Dispatch from Panama II: Gamboa
Traveling back from the islands, we landed at the small airport in Panama City known by its old US military name: Albrook. This is different from the modern Tocumen International Airport, complete with name-brand stores and duty-free shops selling tax free alcohol and tobacco. Once home to the US Airforce, and perched along the edge of the so-called “Canal Zone,” Panama repurposed this old hub of all things Gringo into the national airport. Small planes and helicopters buzz in and out every day with cranes and shipping containers lined up at the locks on the Canal nearby, ready to keep the gears of capitalism turning between the two great oceans.
These Geoffroy’s Tamarins are a cult of personality. Anytime I am in the lowland rainforests of Panama, finding and photographing these little monkeys are always a top priority for me.
Climbing aboard our hired microbus, we navigated our way out of the chaos that is Panama City traffic, turning our sights toward the Chagres River and a series of breathtaking national parks. Driving in the city is not for the faint of heart. While I routinely drive myself around much of this country in an old diesel Land Cruiser, the city is another thing entirely. I’m sure there is a pattern to it all, an unspoken set of rules punctuated with the horns of vehicles belched out like Mores code. Some of it I have come to understand and now use myself here. Like the United States, flashing your lights at another car signals that policia are ahead. Two short honks serve as both a way of saying thank you as well as signaling to someone that you are letting them into the flow of traffic. But this is just the basics. And I’m certain that if I pulled out into the traffic downtown, a hundred car pileup would unfold.
Our destination was a lodge along the banks of the Rio Chagres situated in the community of Gamboa. Bound by the Panama Canal on one side and Soberanía National Park on the other, today Gamboa is primarily a community of Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) brainiacs; which is why I like the place so much. One of the many research facilities for STRI is found here and plays home to the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project, amongst other labs.
The Amphibian Rescue Project is one of the most important conservation initiatives on the planet thanks to Chytrid fungus which has caused mass extinctions of frogs worldwide. Panama has been the hardest hit from this amphibian apocalypse, with the current tally at 30 species that have been driven to extinction and another 9 that have experienced a 99% population decline within just a few short years.
Given the size of Panama, this should be kept in perspective. Imagine if the state of South Carolina lost 30 species of frogs suddenly. Consider what the consequences of this would be throughout the ecosystem. From tadpoles to adult frogs, these amphibians feed everything from dragonflies to snakes to fish. Each of those species are themselves prey to other species such as birds. Researchers across the country are watching a cascade of effects ripple through those hardest hit ecosystems. The Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project is at the heart of trying to save those species who are now most at risk of extinction here by serving as something akin to Noah’s ark while desperately searching for survivors of others.
As is so often the case, this mass extinction of amphibians around the world comes at the hands of us. Chytrid fungus coexists with a species of amphibian known as the African clawed frog that we spent the better part of the 20th century spreading across the planet in the name of family planning. In a story so strange that its nuanced details likely warrant a dedicated article in PhotoWILD Magazine, when a pregnant human’s urine is injected under the skin of a female African clawed frog, within 5 to 12 hours the frog lays eggs. It was called the Hogben test, which was named for the zoologist Lancelot Hogben who first discovered this weird biological anomaly while living in South Africa in 1927. And in short order, every pregnancy test in the world involved injecting urine under the skin of African clawed frogs until the 1960s when other means became available.
Untold numbers of these frogs were transported around the world, bred in captivity, and ultimately released into the wild near practically every major urban center on the planet. As they bred and spread, they transported a strange fungus that lived on their skin which had co-evolved with them. But just because one species of frog was able to co-exist with this fungus, does not mean that any others could. As these clawed frogs hopped their way around ecosystems with conducive climates such as Panama, they mixed and mingled with the native menagerie of amphibians, spreading Chytrid fungus around the world as they went.
Today, amphibians are going extinct at a rate that is four times greater than any other group of animals on Earth. Before Chytrid, on average, one species of frog went extinct every 500 years. This is what’s known as their background extinction rate. Now, however, some 200 species have suddenly gone extinct in the last 40 years and roughly 40% of all amphibians are currently threatened with the same fate.
After our time out on the islands, and the travel to Gamboa, there were no planned outings for the afternoon. Some decided to take a stroll around the lodge grounds where keel-billed toucans and red-lored Amazon parrots flew in and out of the gallery forest along the edges of the Chagres River. That evening, we met for dinner where the lodge had prepared a sweeping buffet of food in celebration of Separation Day, one of the various Panama independence days speaking to the countries complicated past.
