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Birds of a Feather, Sort Of
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 18, 2007 "King vulture at 1 o'clock!" Winnie yelled down the steep stairs from the lodge's observation deck. "King vulture at 1 o'clock!"
From throughout the rest of the building, a half-dozen or so other guests materialized, interrupting their siestas. One man wore only shorts, no shirt or shoes. Everyone aimed binoculars high into the sky.
Where? There! Up, up -- against the big cloud -- big, the biggest, the highest -- up there!
Got him!
Someone pulled out a guidebook to Central American birds and read a description of the huge, white-bodied scavenger that soared far above the Panamanian forest. It's a bird you would never see in North America and only rarely even here, where the isthmus funnels in a remarkable avian variety. "Unmistakable," the book says.
"I like unmistakable," another woman said, as Winnie did a little victory dance.
I like unmistakable, too. I'm decent at identifying robins, particularly the ones with the really red breasts, and I can almost always spot a cardinal, even from all the way across the back yard. But the elegant trogon eluded me in southern Arizona, and I've never seen a quetzal in Costa Rica. In the Galapagos, all of Darwin's finches looked pretty much the same to me.
Nonetheless, there I was, binoculars in hand, on the observation deck of Canopy Tower, an old U.S. radar installation in the former Panama Canal Zone. This place is legendary among serious bird-watchers. I'm definitely not one of those, but I'm married to a man who has owned a Peterson field guide since he was 6 years old.
After the United States transferred the radar tower and surrounding land to Panama as part of the handover of the canal, local businessman and bird-watcher Raul Arias leased it and converted it into an eco-lodge. It's one of the ways Panama is reaching for some of the nature travel business that has been such a gold mine for neighboring Costa Rica.
A Special Breed of Tourists
The five-story metal tower sits on a hilltop, rising well above the tree canopy. It's easily visible from the canal, where guides describe it as a big yellow golf ball sitting on a blue-green tee.
Even though the tower is just 40 minutes from downtown Panama City, it is surrounded by thick forest that shelters hundreds of kinds of birds. That draws eco-tourists with optics, people like those staring at the sky that afternoon. People with spotting scopes and bird books. People with great memories for tiny details and the ability to distinguish cinnamon from rufous at 30 yards.
In other words, birders.
Canopy Tower promised to be an intense few days. On the chalkboard next to the front door, someone had written, "Birding boot camp."
And I was definitely a civilian. On our first afternoon, before the king vulture sighting, I eavesdropped a bit on a group of guests as they compared notes and bird books. One said, "The only way to tell the difference is that it has . . ."
I stopped listening, because I knew the sentence was bound to end with something like "a buff throat instead of an ivory breast."
Bird-watching sounds simple enough. You see a bird. You watch it. But it's actually more like bird identifying. When you see a bird, you have to determine what species it is. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, it doesn't count.
And it's not enough to say, "Ooh, it's a woodpecker!" There are eight kinds of woodpeckers on the list of birds seen in the vicinity of Canopy Tower.
You think you know what a toucan looks like? There are four kinds on that list. It turns out that the one on the cereal box is a keel-billed toucan. The big rainbow-colored beak is a bit of a giveaway, but if you can't see that, the bird book says you can tell it apart from a chestnut-mandibled toucan because it has "black, not dark brown body feathering." Of course.
While it's all about the birds, what you see depends on who's watching. Our fellow guests the first day were serious birders. The vulture-spotter and her husband, both Canadians, had been at the tower for a week. A group of about a half-dozen U.S. retirees had been there several days as part of a longer tour of Panamanian bird spots.
How serious were they? Late that afternoon during a hike, as mosquitoes buzzed around us in the broiling sun, a prolonged disagreement broke out about what kind of swallow we were seeing. One kind has a distinct band across the breast. The other has an indistinct band.
"That's indistinct at best," one man observed solemnly.
Oh, my. This could be worse than I had thought, and there weren't many other options. The lodge's Web site lists some possibilities for non-birders, but they all come down to one thing: Leave, whether it's to tour the canal or to shop in Panama City.
And I couldn't just hang out at the pool, because there isn't one. Canopy Tower isn't a luxe resort, even though the cost is astronomical by Central American standards. Meals are healthy and ample, but not gourmet. The rooms are clean and pleasant, with hot water and electricity, but most are small. There's no air conditioning and no elevator.
Sleeping in wasn't an option, either. The metal walls and floors of the tower carry sound remarkably well, and when people are up with the birds, that's really, really early.
