2019/04 Panama trip - Pipeline Road |
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Saturday April 27th
Next morning the sloth was still in the tree; it hadn’t rushed off anywhere. 
We were back with the birders, this time with George and Martin and Charles. The sign said Camino de Oleoducto, the more romantic Spanish name for Pipeline Road. We were walking the gravel road with Igua and stopping for any interesting birds. Every so often Igua would leave us and walk back and collect the birdmobile so that we didn’t have to backtrack.
There was no shortage of birds. One of the oddest was this Great Potoo, a nocturnal bird that impersonates a broken tree branch during the day. The half-open eyelid is the only giveaway. This one had a chick, also motionless and making like a twig. 
We saw kingbirds, trogons, puff birds and this splendid crimson-crested woodpecker.
This blue-crowned motmot was just emerging from its underground burrow when I clicked the shutter. The birds fly in and out 
at full speed, presumably so that predators can’t track the burrow’s location.
This ani is distinctive with its aristocratic bill.
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Pipeline Road birds (4.37) |
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As well as birds we saw a crocodile from a safe distance and found this lonely howler monkey draped over a branch. We saw a pack of coatimundis (also called coatis), relatives of raccoons, moving through the forest. They looked to have a lighter coat than those we’d seen in Costa Rica.
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Coatis (1.32) |
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Pipeline Road fauna (1.55) |
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We lost George for a while as he’d wandered off looking for that tower we’d climbed on our first morning. Sadly nobody was in a hurry to find George.
Back in our bedroom we watched this large green iguana cautiously make its way onto a branch and then crash down from twig to twig when something spooked it.
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Green iguana (1.03) |
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