2019/04 Panama trip - Gamboa's marina |
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We returned to the Canopy Tower for a good lunch and for a checklist session with our guide. The checklists include all the likely birds and mammals to be seen in Panama and the guide calls out which ones have been seen on the last trip. It makes it easier to match up my photos to the birds in the books. After lunch is siesta time, but I was usually updating this journal.
Our guide for the afternoon trip was Igua, a member of the Kuna tribe, an indigenous people who come from islands just off Panama’s 
Caribbean coast. He took us back to the Chagres River, this time to Gamboa’s marina, another relic of the Canal Zone, now being enjoyed by Panamanians. Igua parked the truck and we walked the road into the marina. Igua told us that the water is usually low at the end of the dry season but this year it was exceptionally low, possibly a problem for the canal as its highest 
elevation, Lake Gatun, is at the same level as the marina.
The birds were quite different from those of the morning trip. There were oropendulas, birds that make untidy hanging nests in the trees around the river. Most numerous were the jacanas, also called Jesus birds as they stride along lily pads and appear to walk on water; we’d seen their relatives in Africa and tropical Australia. On the water were whistling ducks and gallinules and ibis, and a snail kite was hunting around the lagoon. Perched around the water were great-tailed grackles, relatives of the noisy birds we had in our back yard in Minnesota.
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Gamboa marina (0.24) |
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Black vultures were plentiful but there were no crows, a family absent from all of South America as well as Panama and Costa Rica. As well as birds we saw iguanas, a yellow-headed gecko, and this creepy unknown beetle. The butterfly looks to be a monarch; perhaps it took a wrong turn somewhere in Mexico.
We turned around at the large hotel and made our way back to the truck where we disturbed a two-toed sloth and its baby. Sloths only descend to the ground once a week to take a dump, but they promptly bury it so we didn’t know if we’d interrupted her before or after. Either way she and the baby moved up the tree in a hurry, at least by sloth standards.
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Gamboa sloth (1.31) |
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In the first picture the 
baby’s feet can be seen curled around the mother’s back. In the second they have separated with the baby above the mother, 
who’s showing off her big eyes and her two claws
At our checklist session that evening the Spanish couple showed us their pictures of a crocodile at the marina. All the rest of us, including Igua, had missed it.