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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| 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
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