It was fitting that we would arrive on the banks of the Chagres and Panama Canal at this time of the year. When Theodore Roosevelt first signed an agreement for the construction of the Canal, it was not with Panama. At the time, Panama was a province of Gran Colombia and agreements for a canal, first with the French and then the US, were signed in Bogota. France backed out of the agreement which led Roosevelt to step in to fulfill the dream of creating a path between the seas. But almost immediately, the government of Colombia began to worry that an agreement with the US would jeopardize its sovereignty. By now, the Monroe Doctrine had been in effect for the better part of a century in which the US declared all Latin America under its sphere of influence. As worries grew across the political elite of Colombia, the government decided to back out of the agreement.
As all of this was happening, a rebel faction in Panama was demanding separation from Gran Colombia. Roosevelt saw his opportunity in this situation and agreed to back Panama’s secession from Colombia in exchange for an agreement to build the Canal. On November 3rd, 1903, the US government entered into an agreement with Panama that essentially handed Panamanians their own country. Of course, Colombia immediately leapt into action to resist this move, but the US military took out railroads to stop the movement of the Colombian army and blockaded Panama with naval ships which ground the backlash to a halt.
While November 28th is celebrated as Independence Day, commemorating Panama’s break from Spain on that day in 1821, November 3rd is one of the most important national holidays in the country because it signifies the beginning of national sovereignty and the Panama we know today.
The following morning, we loaded into two separate pangas, those native skiffs so prevalent across the region, and were at once confronted with the avian overwhelm of the place. Countless mangrove swallows mixed with migratory barn swallows who had followed us down to the tropics from North America. Wattled jacanas strutted their stuff across floating water hyacinth as tiger herons mixed with both green and little blues. The sky was filled, as it always is here in the morning, with red-lored Amazon parrots, and a layer of fog hung low across the mouth of the Chagres River creating something that felt like a Joseph Conrad novel.
The heavy fog of the early morning meant that the skies above would be clear and thus time was of the essence if we wanted to work in good light. So, after a few minutes of watching six different telephoto lenses swing about in six different directions, we got underway, heading out into the Panama Canal and on to Lago Gatun in search of monkeys, cocoi herons, snail kites, and quite frankly, anything that moved.
Golden mantled howler monkeys, the loudest of all mammals on Earth, save for us and our machinery, roared from the treetops announcing themselves to anyone who would listen. Red brocket deer, a beautifully exotic species that came up from South America, nibbled at vegetation along the banks as the occasional American crocodile could be seen gliding silently along in their prehistoric way. And it wasn’t long before we found our first troop of Geoffroy’s tamarin monkeys eyeing us from tangled lianas dripping out of the canopy of trees. A remarkably small species of monkey, about the size of a red squirrel but with a two-and-a-half-foot long tail, Geoffroy’s tamarins are severely threatened by the black market for exotic and illegal pets. One look at these guys and it’s not hard to see why.
Patience is the name of the game when it comes to working with monkeys. Sometimes their curiosity wins out and we fill memory cards. Other times, they fade away into the green. And sometimes, if you are really unlucky, species like spider and howler monkeys will throw their poop at you.
I’m constantly amazed at the interconnectedness of life on this planet. Us humans tend to see nature as singular parts, likely because we so desperately attempt to tell ourselves we are separate and singular. But all life lives in concert with countless other species, benefiting from, competing with, and collaborating. The little Geoffroy’s tamarin is a good example of this. Tyrant flycatchers, a huge family of insectivorous birds in the tropics, work in tandem with these tamarins. In fact, the tamarin calls are so similar to that of many tyrant flycatchers that it has led some researchers to believe they are communicating back and forth with each other about food. Tamarins respond and travel to tyrant flycatcher calls, just as the flycatchers do with tamarins.
Tapping into the Twitter feed of tyrant flycatchers is something of a stroke of evolutionary genus for a small mammal like the Geoffroy’s tamarin. Tyrant flycatchers are the most diverse and numerous family of birds in the world with over 400 species spread across the Americas. This means that a tamarin’s association is not tied to just one bird. Instead, they are listening to and monitoring the communication of any one of the 92 different species that call Panama home. Meanwhile, a third and completely different animal enters the fray in the form of the double-toothed kite. Tamarins avoid raptors at all costs. But double-toothed kites and Geoffroy’s tamarins are regularly seen hunting together.
As the fog burned off and the sun continued to rise, so too did the temperatures. Though we were protected beneath canopies on the boats, inevitably the light became too harsh to continue photographing. Heading back to the lodge, we had lunch and enjoyed a few hours of air condition in our rooms to download images from the morning and prepare for the afternoon.
We were back on the Panama Canal just in time for the afternoon rains to move in. This time of the year is the wet season here, and it’s when I prefer to lead my workshop to the lowland rainforests of this country. The wet season translates to cooler temperatures, a greater percentage of cloud coverage, and therefore more photography.
