While my trip to Panama had two primary areas of activity – bird watching and digiscoping – I nevertheless also made it a point of planning to photograph as many butterflies and moths as I could. To that end I even packed my standard butterfly and moth camera rig: my Canon 40D mounted with an EF 100mm 2.8 L USM Macro lens. However when I arrived “in country,” it became readily apparent that the birdlife was so astonishing that it was difficult to shift my attention away from it long enough to do any significant butterfly photography. Thus while gigantic morpho butterflies (such as the digiscoped Common Morpho depicted below) angelically floated by, I would more often than not do little more than acknowledge their presence, spend a few fleeting moments admiring their beauty, and then turn my attention back to the bird presently being sought.
However even if I had made the effort to take a significant number of photos of the local Lepidoptera, I would have found myself confounded by the fact that there exists no field or identification guide (in English at least and quite likely not in Spanish either) to the butterflies of Panama. Needless to state, no guide to moths seems to exist either. Thus while I noted different varieties of morphos, a bewildering variety of sisters, and assorted peacocks, emperors, and skippers, specific identities could not usually be atributed to them.
I use the word “usually” as a qualifier due to a book discovered among the field guides in the library of Canopy Tower. Sandwiched among other useful guidebooks to the flora and fauna of the area was found a copy of The Swift Guide to the Butterflies of Mexico and Central America by Dr. Jeffrey Glassberg. Apparently not presently in print in the form available to my companions and I at Canopy Tower, the work nevertheless continues to live on through the website of Sunstreak Books. I plan to make further inquiries with this publisher and will report my findings accordingly; however those interested in obtaining a second-hand copy of the work as we discovered it in Panama might meet with success in searching the shelves of their favorite used book store.
