Trip Report: Wildlife of Panama I
With the return of the rains and the end of a multi-year drought that has plagued Central America for the last two years, this years’ Wildlife of Panama workshop went off without a hitch. Of course, it’s impossible to control the weather, but we always adapt and evolve organically to roll with whatever punches nature throws at us. But this year unfolded exactly as planned.
The shining honeycreeper is one of the few birds where the female rivals the males in terms of color and beauty. Personally, I loved how her colors seemed to match the multitude of different species of lichens on this small branch.
The workshop began at our ocean front hotel in Panama City, looking out over the Golfo de Panama where magnificent frigatebirds soared above the Pacific Ocean just off the balconies. Here we had our official meet and greet followed by a full day of lectures and discussion on the wildlife we were likely to encounter and photographic techniques that would be required to take full advantage of those opportunities. Given that we would be working in a variety of locations such as lowland tropical rainforest, the open waters of the Caribbean, and the backwater recesses of the Chagres River, this workshop required a diverse skillset. As such, there were discussions on lowlight photography, working with high ISO settings, birds in flight, off-camera flash, macro photography, as well as creative compositions for working in the lush and biologically overwhelming forest.
The following day, we boarded a small plane and headed for the islands off the north coast of Panama. This archipelago, for which Columbus named Bocas del Toro, has famously been referred to as the Galapagos of the Caribbean by the Smithsonian. Home to a diverse array of endemic species, and variations of others that are found nowhere else on Earth, this tropical island paradise is a wildlife photographers dream.
Upon reaching the islands, we transferred from plane to microbus to boat. The trip to the lodge on one of the outer islands took roughly 30 minutes as we threaded our way around coral reefs and mangrove islands through crystalline waters. Reaching the lodge, we were immediately greeted by a troop of 11 Panamanian white-faced capuchin monkeys. This wouldn’t be our only run in with white-faced capuchins on this trip. Both here in Bocas del Toro, as well as the Gamboa region of Panama offered us seemingly endless opportunities with these incredible new world monkeys.
There are technically two species of white-faced capuchins. As is often the case, Panama, that bridge connecting the north and the south, stands as the crossroads between these and so many other species. The Panamanian white-faced capuchin, known as Cebus imitator is found from roughly the Panama Canal to points west up through Honduras (though primarily in Costa Rica and Panama). The other species of capuchin, the Columbian white-faced, or Cebus capucinus, is found east of the Panama Canal and down into Columbia and Ecuador. Since the days of Carl Linnaeus, the Columbian variety of this monkey has been considered a subspecies of C. imitator. However, recent DNA studies have revealed that these two white-faced capuchin monkeys have been genetically separated from each other for at least 2 million years, making them unique species.
This is one of the things I love about working in Panama. North meets south. Species that evolved in one hemisphere overlap with their counterparts from the other. Great blue herons fish beside cocoi and agami herons, for instance. There is a reason that the Smithsonian has 12 different tropical research stations in this country, is currently working on around 350 different projects, and churns out an average of over 400 peer reviewed articles in scientific journals every year out of here. And it’s why I have chosen to invest so much time and effort into exploring and learning this extraordinary place.
After an eventful day of travel to get to the lodge, and with thunderstorms on the horizon, the first afternoon in the islands was casually spent in the mangroves discussing the use of off-camera flash. The prop roots of the red mangroves here play home to an array of different species of orchids which I always feel are a great way to get participants used to the concepts behind this style of photography. Since we don’t have to worry about the orchids going anywhere, unlike poison dart frogs, we can take our time to put into practice all the things we discussed the day before.
That evening, everyone enjoyed a much-deserved round of drinks made with a local rum before heading to our individual and air-conditioned cabins to rest up for the coming big day.
The following morning, after a hearty breakfast, we climbed aboard a couple purpose-built skiffs known as pangas and headed out to a nearby island in search of poison frogs. The strawberry poison frog is ubiquitous across the southern half of Central America. Ranging from Nicaragua to Panama, the Oophaga pumillio, as it’s more officially known, tends to live up to its name’s sake throughout most of that range. In Costa Rica, we find a variation known locally as the blue-jeans frog, with a red body and blue legs, but otherwise, these toxic little amphibians generally come in a shade of crimson red. Once you get to these islands, however, everything changes.
