calyptura.com

A busy start to 2011 - shipping from Panama to Cartagena, Colombia

Added 14th January 2011

It seems to be a poorly known fact that the so-called Pan- or Inter-American Highway comes to an abrupt halt in eastern Panama. The mountains, jungle and swamp of the Darien region of eastern Panama and the Choco region of westernmost Colombia have so far prevented a road being constructed. Although the technology to overcome such obstacles of course exists now, in recent decades this area has been a primary hideout of the guerillas and drug-runners of the region, presumably discouraging either country from planning a possible surface route through. Consequently all travellers have to ship their vehicle around this obstacle.

We have just completed this fascinating is somewhat time-consuming process, and below is a brief photo journal of the day we "stuffed" (a technical term, no kidding) our vehicle in the container port at Colon, Panama, at the northern (Atlantic) end of the Canal, for shipment to Cartagena in north-western Colombia. This is the favoured route of most travellers by virtue of being so short (and therefore relatively cheap).

We spent a full day in Panama City getting a police check and related paperwork done, during which time we met various others trying to do the same, including a Mexican-Brasilian couple, a German-Paraguayan couple, and a Belgian-German group. The first of these was shipping with the same company as us, and we went through much of the process together.

They were grateful for the company as they had had a terrible time staying in Colon trying to get their shipping organised. In one week they had something stolen out of their truck, they suffered an attempted armed robbery (which they survived unharmed when locals came and the bandits ran) and they had a traffic accident (not their fault apparently, as they were rear-ended). We managed to avoid all such misfortune by staying away from the notorious Colon and basing ourselves outside Panama City, where Anne did most of the organisation via email.

After another full morning of organising customs and shipping paperwork at the port itself, and following a full security check complete with sniffer dog, we could finally drive in to do our stuffing. We passed about ten rows like the one above, where containers went as far as the eye could see. As big as it appears close up, remarkably Colon is only the 48th largest container port in the World, and is less than a tenth the size of some of the biggest that we have seen from a more typical distance, like Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Pusan.

We were only in one part of the container port. This is a view from where we were stuffing our vehicle, across the water to another equally huge section where a ship (at the left) was being unloaded.

Well here we are, ready to go in. Salvador and Delfina's pick-up (our Mexican-Brasilian friends) was first in, to the small 20' container on the left. For our vehicle we had a 40' high cube (in shipping jargon), the largest available option, but even then we knew it would be tight.

Very tight! On the side where our awning is mounted, we had just over an inch to spare getting past the door. But these guys do this all the time, no problema.

And she's in, with a good two inches to spare on each side! We would like to say we had been smart, and purchased a rig that was just small enough to fit into a container, but the truth is we didn't even think about this, given all the other factora that we had to consider. In the end we got lucky.

Being unable to open the door, the driver was just able to climb out of the side window, then over the bonnet (hood) to the front of the vehicle, to crawl out underneath. He finally emerged, hot and dusty, as his colleagues started to tie the vehicle in place.

And then the long wait for a customs officer to come and finally approve the shipment before the door could be sealed. Here the trucks sit, utterly dwarfed by the massive cranes that load the containers onto the ships.

After another hour's wait, the truck gets sealed in and is ready to go.

There was a constant stream of lorries and giant lift trucks moving containers everywhere. For those who have seen the film "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the whole scene was eerily reminiscent of the ending of that movie, when the Ark is shown disappearing in a packing container in a vast US military warehouse! Hopefully we will reconnect with our vehicle in a few days time in Colombia, and she doesn't vanish in the same way as the Ark.....

Our month in Panama 

Added 14th January 2011  

Although we seemed to spend a lot of our time in Panama online organising shipping the vehicle to Cartagena and some time planning for Colombia, we did manage to fit in plenty of birding of course. Despite the non-birding distractions, we greatly enjoyed Panama, finding it to be the best developed of the countries of the region, while still being distinctively Central American, and yet surprisingly inexpensive (much cheaper than Costa Rica for example). In all respects it was the Central American country most reminiscent of Mexico. While birding is easier in Costa Rica, it is excellent in Panama too, and for the hardcore birder there is more diversity, and, away from the canal area, exploration potential. 

Among our birding highlights, we spent several excellent days in the Gamboa area of the Canal, camping among the declining buildings of this former US canal town, and birding the famous Pipeline Road daily. Huge container ships would pass by our camp in the evenings, seemingly drifting through the jungle-laden hills.

