2019/04 Panama trip - Summit Gardens |
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Our last afternoon we should have been going to look for sloths and raccoons at Punta Colebra on the Pacific coast, but instead we were rejoining Jorge and the birders for a trip to Summit gardens. Summit was close by, once a part of Soberania, but now a city park with lawns and some zoo pens. We would likely have been fried by the sun down on the coast, so we were quite happy with the switch to our schedule.
While we were waiting for Jorge the tamarins kept us amused. They were making their way around the Tower high above us, leaping from tree to tree. The baby couldn’t make the same jumps but could leap to smaller branches, albeit with a lot of dramatic swaying. They were ganging up on a large hawk that had perched in one of the trees and presumably was a threat to the baby.
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Tamarins (2.08) |
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Summit park was large and a destination for bus tours from Panama City: families, schoolkids, and tourists like us. It was more tended and civilized than the jungles we’d become used to but we noted that the ornamental ponds had crocodiles. Unlike the jungle, the park gave us a clear view of some magnificent trees, like these buttressed examples.
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Summit Gardens (2.28) |
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Agouti family (0.52) |
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Zoo tapir & jaguar (1.58) |
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It was easier to see birds too because the specimen trees were surrounded by lawns. We saw agoutis there, including this mother nursing two babies. The zoo pens held a tapir and a jaguar. Sandie had thought she’d seen a tapir last year on our boat trip out of the Corcovado and confirmed that this was what she’d seen, a surprise as we hadn’t realized there were any outside of Malaya.
The jaguar looked bored but it was large and powerful; they are generally bigger and heavier than the cougars that inhabit 
our forests.
The birders were disappointed to find that the harpy eagle’s cage appeared to be empty. We had to make do with this life-sized picture. The harpy is the rainforest’s largest eagle and it feeds on sloths and monkeys that it picks out of the canopy. Some of the party were going on to Canopy’s Camp Darien specifically to see the harpy in the wild.
Back at the Tower, the possum was reportedly still around somewhere. David and Hetti (I think) joined us for dinner. He had been a member of the Canopy team, lately manager of the Darien camp, and he was moving back to Maryland with his Columbian fiancée. Like Ed, he had been a member of the US Peace Corp in Panama and had liked the place so much he had stayed on.
Sandie was packing for our move to the Lodge, trying to keep our disgusting soggy dirty clothes away from our few remaining clean ones. She’d done one wash while we were there and some clothes took two days to sort of dry.