee produced a nice healthy offspring with a Dark-eyed Junco. The resulting bird may be pretty and fill your yard with unique warbles and pretty trills and the mating might be of interest to a scientist, but what does a lister do with the bird? There's no place on his list for it.

Russ explained how he was scoping the original Green-winged Teal flock back on Friday when BAM there it was, a Baikal Teal drake in breeding plumage. Being one of the younger generation inseparable from his cell phone, he phoned his father, ornithologist, Richard Cannings, who opened a field guide and described to son Russ what the field marks were. Son, unfortunately, focused on the duck's body, more than its head, and so for a little while it seemed to be a "good bird" though the length of the bird's tail bothered Russ. Later when someone produced a photograph of the bird taken from a distance, people, including Russ began to worry about the bird's face. The facial pattern just didn't look right, not the long narrow white slightly flattened circle bordering the bird's face, surrounding a big green crescent behind the eye, and two tan commas facing each other and separated by a thin black line below the eye.

Chris and I saw one photo of the bird. The bird looked too big, its neck too long, and the facial pattern all wrong. Although we tried scanning from Duke Point at a second location that morning, we didn't find the bird. Eventually we had to start for home. The duck was seen Sunday, late in the afternoon, but by then we were driving through Hope.

It's interesting and perhaps understandable that the first birders who responded to Russ's immediate phone calls to the birding community didn't question the bird's identity. Several of these heavy hitters unthinkingly accepted the bird as a Baikal Teal, high-fived each other and moved on. It is to Russ's credit that he and a few others looked critically at the meagre photographic evidence available on Friday and Saturday and started to worn birders that the possibility that this birds was a hybrid existed.
For Chris and I however the warning came too late, but that's a risk twitchers face.

As a retired teacher, I ask what can birders learn from the Baikal Teal episode. Well, carry a field guide that shows the vagrants that have reached our shores. By chance a new guide has just been published, The Rare Birds of North American. It would fit in the car nicely.

Secondly, study field guides like The Rare Birds of North America. Be prepared. Learn which vagrants are most likely to occur in your area. Do you know, for example, that there are multiple records of Brambling, a Eurasian finch, in British Columbia in winter and that your chances are much higher of encountering a Brambling than say a Lucy's Warbler, which is a native North American but lives in the deserts of the American Southwest. Another stray you could reasonably expect is the Little Bunting, much, much more rare than the Brambling, but also easier to overlook. It would be awfully easy to misidentify a Little Bunting as some kind of native sparrow unless you had studied the bird's plumages ahead of time. Studying foreign field guides for places like northeast Asia prepares the birder for the unexpected.

Thirdly, if you do encounter a bird that may be a rarity, get as many photos of its from as many angles as you can, and take field notes to record the things that may be subject to the vagaries of light and shadow. Note behavior, colour, pattern, vocalizations, as well as external factors like time of day, foraging habitat, and weather.

Fourthly, make as few assumptions as possible. And most importantly don't assume because most of the birds in a flock are American Green-winged Teal, for example, that all the birds in the flock are Green-winged Teal. Look at every single bird possible. Here's where studying plumages ahead of time pays off. The more you know, the faster the bird that is different will stand out.

Fifthly, if you strongly suspect that you have a bona fide rarity, get on the phone fast to alert other birders so that they can see it too. However, if you aren't sure about the identity of a bird may be bring in just a buddy or two to have a critical look before you alert the nation. This is much easier said than done, of course, and I do not mean to suggest a criticism of Russ Cannings in this paragraph.

I am writing this on Monday, 10 March, 2014. For all I know further photographs will reveal that the Nanaimo Baikal Teal is the real deal, perhaps wearing some obscure, seldom shown immature first winter male plumage and everyone who saw it will be satisfied. There could be a happy ending for some of the twitchers. However either way, whether the duck is pure Baikal or a daffy looking mix of Baikal and some other duck, my points about being prepared will still stand and if practiced will make you a better birder.







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