Over the New Year period we camped at the side of a closed (and therefore deserted) road in the peace and quiet of the forested hills of the Kuna Indian-operated national park at Nusagandi, where Sulphur-rumped Tanager was the target. Very fortunately that species was actually the second bird we saw after we parked on our first afternoon. However, the best bird there was our very last species for 2010, a superb Black-breasted Puffbird, found in the trees right by the camper near dusk on New Year’s Eve.

In early January, after visiting the shipping company and customs agent offices on a Friday to arrange our vehicle shipping for the following week, we then went to the Cerro Azul/Cerro Jefe area just east of the Canal region for the intervening weekend. As with so many sites we have visited in Central America, they clearly get very few folks - foreigners anyway - requesting camping, and consequently they are very welcoming and invariably charge little or nothing as there seems to be no protocol in place for such a possibility. The Chagres national park headquarters at Cerro Jefe was no different, and as a bonus we added several new species in the forest right by our truck. Some good birds here included the range-restricted Tacarcuna Bush Tanager, two or more pairs of the beautiful Blue Cotinga, and a male Great Currasow (a gamebird relative the size of a small turkey) that wandered along an obscure forest trail ahead of us for half-an-hour. For a relatively rare, declining, and shy forest bird, remarkably this was the fifth country in our Central American travels that we had found this species.

One of our most sought-after species anywhere was Yellow-eared Toucanet. We had managed to miss this scarce and localised species elsewhere in southern Central America, and we knew that their range in western Colombia is largely inaccessible. Hence we were very relieved to find several at a fruiting tree near Cerro Jefe, and we were even able to show them to a couple of birding tour groups that arrived a little later. One male in particular posed very well for photos (the females lack the yellow “ear” patch). It was worth the wait, as Yellow-eared Toucanet is quite a stunner.

male Yellow-eared Toucanet, Cerro Jefe, Panama, Panama, 9th January 2011

"The Big Ditch"

Added 14th January 2011

One rainy afternoon in early January we did a couple of hours of more conventional tourism and went to the Miraflores Locks at the Pacific end of the Panama Canal. We have both read a superb and highly recommended account of the canal’s history and construction since we’ve been in the country (“Panama Fever” by Matthew Parker). It has been great to see for ourselves the places mentioned therein during our time in Panama.

We were at Miraflores when two cruise ships and an oil tanker were heading south (from the Atlantic to the Pacific). Note that although one imagines Central America on a more-or-less north-south axis, Panama actually lies east-west, so vessels crossing the isthmus to and from the Pacific and Atlantic are actually travelling north or south.

Here a cruise ship enters the upper of the two lock chambers. There is a perspective-bending sensation of such a giant vessel being largely above you.

The cruise ship has dropped in its chamber and the lock has now opened to level with the lower chamber, while the oil tanker is entering the upper chamber. The two sides operate independently, so typically one ship could be going north and the other south. It just so happened that when we were there, all traffic was going south.

Looking south toward Panama City and Balboa container port, with the cruise ship now moving in to the full lower chamber.

The cruise ship exiting the lower chamber, while the oil tanker drops in its chamber. If it looks tight, it is. The cruise ship had less than two feet either side between its hull and the canal walls. The new, largest supertankers do not fit through the canal locks, so the Panamanians are building new lock complexes parallel to the old ones to avoid losing out on this lucrative trade. We were pleased to see that the new locks will be 60% more efficient with water by using a gravity-based retention basin system. This is a response to increasingly unpredictable rainfall in the region, and the Panamanians do not want to rely on the rivers that feed the system remaining as reliable as they have for the past 96 years of the canal’s operation.

An empty container ship heading north under the Puente de las Americas at the Pacific mouth to the canal. We took this picture from the Balboa Yacht Club, where we became good buddies with their night watchmen, were able to camp for free near their parking area, patch into their wireless internet, all while enjoying spectacular views of the canal traffic.

Some birds (and non-birds) of Costa Rica

Added 14th January 2011

Despite other preoccupations mentioned earlier, we were able to do two months of solid birding in Costa Rica, finding all of the endemic birds of the country, and about 90% of the species that occur only there and in adjacent parts of neighbouring countries (mainly western Panama). Here are a handful of the photos that we managed to get during that time.

