Panama Blog #3 - Birding along Pipeline Road

Ground zero for birders of the world, Pipeline Rd. delivers incredible birdwatching opportunities any time of the day. In fact, our favorite sighting of the day was a toucan spotted at 1pm (for the non-birders out there...birds are most active at dusk and dawn but we stayed out all day and still had fantastic birding opportunities). We decided to spend our last days in Panama in Gamboa because you can walk to Pipeline Rd. and Soberania Parque Nacional straight from the town. Our first afternoon was spent wandering around the first mile or so of the road, which begins right next to the Panama Canal.

Panama Canal

 

One of our first birds was this guy (or gal). We still are not sure who this is; raptors are so hard to identify unless you are David Sibley! Could it just be a Coopers hawk? Not sure... anyone have suggestions? This hawk was flying right by the canal and landed on a telephone pole to take a closer look at us (in this photo he has his landing gear out). 

Panama is the land of the tanager and oriole! Here are some of the species we saw in a few hours of wandering around Gamboa (clockwise from the top left): Male crimson-backed tanager, blue-gray tanagers on feeder (male and female), female crimson-backed tanager, and yellow-tailed oriole.

We set out to spend our last full day in Panama along the Pipeline Rd, in the national park, and at the Panama Rainforest Discovery Center. It was a soggy day in the rainforest, but occasionally it stopped raining long enough for us to take our jackets off. Thank goodness humans are waterproof and that it was warm out - it didn't really matter to us that it was raining because the bird sightings were still out of this world.

Jay spotted this lovely butterfly that we think is called "the postman" butterfly. In terms of wildlife sightings, we had great butterfly and bird sightings.... I had been hoping to find a sloth, but I don't have a trained eye to spot one so it never happened. We probably should have hired a guide to help us spot other wildlife, but I think we did pretty darn well by ourselves. The B&B we were staying at in Gamboa, Ivan's B&B, was run by a super sweet man who had loaded his old Panama Canal house with bird books. So we spent our evenings pouring over their books and writing down the names of the birds we saw. Ivan would even join us, look at our photos, and help us identify the birds.

The rainforest discovery center had a neat tower that you could pay an absurd price for to climb up above the canopy. We sucked it up and paid. Shit - when else will I be in Panama? I've got lots of countries to visit. It wasn't a huge surprise that it was awesome up there. Lucky for us there was one other couple at the top with a smartypants guide who was pointing out birds to his clients and we mooched off his knowledge and spotted critters we might have otherwise missed completely (like the white-necked puffbirds) or not been able to identify (such as the snail kites). We stayed long after the other couple left, but didn't spot much after that because it had started to rain pretty hard and the birds probably hunkered down underneath the canopy.

Here are some of the other awesome birds we saw during our day around Gamboa (clockwise from the top left): Juvenile tiger heron (either rufescent or fasciated), purple gallinule, the ever-so-intelligent great-tailed grackle, gray-headed chachalaca, and a plain-brown woodcreeper.

Although every new bird was a highlight, we were pretty darn well blown away by a little wooden shelter in the rainforest that had about six hummingbird feeders. We got up there and couldn't pull ourselves away from the hummingbird insanity - we must have stayed for a few hours! They were everywhere! Fighting, feeding, fighting, feeding, and whizzing right past you so close that you felt like they would take out an eyeball. Pretty freakin' amazing! Not to mention that it provided great photo opportunities if you had the patience to wait for the right shot. 

 Julie and the hummers

Jay took the best photograph of the most common hummingbird at the feeders, the male white-necked jacobin.

Other species from the top left are the long-billed hermit, female something??, male white-necked jacobin, two male white-necked jacobins fighting, immature male violet-bellied hummingbird??

Jay discusses coffee and hummingbirds

On our way back from the hummingbird spot, we heard a loud bird overhead and after some time Jay finally figured out where it was. It was a keel-billed toucan - a bird we had been hoping to see all along. A great final sighting as we made our way back to town.

The morning we left Gamboa and headed the airport the sun treated us to a gorgeous sunrise over the Canal and the sky eventually turned from pink to blue. The bad weather was leaving the day we were leaving. Figures. While I think we will head back to Africa or Asia again for our next vacation, Panama was perfect for a close-to-home vacation that was filled with lovely people, great birds, good diving, and some entertaining bus rides!

Our photos and videos can be seen here: https://picasaweb.google.com/111221596171793333099/2014Panama?authkey=Gv1sRgCKusgJ2xj6u1WA

Panama blog #2 - islands, beaches, and rain

After leaving Mount Totumas we spent an entire day on the seriously amazing (compared to Africa and Asia) and well-organized Panamanian bus system as we headed southeast to the tiny surfer town of Santa Catalina. We had no plans to surf, however, because we were headed here in order to dive in Nacional Parque Coiba, known as one of the best dive sites in Panama. Divers called this spot the "Galapagos of Panama". Well - that might be a bit of a stretch! I've been diving in the Galapagos and they have these creatures called sharks. They have lots and lots of sharks in the Galapagos. Coiba had sharks, but the Galapagos had a SHITLOAD of sharks. Big sharks. Schooling sharks. Not just your white-tip reef shark sharks. The Galapagos were nothing like Coiba. The Galapagos win, hands down. But I digress. Coiba had some great dives loaded with big fishes (and yes, some sharks) and we thoroughly enjoyed our time here. Another plus was the quaint town of Santa Catalina which gave us our first chance to take in some sights of a Panamanian town along the Pacific coast.

