Sunday bird blogging

There's cozy warm, and then there's steamy jungle hot, where your lenses fog up the minute you leave the air conditioning and your own perspiration soaks you to the skin.

Like Panama, for example, where I found this strange creature. I didn't post it at the time because I had no idea what it was; I went through my field guide a couple of times and didn't see anything that resembled this. Finally I just Googled bird Panama long tail, and found it right away: a squirrel cuckoo.

And I went back to the field guide and saw why I'd passed it by -- the drawing in the book shows the bird from the front, which is much more colorful, while I only saw them from the back. It was the description of their behavior which clinched the ID, though; they're called squirrel cuckoos not just because of the long tails but because they move through trees like squirrels. There were several of them in the bushes at my hotel, running along the branches and eating the flowers, and they did look just like squirrels.

Typical behavior for a species never helps me much with mystery birds in Central Park, where I can basically divide the birds into two categories: 1. Those that hop on the ground. 2. Those that don't.

Sunday bird blogging

Here's one of the few good bird photos from Panama. Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present -- the violaceous trogon!

And it's just as cool as its name.

Local wildlife

I don't actually have to go on supervised walks to see wildlife here. There were howler monkeys jumping through the trees outside my room, and here's a black vulture, a cattle egret, and several capybaras on the lawn of the main lodge.

I guess that's why they call it a "rain" forest

Heavy, steady rain all afternoon, but I didn't mind. I got to spend some quality time scratching the bites I acquired on the hike this morning -- I didn't actually see any insects apart from the leafcutter ants, but they were obviously there. I was wearing insect repellant, but the bugs apparently just thought it was a nice condiment for the delicious filet de Kathleen they were munching on.

I made coffee in my little kitchen (thanks for the free upgrade, Gamboa Resort!) and checked some emails, but mostly I sat on the balcony and watched the mists shifting over the trees through the veils of rain. It was like being inside of a cloud.

Chagres River

We turned back at the river. The water was choked with greenery along the banks, which were slippery mud. Though I slid down to the water's edge to get a clear picture of those canoes, I like the picture of the water taken from back on the trail. Dark, mysterious, jungly -- that's how it felt there in the trees.

Camouflage

I love this tiny frog. Its back looks like a leaf; when it jumped down to the forest floor it vanished immediately. If it wasn't moving you couldn't see it.

I've a feeling we're not in the Galapagos anymore

I signed up for a nature walk in the forest this morning. The air was thick and wet, smelling of mud and leaves and damp wood, as different from the sere, raw Galapagos as it's possible to be. 

We saw agoutis, huge rodents something like two-foot long guinea pigs with pink ears, leafcutter ants carrying stems and stalks many times their size, and enormous spider webs that made me grateful not to be encountering the spiders involved. I didn't take many pictures; the heavy canopy kept most of the light from reaching the trail, and keeping my footing and not tripping over the tree roots took most of my concentration.

Rain forest

I'm staying in Gamboa, which is about an hour outside Panama City. (In the picture of the canal below, if you follow the bottom section of the canal up to where it branches out into a "Y" shape, that's where I am. Hi!)

I'd arranged an airport pickup from the resort where I'm staying, so I found Jose standing outside customs with a big sign with my name on it. His English was only slightly better than my Spanish, but somehow we managed to understand each other pretty well.

It wasn't completely dark when we left the airport, so I got to see a little of the Pacific coast, and the ships waiting to enter the canal. There were at least a dozen, stretching almost to the horizon, in a neat line like schoolchildren on a field trip. Then Panama City, brand new towers of office buildings and expensive hotels, many still under construction, giving way to grittier streets, traffic, and crowds coming from a holiday celebration -- one of Panama's many independence days. (Jose told me but I've forgotten; this one may have been for independence from Colombia.)

My fingers itched to take photos -- a truck piled high with drums, a supermarket with no front wall, stalls selling fruits and vegetables, rusty balconies hanging over narrow streets. After a week of birds and sea lions, it felt good to be in a city again, and such a photogenic city at that. Clearly, I will have to come back.

The last part of the road to Gamboa was along the canal, and that was even better: container ships looming high above us in the darkness, like a Surrealist's steampunk dreams.

So I didn't see the view from my room until this morning, when the thick mist instantly fogged my lenses. But you get the idea. It's stunningly beautiful here.

A man a plan a canal Panama

This is an Envisat radar image of the isthmus of Panama from space, courtesy of the European Space Agency. The canal is just to the left of the center of the picture; you can locate the two ends of the canal by looking for the clusters of green dots above and below the land mass. Those are ships entering and leaving the canal, and the large lake in the middle is part of the waterway.

What I had never realized is that because of the way the isthmus curves, the canal is at an angle from northwest to southeast, and the Atlantic is on the northern, western end. So to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific, you travel to the southeast, which is completely counterintuitive. In parts of Panama, the sun actually rises over the Pacific.

I didn't see the actual canal when I was flying in from Guayaquil yesterday evening, just a few ships that seemed to be headed in that general direction as we approached the coastline. And for an unpleasant half hour or so I thought I might not get to see the canal at all.

Because I didn't have a pen.

One had broken early on in the trip, and another ran out of ink when I was trying to give someone my email address on the way back to Guayaquil. And I think the room service waiter at the hotel kept another one, because that's gone too. So although I usually have at least half a dozen pens in my various bags, and I always fill out any necessary forms on the plane to get it over with, yesterday I arrived at Panamanian immigration with nothing but a blank form and a hopeful smile.

Fortunately the very kind agent lent me her pen, and I filled out the form there. (The other passengers on my flight had long since vanished, so at least no one was waiting behind me.) Unfortunately, there was another hurdle -- Customs had its own form to fill out, and the bored woman behind the counter had no interest in helping me. She waved me off in the direction of a nearby counter, which had pads of custom declaration forms and nothing to fill them out with.

And while there had been dozens of airport shops before the immigration check, there was nothing between Immigration and Customs but linoleum. The only other passengers, a couple from Buenos Aires who were clearly very confused because they asked me -- a woman who was about to fill out the form in eyeliner -- for help answering some of the questions, didn't understand my very bad Spanish-plus-pantomime request to borrow one of their pens.

Finally, I noticed airport workers taking a break nearby and one of them, a man who will forever be one of my heroes, lent me his leaky Bic, and I was finally allowed into Panama.