But hikes through Central American forest are fun, as long as the sun isn't too hot, the rain isn't too heavy and the snakes stay well away from the path. If you listen, you can spot monkeys. If you're patient, you can see sloths.
And, of course, birds. Birds are most active near sunrise and sunset, and that dictates the rhythm of the day during a bird vacation. At Canopy Tower, that usually meant coffee and orange juice on the observation deck for an hour or so before breakfast. By 8 a.m., sometimes hours earlier, everyone headed out for a long forest hike with one of the multilingual guides -- they all spoke Spanish, English and Bird.
After lunch, there was time for a nap; few birds are out in the heat of a tropical day. Hike for a couple more hours in late afternoon, then return for a shower, cocktails and dinner.
Conversation at the shared dinner tables revolved around those travel staples, where are you from and where have you been. Then came a group review of the day's bird list. Even though I'm usually a night owl, I was sound asleep by 9.
Eight Birders, One Book
Our second day, all the bird experts from the previous day had flown the coop, either for home or another bird lodge. We shared breakfast and the morning hike with a new couple, Bob and Gery. They were world travelers who had visited countries I've barely heard of, but they were new to the whole birding thing. On a visit to Brazil, they had hiked with a bird-watcher friend and enjoyed it. They figured that as long as they were in Panama, they would give it a try.
And so they did, even though the binoculars they purchased the day before their flight were better suited for watching a football game than for spotting birds in the trees.
With a guide who knows the territory, though, even an absolute beginner will see birds. Our guide, Jose -- one of two by that name at the lodge -- knew the territory. He walked a bit ahead of us down Semaphore Hill Road, watching the woods and sky, occasionally trilling out a bird call or playing a taped version. When a bird responded, he set up his spotting scope (a specialized telescope on a tripod), aimed it at the bird and urged us to look, quickly.
With Bob and Gery still trying to figure out what was going on, even I could be of help for once. Mostly it was with such hard-earned wisdom as, "Remember to take the lens caps off the binoculars."
And another tip, which my husband had repeated to me countless times: When you spot a bird in a tree, hold your head still, then bring the binoculars up to your eyes. Now that I was showing someone else, it finally made sense to me. With some hints from Jose and my husband, I even picked out a few birds myself. It helps a lot that the purple-throated fruit crow has a bright purple throat.
That afternoon, we added Doran and Sue, retirees from Florida, and Nathan and Natalie, young British backpackers spending six months traipsing around Central America. Among eight eco-tourists, all of whom had come a very long way to look at birds, we had one bird book.
For most people, a stay at Canopy Tower is the kind of thing you plan. There are just a dozen rooms, and much of the year there's a three-night minimum stay. Oh, and it's more than a mile up a hill on a rough road.
The Brits, both of whom had studied zoology, were a bit more casual. They had heard of the place, so when they were in the area, they hopped off a bus to take a look. That required walking up the hill -- "with 15 K [more than 33 pounds] on my back," Natalie said.
They may have been the first walk-up trade the Canopy Tower had seen in a while. Once they had arrived, they were going to stay, even though one night probably used two weeks of their hosteling budget. After all, as Natalie pointed out, the lodge had showers, and she needed one badly.
These two were knowledgeable birders -- and jubilant ones. When my husband and Nathan saw a summer tanager, a pretty little red bird, they high-fived each other. A keel-billed toucan flew overhead, and Natalie exclaimed, "I've finally seen a toucan's beak -- all I ever see is the rump."
They kept this up the whole next morning, through more than five hours along Pipeline Road, perhaps the most famous bird trail in this part of Panama. The road lived up to its billing, with what seemed like dozens of kinds of birds flying through, mostly in two big mixed flocks.
I wasn't counting the different species -- that's still something I leave up to the experts. My husband tallied 127 during our three days at Canopy Tower. But along with everyone in our group, I was seeing birds. And sloths. And monkeys.
That's what attracts people, including the ones who arrived at the tower when my visit was almost over. These four obviously knew what they were doing. They had clean, well-matched khakis and a thick bird book. From across the room, I could tell they had exactly the right binoculars. One woman, who looked uncannily like Laura Bush, even had her own very expensive Swarovski spotting scope.
They didn't talk much to the rest of us, who admittedly were looking a bit scruffy at this point. In the morning, they took a separate hike, with a separate guide. We didn't see much of them until our groups converged where two trailheads met. We chatted idly while a guide passed around sodas.
And then someone yelled, "King vulture!"
And everyone, binoculars in hand, ran to the clearing to point out to each other the unmistakable white-bodied bird far overhead.
Maryann Haggerty edits The Post's Real Estate section.
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