Every good day of bird watching begins with a healthy breakfast. At Los Quetzales Ecolodge in the small town of Guadalupe, Chiriqui, Panama, this includes bananas. Fresh bananas – kept on their original stalks and hung over the breakfast buffet. The only way to get fresher fruit is to go out and pick it directly from the tree, which in the Chiriqui province of Panama, wouldn’t require a very long trip at all.
Well fed and ready for the day, we grabbed our gear and prepared to load into the vehicle for the drive to Parque Nacional Volcán Baru. However before we could even get that far, we stopped to view a few birds visiting the lush gardens surrounding Los Quetzales. These included Black Phoebe, Sayornis nigricans, Green Violet-ear, Colibri thalassinus, Slaty Flowerpiercer, Diglossa plumbea (a bird with a curiously shaped, can-opener like bill that allows it to puncture the base of nectar bearing blossoms to feed upon the sweet bounty there to be found), and a pair of Long-tailed Silky-flycatchers, Ptilogonys caudatus. Nothing like a few life birds to round out a balanced breakfast.
Arriving at Parque Nacional Volcán Baru, Chiriqui, it became apparent to me that two things were to be absolute necessities on the trip: a rain jacket and a telephoto lens. The first I had, the second I did not – something I intend to remedy at the first opportunity (in which I find myself with a spare $1,500.00 that is). Regardless, off we set up the hill into the cloud forest in search of what is perhaps the holy grail of definitively existing bird species: the Resplendent Quetzal, Pharomachrus mocinno.
Did we find it? Stay tuned…
Peace and good bird watching.
Other “members of the expedition” also blogging about the Panama la Verde Birding Circuits trip (all of whom did have telephoto lenses):
Bill at Bill of the Birds
Jeff at Jeffery A. Gordon
Mike at Birding to the EDG