Our day out diving along the shores of Isla Coiba also happened to be the day we had the best weather of our entire trip. No complaints here - this was the place to have the awesome weather. The beaches were gorgeous, we were chilly by the end of the dives and the sun warmed us back up, and we just like frying O.K.?

I wish I had remembered to bring our underwater camera housing, but I did not. I originally had it packed in our backpack. But, for safe transport, I wisely slipped the housing into an old bag for a pair of headsets labeled "JVC". When I wasn't thinking straight and I was trying to reduce the crap we were bringing, I glanced at the bag and asked Jay if he wanted to bring headsets with him and he said "nah". So out came the bag with the "headset" that was really our camera housing and there it sat on our couch while we were diving in Panama without it. Ergh....  So you will just have to imagine the dives without my help. But here is a great view of the spot where we ate lunch!

The important stuff to consume in Panama

Our first dive was near a rocky islet with strong current blasting around the backside. We jumped in and took our time taking in the sights of huge oysters, lobsters, corals, fishes, etc. This is not a coral reef - it is mostly rocky substrate with some hard and soft corals growing here and there. As we rounded a corner and really got ourselves into the strong current we also got surrounded by large schools of big and healthy fishes like jacks and trevally. I found this random YouTube video taken by someone else at this dive site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uswL7edyZ8A. That should give you a better idea of the site, although it doesn't look like they had much current. The current we encountered, on the other hand, was so strong that we had to hug rocks in order to stay in one place so we could watch the fishy show go by. White tip reef sharks commonly swam within an arm's distance to me, as did the blue trevally. Our second and third dives were less eventful - but awesome sightings included frogfish (three on one dive!) and seahorses. We loved the first dive and our lunch spot the most and after that we were just thrilled to be diving in wetsuits instead of drysuits and we lapped up the ease of diving in the tropics. Cold water diving is tough (40 lb. belt and loads of fleece) when you compare it to a eight pound weight belt and a thin neoprene wetsuit!

 Gorgeous Santa Catalina

We never planned on staying in Santa Catalina that long - it was a quick trip to get in our dive day and then we headed back out on the buses to get to a B&B where we planned to do nothing on a beach for a while. This image is a classic view from the buses where the bus dude hangs out the door and gets the driver to stop every 10 ft. to pick up another passenger.

My bag took a ride with some chickens. This was also different from Asia and Africa where the chickens tend to ride with the passengers and bags get tied to the top of the buses!

I had to include this photo because the situation cracked me up so much - it is certainly one I have experienced many times which is probably why I laughed so much. This woman (ten bucks says she is British, just a hunch) was trying oh so hard to ignore the group of Panamanian men that had gathered around her. As she wrote in her journal all the men would, not so discretely, watch her write. She tried to pretend this wasn't going on and they never really tried to pretend that they weren't watching her. The man in the Panamanian hat watched too - it was just when I took this photo that he looked up. The joys of travel and bus stations!

Playa Blanca! We arrived in the early afternoon after a strong rainfall cleared the skies for some beach time in the late afternoon. We had four days here.... two full days.... and of these four days the sun only came out to play for 1 1/2 days. This was a a bit of a bummer since this was supposed to be our Vitamin D time, but it was still lovely and relaxing.

The beach was a bright white sand, as promised by our research. But the guidebooks made no mention of the fact that most of the beach was bulkheaded and houses sat right on the spot where there should have been palm trees. So we ignored the bulkheads and stared out toward the Pacific instead; it was much nicer that way. Aside from the beach, we also scored on staying at an awesome place, Togo B&B. We opted to get the suite with the kitchen because we didn't have a rental car to easily reach restaurants, restaurants were too expensive anyway, and we make better food when we cook. So we stayed in a lot and enjoyed our hammocks, our swanky room, the fantastic owners of the B&B, the B&B cats, and the beach! After busy quarters in school and in his job (Jay) and sometimes stressful job times for me (Julie) - this was the important detox time we needed.

I gave up on cheap tropical beer because it just sucks. Admit it. It sucks. Sometimes it is lovely, but that typically requires a hot day in the sun. Since we didn't get that much, a piña colada ended up in my hand. It was tasty.

 Crabs! 

 Fishermen!

 Most of our weather! 

Apparently we wanted more rain because we decided to spend the remainder of our trip in a lower elevation rainforest. We headed to Gamboa via Panama City on a rainy day that just got more and more rainy. Here is a view of one of the buses along a highway as we were entering Panama City. My last blog from Panama will focus on our soggy but birdy times in Gamboa!