The beautiful Long-tailed Silky, formerly considered related to the flycatchers, probably more closely related to the waxwings, now placed in their own family, the Ptilogonatidae. There are only four species in the family, three of which are found only in Mexico and Central America. The fourth species, Phainopepla, occurs from Mexico into the southwestern US. We saw all four on our 2010 travels.

Fiery-throated Hummingbird, stubbornly refusing to show off the critical identification feature alluded to in its name.

But when they catch the light....they certainly live up to it! These were photographed at KM70 on the Cerro de la Muerte road.

We had both always wanted to see a sloth, and despite our previous travels in the New World tropics had failed to do so. Finally we caught up with this three-toed sloth, watched from our campsite at Braulio Carillo National Park for two days. As expected, it didn’t move much, and spent almost the whole teo days hanging upside down scratching, using gravity to help get rid of it's abundant parasites, an inevitable by-product of their lifestyle. This was the first of several we saw in CR and Panama, mostly three-toeds, but including one two-toed sloth in northern CR.

Black-thighed Grosbeak, helpfully showing off its black thighs. This was one of several that we found at Braulio Carillo National Park at about 470m above sea level, several hundred metres below their supposed typical range. This was one of many instances while we were birding in the country that it was clear that there is still much to be learned about Costa Rica's birds, especially in the rainy season, when few birders (or ornithologists) visit.

A small fer-de-lance, one of the more venomous neotropical snakes, that we found under the vehicle one evening when camped at Braulio Carillo National Park.

Black Guan, endemic to the mountain forests of CR and western Panama. Photographed at the Santa Elena Reserve, near Monteverde.

End-of-year update 2010 

Added 25th December 2010

Since we were last in touch way back in the late summer we have completed our birding through the northern Central American countries and spent two highly successful months in Costa Rica. We are now in Panama and will be here into the New Year, when we will ship the vehicle and ourselves to Colombia.

In the last few months Anne’s mum, Sallie, has been very sick with a life-threatening illness. Consequently our already limited internet time became almost completely occupied with family email for many weeks, which led to us unintentionally suspending all activity on the blog. We seriously contemplated turning back to California on several occasions, but we knew that that was the last thing Sallie would have wanted, as she has always been the strongest supporter of our travels and explorations. After some very difficult weeks, the great news is that recently she has been improving considerably, and the current prognosis is optimistic.

We effectively took November and early December “off” from our birding travels, with brief family-and-friends visits to the US (twice), the UK, and Cuba, from a base in Costa Rica. We saw almost all of both of our immediate families on these trips, plus many friends, but returned to Costa Rica pretty drained from an extremely hectic and emotional travel schedule. Fortunately in September and October we had seen most of Costa Rica and almost all of its birds, so we were able to comfortably cross into Panama on 15th December, the date our 90 day vehicle permit for Costa Rica expired!

It probably goes without saying that we have had a superb year of travel and birding. It is hard to believe that we were still living in Australia for the first couple of months of 2010! By this time in 2011 we hope to be in Patagonia, which we are really looking forward to, although in the meantime we will have spent many months in some of the World’s most bird-rich countries (Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru), so it looks set to be another very eventful year.

We wish everyone a safe, enjoyable, and healthy 2011.

Parrots, falcons, and guans: a few weeks through Belize and Guatemala 

Added September 2010

We wrote these first paragraphs from the porch of a small hotel on the seafront at Punta Gorda in southernmost Belize, with Guatemala and Honduras visible across the bahia. (We're camped in the hotel parking lot.) This just might be the most ethnically diverse small town on the planet. Mayans, latinos (Guatemaltecos, Salvadorians, and Mexicans at least), Chinese, Germanic Mennonities, Afro-Caribbeans, Hindis, and even a few Anglos, the latter three at least holdovers from the days of "British Honduras". Not to mention obvious mixing between some of the above. We heard eight languages at the street market. And all in a town of a few thousand people. Quite something, even for the hardened traveler.

