Our next stop on the tour was Selva Verde Lodge in the Caribbean Lowlands, where we hoped to photograph frogs, macaws in flight, and, of course, more hungry birds. The three-hour drive from Rancho Naturalista was uneventful, with the exception of a roadside sloth spotting. Arriving at Selva Verde Lodge It was raining when we […]
The plan for today was to make our way to Rancho Naturalista, where the main event would be something completely different from the bird photography we’d been doing so far: photographing bats in flight. We were also hoping to photograph snowcap hummingbirds. But first, some time at the feeders before breakfast. The drive took us […]
The plan for the day included two main activities: a hummingbird flash photography session at Paraiso Quetzales in the morning and another visit to the quetzal viewing area in the afternoon. We headed up to the feeders around 6am. It was a little dark in the forest, which made for some interesting images. After breakfast […]
Our day of Savegre Valley bird photography had two main parts. First we would do some hummingbird photography at a nearby garden, and in the afternoon we would stake out a wild avocado tree hoping to see the resplendant quetzal. The days started beside the Savegre River, where the sound of water rushing over rocks […]
An 8 a.m. start almost felt like a sleep-in. The goal for today was bird photography at San Gerardo de Dota, specifically, the Batsu Gardens in the Savegre Valley. Breakfast was pretty underwhelming, although maybe that was because we couldn’t stop thinking about the Denny’s next door. It was kind of funny when another hotel […]
The plan for our final full day at Tranquilo Bay Nature Lodge was an excursion through the Changuinola Canal in Bocas del Toro. The canal winds through mangroves, wetlands, and lowland rainforest, forming a quiet waterway that links remote forest habitats with Panama’s Caribbean coast. The region itself grew during the early twentieth-century banana boom, […]
After the long day on the mainland, today was supposed to be slower. For birding, that means breakfast at 6:30 instead of 5am. I would have been happy watching the capuchin monkeys in the trees around the lodge, but there were birds to see so it was back to the dock. The water that morning […]
The plan for our birding day trip from Bocas del Toro, as it had been explained to us the night before, was fairly loose. We would take a boat to the mainland and spend the day moving through several different ecosystems in search of birds. Breakfast was at 5:30 a.m., which meant the lodge was […]
For our final morning at the Canopy Tower, we returned to Pipeline Road. This time, though, the plan involved climbing an observation tower to view the rainforest canopy. The climb itself turned out to be easier than I expected. The tower swayed a little in the wind, which felt mildly unsettling, but not enough to […]
We woke to the sound of heavy rain. Not the brief tropical kind that blows through in twenty minutes, but the sort of steady downpour that settles over the rainforest and refuses to leave. Water hammered the roof hard enough that spending the morning in the open-backed birdmobile sounded considerably less adventurous than it had […]