Birding in Panama - Episode 2, Rainforest Discovery Center

Hi everyone, welcome back to the channel and welcome back to another video in my series based on my trip to Panama. So I am in the Gamboa region of Panama right now and this morning I've come to a place called the Panama Rainforest Discovery Center. This looks like a really neat birding spot. I'm on this entrance path that you have to walk about 10 minutes to get to the main birding area so I thought I'd take the opportunity to do an introduction to the video here. I don't know how many people are going to be around there. This location has two things that I'm very interested in. The first one is some hummingbird feeders and you would think maybe that every place around here would have hummingbird feeders but it's really not the case and I found that was the case in Costa Rica as well. People don't really put out hummingbird feeders like they do in the United States at least. The other thing they have that I think I'm even more interested in is an observation tower and this is not one of those, you know, little 12-foot tall towers that you see in some parks in the U.S. This is a huge one with 174 steps that rises all the way up out of the canopy and you can sort of go up and see the different levels of the rainforest as you go up. So that is going to be my first stop because I want to get there before it gets too late in the morning when the birds are really active. I haven't been here before so I don't know exactly what to expect but I will take you along and we'll see what we can see here today. It looks like a really cool spot. This is the small welcome center where I paid my ten dollar entry fee. Just to get to this point required a two-mile drive on a very bumpy gravel road which my Uber driver was fortunately willing to do. And here is the path to the main birding area where I filmed the intro. I picked up my first new bird of the day along this path, this mealy amazon. This is one of the largest parrots in the world and apparently one of the loudest as well judging by these calls. Once I reached the entrance to the park I headed for the observation tower and huffed and puffed my way up the 174 steps to the top. I was rewarded by expansive 360 degree views over the top of the rainforest. The first bird I spotted was this scaled pigeon, another personal lifer and a new channel bird. The channel lifeless total is the number in the lower right hand corner of the screen. That's all the birds that I've shown well in these YouTube videos. At one point the pigeon was kind enough to turn around so I could see the unique scaly pattern on the breast. Quite a beautiful bird actually. I also spotted this partially hidden perched raptor. With the help of Merlin and my field guide I was able to identify this as a crane hawk. The long bright red legs are a good field mark for this bird. It can be hard to find and get good looks at raptors in the tropics so I was quite happy about seeing this bird. A few minutes later I spotted another raptor in flight. This turned out to be a snail kite, a bird that I had previously seen in Florida. Note the very sharp down curved bill which they use to remove snails from their shells. One other very distant bird that I photographed from the tower was this blue dachnus. Not a very good shot but you can see what a neat shade of blue it is. This is the view from part way up the observation tower. You can sort of see how the rainforest is divided into different levels and you can find different birds at different heights above the ground. My next stop was the visitor center building which has the hummingbird feeders as well as the only bathrooms in the park. There was also a naturalist on duty here and she gave me some good advice about where to bird in the park. I was quickly able to pick up this beautiful male white-necked jacobin. I saw this species in Costa Rica several years ago and I actually have a photo of one from that trip hanging in my bathroom at home. It was nice to see one again. These are female white-necked jacobins. I must say that I was slightly disappointed that this was the only hummingbird species that was coming to the feeders here given that there are at least 15 different species found in this area. At some point a raptor flew into a tree just above the hummingbird feeders causing some excitement. The naturalist was not immediately sure what species it was. Eventually we figured out that it was an immature yellow-headed caracara. This species is common in Panama but it's usually found in open areas rather than inside the rainforest. It can be tricky to identify a bird that's in an unexpected habitat. Next I headed out on a forest trail that was recommended by the naturalist at the visitor center and I was really glad that I did. Okay so just a quick update. I've already been to the tower and to the hummingbird feeders and you'll have seen what I saw there. I'm doing a path now that kind of goes through the deeper rainforest and it's the kind of path where normally you don't see a lot you hear a lot but I have found this one spot here where there's an ant trail going right across the trailer. There's a line of ants and there's a lot of bird activity in this area. I just picked up three species. I don't even know what some of them are to be honest. I need to identify them and you'll see that on here but you know they're flitting around eating the ants and very active