During the last ice age, the Caribbean coast of Panama was made up of the foothills of the Talamanca Mountains. But as those great ice sheets to the north began to recede and the planet shifted from the Pleistocene into the Holocene, sea levels rose as continent spanning glaciers melted. For this stretch of Panama, the result was the flooding of coastal river valleys. Lowlands became estuaries, hilltops became islands. And many of the species that clung to survival on these new islands became genetically separated from their species at large.
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Isolate a population of any animal for long enough and it will inevitably begin to change. Evolution happens for many reasons. Sometimes it’s forced by dramatic and apocalyptic events. Other times, it’s just the slow and steady march of genetic mutation that continuously occurs in all life that then gets mixed and matched every time the proverbial Harry meets Sally. And as such, across the Bocas del Toro archipelago, there are more than 90 different color variations of these frogs.
On one island, the strawberry poison frog is completely blue. Nearby, it’s blue with black dots. On another small island, it’s red with black dots. Next door, it’s red with white dots. Over here, it’s leopard printed with a white belly. Over there, it’s green with black spots but with a yellow belly. Some are purple. Others have a red head that then softly fades to purple across the body. The diversity is extraordinary, and thanks to this archipelago of small islands, the Oophaga pumilio has the highest color diversity of any amphibian on Earth. And we were here to photograph that diversity.
Pulling up to a small dock built from hand carved boards that stretched out through the mangroves with ancient dugout canoes hauled up and scattered about on the sweeping roots, we tied off and began our ascent into the forest. Atop a hill was a small hut with thatched roof. Like most native domiciles in the lowland rainforest, it was raised off the ground and perched on 4 posts, bringing it out of easy access from snakes, army ants, and floods by about 8 feet. A log with notches for steps carved out by machete connected the entrance to the ground where a Ngäbe elder set quietly smoking as he watched on in silence.
The Ngäbe are one of only two indigenous people I know of who were never defeated by the Spanish. This proud people attacked and repelled Columbus and his men on his 4th expedition in 1502. They stood their ground and deflected Balboa’s attempts at subjugation in 1513. The Ngäbe helped Sir Francis Drake navigate the Chagres River to sack Panama City in 1596. Then they did it again for Henry Morgan, of Captain Morgan fame, in 1671. Such was their hatred of the Spanish trespassers that they readily adopted the maxim, “the enemy of my enemy, is my friend.” Even today, the observant traveler will find the word “unconquered,” written in English and spray-painted like so much political graffiti in places across the country; a testament to the fact that the Spanish eventually were forced to concede to the Ngäbe and live in a uneasy state of dynamic equilibrium. I would be proud as well.
I had first met this man some ten years ago. His son had invited us to their home on Isla Popa, where he lived with his father, wife, and three children in the one room hut. A small stand of banana trees grew behind the home, while a few obligatory chickens wandered about with the usual doe eyed expression as they seemed to aimlessly mill about. It was obvious the father was unsure of us, not knowing what to make of these gringos with large packs who slipped in the mud, belly flopping onto the trail in the process. Even the children looked on in wonderment with an expression that suggested the cold judgement of a four-year-old. As we searched the forest for frogs, the old man followed us around, silently smoking, with a look I could only describe as contempt. But at the end of the morning, when I handed his son $50 for helping us find several new color morphs of the Oophaga pumilio, the old man’s countenance changed as contempt became bewilderment.
In Panama, 97% of the Ngäbe live in what the country classifies as “extreme poverty.” Panama has the highest standard of living in Latin America, uses the US dollar, and the capital city is reminiscent of Hong Kong with its skyscrapers that are themselves a work of art. Yet most of these indigenous people survive on less than two dollars a day. When I handed the son fifty dollars for his help, it was the equivalent of a month’s worth of wages. The following year when I returned, the old man greeted us himself at the dock, and excitedly led us to the hill where we had floundered in the mud the year before to show he had shoveled out steps in the hillside for us and even built a handrail out of branches bound together with dried vines.