Oh, and some birds. If you did a birding trip just to Belize for a week or two it could be great, we did very well in our week-plus. Of course after three-and-a-half months in Mexico, including a couple of weeks in the lowlands bordering Belize and Guatemala, it was a little anticlimactic, and Belize had little new to offer us. That said, there was one species we had to see here, and we did so nicely on our first morning, Yellow-headed Parrot. Virtually restricted to Belize and Mexico, and now rapidly heading for extinction in the latter thanks largely to trapping for the cagebird trade, Belize seems to be the last location where it hangs on in moderate numbers. Even here it is scarce and localised, but we had a gorgeous perfectly-lit pair pass by us at Crooked Tree. The happiness at such a sighting, and we have had many in recent years, is always tinged with a certain regret that there is a chance that the species may be extinct in our lifetime.

The view of Temples III (right) and I (left) from the top of Temple IV at Tikal, Guatemala. Two species of monkey leapt about in the trees below us, while Orange-breasted Falcons perched at eye level nearby, among many other good forest birds.

After Belize, we spent a while in Guatemala. First we went to Tikal, probably the most famous of the Mayan ruins. It is impressive and more interesting than most of the ruins in Mexico, because the structures are set within excellent forest that has re-grown, so there’s lots of nice habitat for birding. Plus you come upon these huge temples somewhat suddenly when you break out into an opening in the dense, tall forest. Indeed, while sitting atop Temple IV watching Orange-breasted Falcons, we contemplated how we were enjoying this great tract of now-preserved rainforest with cleared areas just visible in the distance, where about 1000 years ago the entire area in the foreground was complete clear around the great city, with the rainforest confined to what would have been the far distance beyond the Mayan agricultural fields. The positive side of that irony is that Tikal is proof that with sufficient passage of time, even “primary” rainforest can return, and be home to monkeys and jaguars and eagles and curassows. However, in a perfect growing climate, we are talking centuries not decades.

From Tikal we made our way via a birding stop or two to the one-time capital of Antigua, near Guatemala City. Antigua is in a valley surrounded by three major volcanoes, so it’s a dramatic setting. The town still has its old colonial architecture and cobble streets and loads of decrepit stone churches that were severely damaged in a major earthquake about a hundred years ago. It’s a major tourist destination, so there are lots of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans, but there’s still a big Guatemalan population in the surrounding villages, including a lot of Maya. We camped on a property about a 30-minute walk from town for over a week. The property is part farm, part quarry, part reserve. It has some really nice habitat and great birding, so it was a perfect spot for us. While there, Anne went to Spanish school for five days, walking into town for 4 hours of lessons at a small school owned by a young Mayan woman. Along with practicing her Spanish, she learned how to make traditional Mayan tamales one afternoon at the school. They’re very different from the Mexican version...much more complicated filling (including meat, veggies, raisins, prunes), wrapped in banana leaves, and delicious.

Rufous Sabrewing (left) and Beryline Hummingbird (right), photographed at El Pilar, near Antigua, Guatemala in August 2010.  While the latter is widely distributed throughout Mexico and northern Central America, the sabrewing is found only in southernmost Mexico, western Guatemala, and El Salvador.

While in Guatemala, we also went to a large property on the slopes of Volcan Atitlan that is one of the best birding sites in the country. It’s a farm that mostly grows coffee and ornamental plants, the latter primarily for export to Italy. The farm is on the low slopes, and the upper slope portions of the property are set aside as a reserve. It’s particularly special in that it’s one of only two places in northwestern Guatemala and southwestern Mexico where you can see the endangered Horned Guan. The only drawback is the effort it takes to actually get to see the guans, because they’re pretty high up on the mountain. We had to get up at 0230 to be ready to leave at 0300 for a 45 minute drive up a pretty bad four-wheel drive road to where the trail starts. Unfortunately, it was raining when we headed out, but we got lucky because the guy that monitors the guans had seen one relatively low down just the week before, so we got to stop walking after only an hour and a half of trudging up the steep slope in the dark and rain.

As we were waiting for it to get light enough to see, the rain let up a bit but the cloud and mist began to descend. Suddenly Jon heard a guan call from very close. The visibility was poor, but because Lalo knows the birds so well, he was still able to find the bird high up in one of the huge trees and get us in position to be able to see it. Jon was even able to get the scope on it, so we had excellent looks, despite the weather and almost 45 degree mountain slope we were on!

