Given it is the year of shoulder rebuild, for Dave, we decided to do a longer birding trip. After careful consideration of possible locations, we decided on Panama. It was a great decision. We flew to Panama city then grabbed a cab to the Canopy Tower. Here is the website: http://www.canopytower.com/canopy-tower.
The Tower is a decommissioned Radar Tower used by the US Air Force until it was handed back to Panama after the US's departure from the Canal Zone.
A guy bought it, added windows, rooms and other amenities creating a really amazing birding destination! It is bare bones, but still luxurious in its bare-bones kind of way.
There is a floor right below the roof that provides excellent views near the top of the tree canopy. This is also where all meals were served.
The rooms were small, but no one spent much time in their rooms. The fun was watching birds and critters. One could see plenty of those from their rooms too!
Panama has a ton of birds. More than we have in North America in a geographic region the size of South Carolina. It was amazing.
This is a Violent Bellied Hummingbird.
From the Tower, we could see the Panama Canal. This is a photo of a really beautiful bridge that goes over the canal as seen from the Tower.
This area was rich in Palm Tanagers. They never got old
Here is a photo of a cargo ship as it cruised along the Canal.
Panama has many types of Trogon. We saw all that were in the areas we birded. This beautiful male is a Violaceous Trogon.(I like the way spell checker is demanding I correct this spelling to Lascivious!)
There are species here - lots of them - that we have nothing like in the United States. We went at a time that all the North American birds had already gone north, meaning what we saw were primarily new birds for us. In total we saw 248 species - 217 of which were new for both of us. Pretty amazing.
This gorgeous male bird is a Fasciated Antshrike.
A Broad-Billed Motmot
Rufous-Tailed Hummingbird
A tree full of Orange-Chinned Parakeets. They were really entertaining!
Though not brightly colored, I really liked the Long-Tailed Hermit (tail not shown in this portrait).
White-Vented Plumeleteer.
Black-Striped Woodcreeper
Three-toed Sloth!
White-Chinned Puffbird choking down a lizard that really was far too large. It took him forever, with many forwards and reverses, but he was finally successful!
Collared Aracari. Really gorgeous birds!
The Black-Tailed Trogon.
A few more installments coming as we stayed at the Tower from 05_02_2016 through 05_09_2016 when we moved to the Canopy Lodge higher up in the mountains.
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