After photographing some of the color morphs unique to Isla Popa, we retraced our steps back down and through the mangroves to our boat. The cool breeze was a welcome respite as we made our way back to the lodge across the waters of Chiriquí Bay for lunch and to prepare for an afternoon spent out on the Caribbean.
As is often the case on workshops, I don’t always have the chance to photograph because I am working with clients. On this years’ workshop, I didn’t have the opportunity to photograph the poison frogs for this reason. This photo of the Oophaga pumilio was one for a couple years ago that I created while not in the field with clients.
Our destination that afternoon was a small sea stack roughly two miles out from Isla Colon that can only be described as a lost world. Towering several stories above the Caribbean blue and dripping with all the biological exuberance one comes to expect at these latitudes, this small island plays home to the only breeding population of red-billed tropicbirds in Panama. The particular subspecies found across the Caribbean is known as Phaethon aethereus mesonauta, with only around 1,600 breeding pairs left. With so few numbers, and what little we know of these birds thanks to their lives out over the open ocean, it’s quite possible that more than half of the world’s population of this subspecies breeds here on this one rock.
Of course, diversity begets diversity and whatever makes this great rock a suitable place for a thousand or more red-billed tropicbirds to breed also creates desirable real estate for other pelagic species of seabirds such as magnificent frigatebirds and brown boobies.
The result of so many birds frequenting this location creates an almost endless halo of avian life circling the island. Waves of brilliantly white feathered tropicbirds with their long and flowing tails washed over our field of vision. Brown boobies darted in between while the magnificent frigatebirds, always a species that seems to look down at the rest of the world with indifference, soared overhead in the hundreds.
Situations like this are the best of opportunities for not only learning to master bird in flight photography, but also to begin dipping one’s toes into more challenging but more creative approaches such as panning blurs. I like to approach photography here from a relatively calm and protected bay in the lee of the prevailing winds and swells. This presented us with dark caves to contrast white birds against. Meanwhile on the other edges of the small bay, waves crashed upon rocks sometimes with the sound of thunder sending water sky high. The two scenarios created the perfect backdrops for frozen in time bird in flight photography that allowed us to fill memory cards with some of the most enigmatic birds on Earth. Yet, the rest of the island is covered in lush tropical vegetation. Vegetation, I might add, that can be distracting with all of its lines and patterns that overwhelm a composition. But it’s these very situations that often make for the best panning blurs as all the details become streaked and smeared, emphasizing motion and movement. And so, after everyone had their fill, we spent the rest of the afternoon working with more creative approaches to birds in flight before undertaking the hour-long boat ride back to our dock just before darkness descended.
The following morning, we worked closer to home. The small off-grid lodge that we based out of is perched on the edge of Bastementos National Marine Park. While itself situated in a protected bay, views of the open ocean engulf the eastern horizon as the lodge backed into the expansive primary forest that stretches from end to end of this island. And it’s these protected forests here that may hold the densest population of sloths in the world.
The islands play home to not one, but two species of sloths. The first is the brown-throated three-toed sloth. With algae rich fur that gives them the coloration of the vegetation, these are the sloths that all travelers to Mesoamerica know. The other species of peresozo, as sloths are known in this part of Latin America, is the Herman’s two-toed sloth. More nocturnal in habits than their three-toed counterparts, this species is like the Ferrari of the sloth world. Of course, such descriptions should be kept in context.
The thing about photographing sloths is that many different factors must come together at the same time to create anything acceptable. Either the sloth needs to be climbing a tree, with a clean green background, or they need to be actively feeding in an open area in the canopy. Luckily, cecropia trees are a preferred food of the three-toed sloth which offers a clean white trunk with widely spaced limbs concentrated at the top with sparse leaves. But the leaves of mangroves are also a major food item for these animals on the islands, which are notoriously dense tangles of chaos. While we found five peresozo in less than a hundred yards, three of which were three-toed and two were two-toed, none of the situations happened to offer good compositions. One of each species was nearly eye-level with us. But the cloudless morning had all of these sloths tucked into tight balls sleeping through the heat of the direct sun.
Not to be shut down, we switched gears and found a couple red-eyed treefrogs and a brown vine snake to photograph instead. With all three of these subjects, I setup a single off-camera flash on a stand with a 26-inch softbox to manipulate the light. This is the same set-up I used for the orchids the first afternoon and now it was time to put it to use with more animated subjects.