Basking in the “warm” glow of seeing one of Central America’s toughest and most impressive birds, Horned Guan: Anne with Josue and Lalo (behind). These are the only guides we have used in five months birding in Mexico and Central America  (the reserve requires you to take them to ascend the mountain). They were great company, and had superb knowledge of the local birds. To the amusement of all, Jon dubbed Lalo “GuanMan”. He wore a plastic tarp in the manner of a cape to keep the rain off, and combined with his constantly moving machete and his razor-sharp eyes - he spotted totally stationary guans in huge trees hundreds of metres away through thick mist with no binoculars! - he deserved a superhero moniker.

Xeno-canto.org

Added September 2010

If you’ve read this blog since we started in Mexico back in April, you may have noticed frequent reference to us recording the vocalisations of birds we have encountered. While we do this for several reasons, a major one is to contribute the best results to xeno-canto.org (known as XC among bird folk). This phenomenal project is basically a huge interactive archive of the World’s bird songs and calls, like an online museum. Indeed the project is based at Naturalis, the Dutch Natural History Museum. The best part is that anyone can contribute by uploading recordings online, making it a great collaborative effort among amateurs and professionals alike to assist in any study that may use a bird vocalisation - taxonomy, conservation, behaviour, anything.

So far, we have added over 200 recordings of 124 species from the seven Latin American countries that we have visited in the past five months. That may not sound like too many, but we usually only contribute our best results, and Mexico and Central America are surprisingly poorly represented in the database. Hence we have added several species not previously on XC, and many for which there was little or no material from the countries in which we have been traveling. We have even added a few species for which the vocalisation we recorded was previously completely unknown.

Anyway, we love the concept, and are having great fun with it, while feeling we are contributing to a very worthwhile project. We thought we would share a few of our recent recordings. Clicking on the links takes you directly to specific recordings at XC, where you can click on the play button to hear exactly what we recorded. (Use your back button to return to our blog afterwards.) Enjoy!

Barred Forest Falcon from Guerrero, Mexico

http://www.xeno-canto.org/recording.php?XC=58027

Brown-backed Solitaire from Nuevo Leon, Mexico

http://www.xeno-canto.org/recording.php?XC=58071

As we have been camped in the bush most of the time, we have done well finding many nocturnal birds - owls and nightjars - right around camp. A widespread New World nightjar species that has sung us to sleep at many sites is the Common Pauraque, which we recorded in Nicaragua.

http://www.xeno-canto.org/recording.php?XC=62573

The wrens famously belt out loud and often musical songs disproportionate to their (often) tiny size. As a group, the wrens reach their greatest global diversity in southern Mexico, and they are one of the real highlights of birding there. We were able to find every species of wren known from Mexico in our travels there this summer, and to record almost all of them. Perhaps our favourites were the small, long-billed, no-tailed Sumichrast’s and Nava’s Wrens, both adapted to forested limestone escarpments in tiny areas of southern Mexico. Both have fantastic songs which echo throughout the rugged terrain they occupy.

http://www.xeno-canto.org/recording.php?XC=57405

http://www.xeno-canto.org/recording.php?XC=58118

Not all the songbirds are particularly tuneful. Those thought to have derived from the earliest evolutions of the songbirds (in technical parlance, the suboscine passerines) tend to have much less musical songs than those of the evolutionarily younger oscine passerines. The latter are much more familiar from the temperate latitudes, and in those species usually only the male sings. However, in the suboscines, which are especially characteristic of the New World tropics, often both sexes sing equally proficiently. Here is a good example from just the other day, a female Silvery-fronted Tapaculo from Costa Rica (if we hadn’t seen her well, we could not have known the sex as the song is virtually identical to that of the male).

http://www.xeno-canto.org/recording.php?XC=62678

And the non-songbirds (the non-passerines) are often not very tuneful at all. As a consequence their calls and “songs” often get overlooked and under-recorded, even though those vocalisations can be very helpful for identification. Jon has made a special effort to record the different vocalisations of the over 50 hummingbird species we have encountered. Having famously spectacular male plumages, not much emphasis is placed on the calls of hummers, but with experience they can be remarkably helpful in identifying species. The Green-breasted Mountain Gem (hummers also often have justifiably great names) is found only in the mountains of central Honduras and northern Nicaragua, and its song was apparently undescribed until Jon got a recording in early September. Here is the call they make when feeding (they usually make a different call when perched, when aggressive, etc.).

http://www.xeno-canto.org/recording.php?XC=62095