in this area which is kind of cool. So this is what you really hope for when you're in the jungle. You'll go a long ways without seeing anything and then you'll find like a pocket of birds that are that are eating something. So I'm just going to hang out here and see if I can find anything else. The most common bird in this mixed flock was gray-headed tanagers. There were several of them flitting about and eating the ants. This black-crowned ant shrike was a nice find. It was definitely more shy than the gray-headed tanagers which were flying around almost right at my feet. I was excited to see this bicolored ant bird even though it is a fairly common bird in Panama. Ant birds are a rather large family of passerine birds found throughout the tropics but this was my first time seeing any of them. This plain ground woodcreeper was kind enough to perch motionlessly for me. Something that was very helpful in the low-light conditions of the rainforest. You can't really tell from this video but it was very dim along this trail which made photography a challenge. This tiny ruddy-tailed flycatcher is a really cute little bird. It has large eyes which is an adaptation to the low-light conditions that I was just mentioning. This northern plain xenapse is actually a type of woodcreeper but much smaller than the plain ground woodcreeper. The last bird that I found in this mixed flock was this handsome red-throated ant tanager which I had also shown in my first Panama video. So that was an exciting stop. I was able to identify and photograph seven bird species in that location eating the ants. Five of them were lifers. Okay I'm leaving that area where the ants were crossing the trail now and one thing I wanted to mention is that I'm using the Merlin sound app here in Panama. So IDing birds by the sound and up until today that had worked perfectly. You know it was really very effective. When you start it up here in Panama you get a message that says that Merlin is only able to identify something like 60 percent of the birds in the area but up until now when I've been around my hotel grounds and so on it's picked up everything. This trail here is the first time there have been birds floating around making lots of distinctive sounds and Merlin has no idea what they are. They don't appear at all so I'm not complaining. It kind of is a neat feeling that I'm like off the beaten track and you know kind of on the edge of the ID frontier a little bit. So I will certainly be able to identify those once I get back to my hotel room with the field guide. Just a few minutes later I heard something large moving along the ground close to the trail. I thought it was going to be a mammal of some sort but it was actually a pair of great tinamou, a large game bird that walks along the forest floor. Due to the low light and the heavy vegetation I really struggled to get good photographs of these birds unfortunately. Great tinamous are fairly uncommon and hard to find so I felt pretty lucky to come across this pair. At one point the trail led out to an open area next to a river. This made a nice change from the dense forest although I didn't see many birds other than a few mangrove swallows. Back on the trail I came across another really tiny bird called a southern bentbill. Then as I was finishing my loop and approaching the visitor center again a larger bird with a long tail flew into a perch over the path right in front of me. This turned out to be a broad-billed mutt-mutt. The long central tail feathers with paddles on the end of them are a distinctive feature of mutt-mutts. I thought it had flown away but it had actually just relocated to another convenient perch right next to the path. I was able to get some other birders on this neat bird and we watched it for quite a while. It was a very confiding bird as the British say. I even took the opportunity to get a close-up shot with my long lens. At this point I was getting hungry and a little tired so I started to head back out of the park. On the walk back out I found one more good bird species a small group of greater anny. I'm actually surprised that this video came out as well as it did because it was getting cloudy and the birds were hanging out in a little opening in some very thick vegetation that seemed to be as dark as a cave. I actually find with my camera that the main problem with low light conditions isn't the image quality it's the autofocus struggling to stay focused on the Okay I've been here at the Rainforest Discovery Center for about four and a half hours now and I'm on my way out walking on the access road towards the entrance where I'm hoping to be able to call an Uber. Not sure if I'm going to have cell phone reception or not I need to figure that out but it's been a great visit. I hope you've enjoyed all the birds that you were able to see. I was a little concerned about getting footage and photos of a lot of birds. You know you can come out to the rainforest where it's very thick and hear a lot of things and glimpse a lot of birds but sometimes it's difficult to get photo ops but I think I was able to see and photograph enough to make a nice video so I hope you enjoyed it and I'm going to have more videos from Panama. I'm not sure how many I don't have it all planned out yet but please do stay tuned for I think at least one more maybe more and thank you very much for watching. I appreciate it and I'll see you in the next one.