2019/04 Panama trip - Metro national park |
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Monday April 29th
There was a large flower on the cecropia tree. Perhaps that was why the sloth had been there. The flower was gone by lunchtime.
Birds on the tower included colourful honeycreepers and tanagers.
Igua took the two of us to the Metro national park in Panama City. It was slow going with the traffic, made worse by a fallen tree across the road. 
The park was green and inviting but littered with concrete buildings half-buried in jungle. We were warned not to stray far off the paths 
as this used to be a US Army trainng ground and there was some doubt about the clean-up.
We found lots of small birds, mainly wrens and doves, nothing very exciting. We saw more agouti, obviously very comfortable with people around. Look at those cute ears!
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Metro Park birds (2.00) |
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And some basilisk lizards, also called Jesus lizards, because they can run across the water for short distances. Igua tried 
to persuade one to do this but it ran around the pond instead.
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Tree & lizards (1.58) |
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Flowers & butterflies (1.41) |
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It was even more hot and humid down in the city, with no breeze. We were laboring a bit on the steep hills. We went to the main office to pay for entry, a nostalgic event for Igua as he used the work there years ago. He also met up with a fellow Kuna so they were chatting away in their native language. His family speaks Kuna but he said that Spanish is required for most jobs. 
We walked around the garden centre, a good spot for birds and butterflies, but in retrospect I think this was the only trip that I didn’t really enjoy and it was because of the constant roar of traffic blotting out the sounds of the birds and the jungle.
Back at the Tower we said goodbye to Igua who had a couple of days off and was going home to see his family. He told us that Alberto had injured his arm and was off work so we wouldn’t be going on our last night tour. We thought we’d lost out but they transferred our tour from the Tower to the Lodge and we did it later.