I prefer to use Godox flashes for many reasons, and travel with an assortment of radio frequency triggers to ensure that everyone has one that matches their camera brand. By setting up in the manner, I can ensure that everyone has the opportunity to create beautiful photographs of these difficult to photograph species.
Even our local guides wanted in on the fun with the frogs and snake. Both were young biologists, recently graduated from the University of Panama, and were finding work as guides here until they might obtain more prestigious occupation with one of the Smithsonian Research Institutes or national conservation organizations. I always get excited when the native guides get into what we are doing like this, and everyone was more than happy to let them have a turn with the flashes as I showed them how and why it worked, how to control them, helped with settings, and gave pointers on their compositions.
Learning that both of our guides were also interested in photography, I set them both up with complimentary lifetime memberships to PhotoWILD Magazine. I remember what it was like to be a freshly minted biologist trying to figure out what to do with that degree that didn’t involve compiling data in spreadsheets for others. I also remember what guiding jobs paid, and more importantly what that means for both mestizos and indigenous in Latin America.
After lunch, we loaded back into the boats for another round out at the seabird rookery. This time, however, we made it only a few miles from the dock before the heavens opened up and torrential rains began to fall. So, we reversed course and headed back to take shelter from the storm. As the rains continued, it became apparent that it would be too late for us to make it to the island for any meaningful photography before nightfall, so we spent the rest of the afternoon photographing birds at eyelevel in the canopy.
The narrow and snake-like land bridge that is Panama, is a natural pinch point in the Western Hemisphere that creates what I believe to be the very best place in the Americas to experience the migration. Millions of raptors, for instance, pour across the skies here between September and November, creating one of the greatest shows on Earth. Meanwhile, billions of songbirds who have left the temperate zones are squeezed into this narrow stretch of land as they make their way to South America. All of this combines to offer wildlife photographers an unparalleled opportunity to photograph not only exotic neotropical species but also a seemingly endless array of migrants. In short order, you become accustomed to photographing prothonotary and bay-breasted warblers, whose entire populations winter almost exclusively in Panama and the northern edge of Columbia, right alongside of shining honeycreepers and golden colored manikins.
Working from the large and covered deck of the lodge that put us at face to face with the canopy of the forest, we were rewarded with hours of non-stop bird photography as untold numbers of small woodland birds darted about..
As is the case with nearly every lodge I have been to across Latin America, there was a small fruit feeder set out for the birds much like hummingbird feeders or bird seed is set out in millions of backyards across the temperate latitudes. With my trusty Leatherman multi-tool I travel with, I opened the small saw and trimmed a lichen and moss-covered branch that was laying on the ground. One of our Ngäbe boat captains brought us a long strand of vine and we tied this “perch” to the side of the deck extending out over the void and above the fruit. The background was a solid green wall of dense canopy some 50 feet distant. And in no time, brilliant yellow and blue prothonotary, Tennessee, chestnut-sided, yellow, and bay-breasted warblers were jockeying to use the perch, landing momentarily waiting for their turn at the fruit.
This little matter of warblers eating fruit fascinates me. We tend to think of warblers as being insectivorous birds. This is, of course, a big reason why they leave the temperate zones in the fall as insect populations either die off or go into hibernation. But here in the tropics, while still hunting insects, they become voracious frugivores to the point of being considered one of the most important dispersers of certain fruiting trees in the neotropical rainforest by ecologists working down here.
As a rule of thumb, birds that eat fruit tend to be colorful while those who specialize on insects tend to be drab. There are a few different hypothesizes as to why this is, ranging from drab coloration being a form camouflage for hunting prey to fruit providing excess calories and the building blocks necessary for synthesizing brightly colored feathers. Northern cardinals, for instance, get the carotenoids they need for their brilliant red feathers from the fruit they eat such as wild grapes and dogwood berries. But when we look at all those insect eating warblers across the temperate latitudes, we find a veritable rainbow of different colors. And it’s this diversity of colors in warblers that often make them a favorite of bird watchers across the northern hemisphere.