In Panama, the rainy season doesn’t mean it rains all day. It doesn’t even mean it rains every day. The rainy season means we will see some rain in the afternoons most days of the week. Sometimes these showers last only a few minutes. Other times, they begin at 2pm and last until 2am (though not usually). Most often, they seem to begin after nightfall and are done before morning.
Forging ahead, we took shelter in the lee of an island when the rain intensified. We did so along with a few hundred mangrove swallows who were also waiting out the storm and gave us the opportunity to photograph these little birds up close and personal.
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In short order, we were underway and in search of other subjects. Snail kites factored heavily into the afternoon as we found ourselves with numerous opportunities to create frame filling portraits of these raptors at eye-level. Cocoi herons also made an appearance, those South American cousins of the great blue donning beautiful contrasting white and black plumage. We photographed more Geoffroy’s tamarins and a lone white-faced capuchin as well. But then our guide spotted a massive male iguana lounging at eye-level while we were focused on the monkeys. We knew this iguana was a male because of its large dewlap which is used for both courtship and regulating body temperature. With a slow approach, we were able to maneuver our boats to within feet of the great lizard.
Though far from a chameleon, these green iguanas change colors based on temperature, darker when colder and lighter when warmer. But the name green iguana may be something of a misnomer for the species overall. When these iguanas are very young, they are indeed bright green. But as they age, the color varies wildly depending on where they live. In Peru, green iguanas are more often a blueish color. On islands such as Aruba and Bonaire, they range from lavender to almost black. In western Costa Rica, they are often red. Here in Panama, they tend to be shades of Earth tones with bold markings and are often various hues of orange. Our indigenous guide explained to me that those big orange ones taste the best.
Like many species of lizards, green iguanas have what is essentially a third eye found on top of their head. Known as a partial eye, iguanas can’t exactly see specific shapes and colors with this thing, but they can detect light and movement. When an iguana eating raptor soars overhead, these lizards can detect that through their partial eye and take cover. You can see this partial eye with your own eye, if you have the chance to look down at one of these lizards, which looks like a large gray scale in the center of the heard.
While there were several other angles to photograph this male iguana that did not include all of the out-of-focus vegetation in front, I opted for this composition to create a sense of depth and perhaps mystery to the situation. An iguana, laying atop a large flat mass of vegetation with a distant background just didn’t do it for me. While that sort of “documentary” shot was available to us, such photographs are a dime-a-dozen, as the saying goes. Choosing to compose through the vegetation, selectively focusing on just the eye of the iguana created a much more interesting photograph.
The following morning, we set out for Lago Gatun once again. This time we were treated with species of trogons, a large common basilisk, cocoi herons, more snail kites, a couple iguanas, and another family of Geoffroy’s tamarins. One of the adult females had two babies who were riding around on her back as she moved through the forest and understory, and at one point we found ourselves within 10 feet of them. You know it is going to be a good day when the big concern is that the animals are too close to focus on. Tamarins and white-faced capuchins dominated the morning photography, and we had the chance to spend half an hour or more with one troop of Capuchinos, as our guide liked to refer to them.
Everything about the Panamanian white-faced capuchin fascinates me. Sure, there is that haunting resemblance to us when you look in their eyes or watch how they use their hands. This species is also considered to be the smartest of all the New World monkeys, surpassing dogs and pigs on such arbitrary tests. Two different populations of these monkeys even use stone tools here in Panama which shocked the scientific community when it was first discovered two decades ago. And then there’s their eyes.
Female white-faced capuchins are like most humans in that they are what we call trichromats. This means they have three different types of cones that allow them to see three different colors just like us: red, green, and blue. These are, of course, what we call additive colors in art. Our cameras are built around this red, green, blue (RGB) part of the light spectrum because not only does it mirror how we see, but you can also add various combinations of these colors to create any of the one million hues of color we can see. But when it comes to the males of these capuchin monkeys, they are dichromat – meaning they have two types of cones, which detect green and blue. In humans, we would say that these males are “color blind.”
What fascinates me the most about this is that studies have shown both males and females play to their strengths based on how they see, or don’t see, colors. Females are the expert foragers, finding ripening fruits and vegetation that has reached its peak nutrient content by detecting subtle differences in color. The males, however, excel at hunting and appear to be able to discern shapes of insects against the visual noise of the canopy in ways females cannot. Green insect that looks like a leaf? No problem. Perhaps seeing 99,000 less colors allows the males to focus more on the subtleties of shapes and differences in the patterns of the vegetation.
So-called “color blindness” is common in human males. Much like the white-faced capuchin, many guys struggle to differentiate between red and green. My brain inevitably trips here, stumbles a bit, and then does a headfirst dive down the rabbit hole of biological anthropology. Most populations of humans have had a division of labor in hunter – gatherer communities that sort of rhyme with what we see in white-faced capuchins. I cannot help but to wonder if what we are seeing in these monkeys is the origin of our own cultural traits.
