A Trip to Panama

A few pictures from a trip to Panama in August, 2005. Organized by Victor Emanuel Nature Tours and guided by the extraordinary Tony Nunnery, a few of us explored El Valle on a pre-trip to El Valle for a few days before joining the main group at the Canopy Tower for the next week. Pretty hot and steamy for this desert boy, but not much rain and few annoying bugs during the euphemistically named 'Green Season'. All in all, over ten days wandering through such well-known birding areas as the Pipeline Road, Achiote, Plantation Road, Tocumen Marsh, etc., we saw or heard almost 300 bird species, various monkeys, sloths, coatimundis, lizards, bugs, and all kinds of other flora and fauna.
A trip that more than met my expectations; I'd recommend a VENT trip with Tony (maybe his Hummingbird Extravaganza in Ecuador?) to anybody serious about seeing good birds and having a great eco-trip.
For these pictures, I used my 4 megapixel Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ10. Once I got home, I waded through the more than 350 pictures to pick the better ones, cropped/resized/adjusted them with Paintshop Pro, and arranged them for this site. There are many more pictures in my head (that fabulous 'smoke ring' spider web,the Pheasant Cukoo display, and superb views of the Rosy Thrush-Tanager and Ocellated Antbird come immediately to mind) and a few of the photographs could be better, but the point of this trip was the birds and photos were a distant (but important) second priority.

Click on any of the thumbnails below to see a larger view of any of the pictures in a new window.




Raúl's El Valle
guesthouse

Crimson-collared
Tanager

Red-legged
Honeycreeper

Male and Female
Honeycreepers

Fabulous flower

Honeycreeper and
Clay-colored Robin
on the feeder

Tropical Peewee

Another flower

Jungle View

White-lined Tanager
preparing to bathe

Now that's a bath!

View from the Crater

Blue-Gray
Tanager

Ruddy
Ground-Dove

Yard
Lizard

Rufous-tailed
Hummingbird

White-necked
Jacobin

Hummer

Hummingbird
(Flash)

Flame-rumped
Tanager

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