The colorful nature of warblers long confused me before I began spending time in Panama where I found myself watching countless numbers of these birds gorge themselves on both wild and domesticated fruits. It was then that I realized my perspective of these birds had been rather myopic. I had only considered them through the narrow lens of their short time spent in North America. But in truth, this family of birds with their kaleidoscope of colors should probably be thought of as a neotropical species where fruit is often a major food source as much as a temperate one. When we begin to look into the scientific literature on these birds, however, research largely stops at the border. With the yellow warbler for instance, Cornell University’s Birds of the World, an absolute indispensable resource on all things bird, states that these birds may eat fruit but no studies have been conducted on their diets outside of their nesting range.
Our last full day in the Bocas del Toro archipelago was spent exploring an old canal the United Fruit company had dug out between Bocas del Drago and the Rio Changuinola many decades ago. The canal itself cut across a major cape that protrudes from the mainland and therefore offered us an opportunity to see and photograph a different menagerie of species than that of the islands, giving everyone a taste of the mind-bending diversity that was to come on the second half of the trip.
The sheer number of prothonotary warblers this year was almost overwhelming. While the majority of the population winters in one small area of Columbia, it would seem as though these islands harbors the rest of these birds this time of year. During the breeding season, prothonotary warblers prefer the swampy recesses of the eastern deciduous forests of North America. Here in Panama, they tend to winter along the edge of the mangroves swamps. Our location is ideal for photographing these birds as it’s perched on a hill overlooking the mangroves below and eye level with the rainforest canopy.
The highlight for us here was one of the most beautiful male emerald basilisks I had ever seen. Stretched out across a low hanging palm frond and measuring close to a meter in length, as name of this species of Jesus lizard suggests, the rich and otherworldly green shone like a neon sign against the darker hues of the forest to our trichromatic primate eyes. With rich turquoise blue flecks and a large crest, we spent half an hour with this reptile and experimented with a variety of different creative compositions such as framing with and focusing through the vegetation so as to create an ethereal if not mysterious look and feel to the images.
Similar to the diets of warblers once they fly south for the winter, very little is known about the emerald basilisk in the wild. Also known as the plumed basilisk, this species is thought to subsist off insects despite their large size. However, photos keep showing up from armature photographers visiting the tropics of these reptiles eating young iguanas.
The fact that photographers are capturing images of animal behavior that is not recorded in the scientific literature shows the impact that wildlife photographers can have on our understanding of ecology, wildlife biology, and conservation. Fruit eating warblers? Iguana eating basilisks? This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Over the decade I have been exploring Panama, I have had the opportunity to help find and document new species of poison frogs, a new species of eyelash viper, and capture some of the first photographs of a species of salamander that had been recently rediscovered after it was thought to be extinct. This is the power of wildlife photography, especially in the biologically diverse rainforests and islands of a place like Panama. New species are routinely being discovered here. And our work here can have real impact as opposed to just being an excuse to check Facebook and Instagram.
In today’s world of hyper-specialization, where our credibility is hinged upon university degrees and narrow fields of study, it’s easy to forget the titanic impact that amateurs have had on our understanding of the world. Name someone over the last few hundred years who has had a tremendous impact on the way we see and think about nature. If Darwin came to mind, you should probably know he trained to be a minister. Alexander von Humboldt maybe? A rich Prussian who inherited a ton of money and wanted to see the world. Or perhaps Jane Goodall, who was a secretary at the Oxford University Library before Lewis Leakey sent her Africa to observe chimpanzees specifically because she wasn’t a trained primatologist, hoping that, because she had not been indoctrinated by the old guard of academia, she may see what others miss. None of those people were trained biologists. Yet each one completely revolutionized our understanding of the natural world.
Today, wildlife photographers have the ability to fill the shoes of the great naturalists who devoted their lives to exploring, observing, documenting, and forever changing our collective perspectives on nature. But I digress. Such is the power of this place and the impact it has on simply writing this trip report while swinging in a hammock and peering out into rainforest before me.
After four days in this tropical island paradise, we returned to the lodge to pack, have a celebratory dinner, and prepare to fly out in the morning for the mainland where more adventure and wildlife were just on the horizon for us.
To be continued. . .