PANAMA'S CANOPY TOWER
Canopy Lodge El Valle Extension

$3150 (2009 fee; ext. $1395). 8 days
From Panama City. Limit: 8
Good accommodations, easy terrain, warm climate. Our staff travel agents can book your air travel for this tour. Contact us at (800) 728-4953 for more information. Tour I may be combined with WILD PANAMA: BURBAYAR, MOGUE & THE HARPY EAGLE; Tour II with WILD DARIEN: CANA & CERRO PIRRE; and Tour III with WESTERN PANAMA.

See our triplist for March 2008b (extension) or March 2008 (extension) or February 2008 or January 2008.

Blue Cotinga, photographed at the Canopy Tower by guide Jay VanderGaast

One of the highlights of this tour, even for veteran Neotropical birders, is as likely to be the rewards of becoming a canopy-dweller, as it is the intimate views you will get of a becoming assortment of feathered canopy-dwellers—from electric Blue Cotingas to splendid Green Shrike-Vireos.  Our exhilarating site for the week will be the remarkable Canopy Tower <www.canopytower.com>, a former radar installation located atop Semaphore Hill that has been transformed into a marvelous birding facility.  Here, the hospitality and food are exceptional.  And the Tower serves as a strategically placed headquarters for visiting a variety of nearby habitats, especially Soberanía National Park and Metropolitan Park, as well as the Canal’s Miraflores Locks.

If you’ve never birded the American tropics, you’ll find that little is quite as exciting as coming upon: your first army ant swarm, attended—sometimes feverishly—by Ocellated, Bicolored, and Spotted antbirds, Plain-brown, Northern Barred-, Cocoa, and Black-striped woodcreepers, and Gray-headed Tanager; or a Cecropia tree full of frugivorous birds from Keel-billed and Black-mandibled toucans to Red-capped and Blue-crowned manakins; and lethargic species like trogons, puffbirds, and motmots that sit almost motionless, seemingly content to watch forest life go by.

When not enjoying raptors from the open-air observation deck or mesmerized by the hummingbird feeders at ground level, we’ll make day trips from our canopy perch along the Continental Divide to the justly famous Pipeline and Achiote roads on the Caribbean slope, or to the rich, semi-deciduous forest of Metropolitan Nature Park on the Pacific slope, home of Rosy Thrush-Tanager and Lance-tailed Manakin, and Tocumen Marsh, a Pacific wetland concentrating a number of mangrove and non-forest species.

Our tour is limited to eight participants in order to eliminate the confusion that sometimes ensues with a large group.  This way we are ensured of riding in the same vehicle when we travel to and from birding sites and of having a better participant-to-ornithologist/guide ratio in the field and at meals than with a cumbrous group of 14.  This is especially valuable on our night drive when everyone is able to be in the same open-air vehicle with the guide who is using the spotlight.  As with all Canopy groups, ours are accompanied by a local Tower guide who has the most up-to-date knowledge of the area and who is excellent at finding birds and quickly putting them in the spotting scope for everyone to see.  Yet in a small group our Field Guides can more effectively impart a wealth of knowledge that is otherwise difficult to get from those who have not had the breadth and depth of Neotropical experience that characterizes all our guides.  Based on the response from clients—who remark on the pleasure they take in learning so much about what they encounter—this intimacy and expertise are well worth a slight premium.

In addition, we’ll offer an extension to the Canopy Lodge, El Valle de Antón, located in bird-rich southeastern Coclé.  Our base of operations will be the lovely Canopy Lodge nestled under the watchful eye of an extinct volcano and within sight of the protected forests of Cerro Gaital Natural Monument.  Along the Lodge trails and in the surrounding area we expect to see a variety of foothill species.  Some of the most highly sought scarcities include Sunbittern, Rufous-crested Coquette, White-tipped Sicklebill, Tody Motmot, and even Rufous-vented Ground-Cuckoo!  We will also visit Altos del Maria, known for, most notably, Snowcap and the difficult Black-crowned Antpitta, among many, many other species.

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Field Guides Incorporated, 9433 Bee Cave Road, Building 1, Suite 150, Austin, TX 78733

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