If you travel with me to the tropics and find me sitting alone after hours staring off into the darkness of the forest in contemplation, you can be assured my mind is wandering the expanse of the universe as I consider such riddles about life on this planet. Of course, you are welcome to join me.
While photographing under cloudy skies makes things much easier for us in terms of exposure, sunny days like this force us to be more creative with our approach to composition. The style of lighting you see here is called chiaroscuro within the art world. Contrasting highlights off of sweeping shadows like this forces us to pay attention to only the thing an artist wants us to see. With chiaroscuro lighting, the shadows themselves are used to create depth and dimension to the photographs. It’s all too easy to forget about the importance of shadows in our composition. But where the black falls is just as important and has just as much impact as the light itself.
Come afternoon, we decided to change up the itinerary. After three trips out to Lago Gatun, I directed the boats up the Chagres River in search of birds and wildlife. The Rio Chagres is a completely different world than the lake or the Panama Canal. Entire ecosystems of floating vegetation can be found through this area, changing each day and making travel into some of the smaller tributaries a bit like finding your way through Hampton Court Maze. I’m sure that if one of Pablo Escobar’s escaped hippos in Columbia were to find her way up here to Panama, this is where she will take up residence.
Normally, we are inundated by a never-ending parade of tiger herons along this stretch of the Chagres. But this afternoon left us with a grocery list of common wading birds one might find across the southeastern United States. Little blue herons, snowy egrets, great blue, and great egrets. Tropical kingbirds perched on taller vegetation in these floating islands all around us as the ubiquitous mangrove swallows and wattled jacanas were a constant companion.
Threading our way back out to the main channel of the river, we navigated the boats into a small bay where a Wounaan village was perched above the waters. The Wounaan are a people of the Darien and were once referred to as the Choco. This small village is the furthest west these people live, and their thatched huts and dugout canoes mix with clotheslines adorned with brightly colored t-shirts and small boats pushed along by Yamaha outboards; the cultural impact of life lived so close to civilization that we find with many traditional communities throughout the neotropical rainforests.
It was here that we discovered not one, not two, but four distinct species of kingfishers. Panama plays home to five different members of this family of birds, and to find four of them within a hundred meters of each other was nothing less than extraordinary. Ironically, we found them in descending order of size.
First it was the ringed kingfisher, the largest in the Americas. Moments later, we spotted an Amazon kingfisher followed by a green. Rounding a small island in the bay, we were greeted with a sudden flash of color and a beautiful American pygmy kingfisher perched just feet from our boat. At once the bird took wing, and I assumed we had scared him from his fishing hole given that we had no idea he was even there until it was too late. But instead of flying off with the usual rattle of protest, our pygmy kingfisher dove into the water, missing a fish, only to resurface and perch even closer to the boat.
While never a big fan of the proverbial “just-a-bird-on-a-stick” photograph, the uniqueness of the situation, having an American pygmy kingfisher choose to land and fish so close, warranted making do with the situation. If we had repositioned the boat, would the bird have flow away? This is the smallest kingfisher in the Americas and was a highlight of our last day of the workshop.
Anyone who has ever tried to photograph kingfishers in the Western Hemisphere knows that they are nearly impossible to approach. Most belted kingfisher photos you see from North America are created by luring the bird to perches near a blind using “baitfish” bought from bait and tackle shops. To have one not only accept our presence but to choose to fly in and hunt even closer to us felt like the wildlife photography gods were smiling down on us. Normally, the American pygmy kingfisher is a species of small streams in the deep forest or mangroves. My encounters always seem to come from the seat of a kayak or a dugout canoe while plying the narrow passages through mangrove roots. To find one out of the forest like this, on the edge of this river, and so accommodating was extraordinary.
That evening it was time to pack as the workshop was coming to an end. In the morning, we loaded back onto our chartered microbus and made our way back to Panama City. Most of the participants of the workshop did not fly out until the following day and so we met that evening at a rooftop bar 66 floors above the city and overlooking the Pacific, the entrance to the Panama Canal with its ever present flotilla of ships patiently waiting their turn, and the original Panama City known as Casco Viejo.
For myself, the trip to Panama was just beginning. In the morning, I flew out to the western part of the country where I picked up a Land Cruiser and headed into the cloud forests where I would be photographing for several more weeks.
I can honestly say this year’s Wildlife of Panama’s workshop was, in my opinion, a huge success. This is a land of breathtaking beauty and extraordinary biological diversity. The great land bridge between north and south never disappoints. Now having rented a small home at the edge of the tropical cloud forest for a year, you can be certain there will be much more to come from this paradise.
The Wildlife of Panama
Interested in traveling with us to the lowland rainforests of Panama? Want to experience the Caribbean islands and the spectacular diversity of the Gamboa region?