The plan for today included snake and frog photography, or “herping” at Laguna Lagarto. But we’d had another sleepless night. Andy’s legs were covered in more bites than I could count, and mine had turned into bullet-shaped three-dimensional protuberances. The bites had also gone from a personal problem to a group-wide issue. Several others were […]
After breakfast, we drove about five minutes down the road from Laguna Lagarto for a king vulture photography session. The vulture photography hide is owned by the same people as the lodge. The walk in was muddy, and our group split between two hides. We chose the one slightly farther in and off to the […]
The plan for today was a short drive to our next lodge and some afternoon birding at Laguna Lagarto We were at the Selva Verde feeders by 6 a.m., and no, we were not the first ones there. The highlight of the morning was a motmot, which felt like a good way to start the […]
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 […]