a long weekend in the highlands of Panama

Another long weekend away, taking advantage of more Independence Day holidays, walking in some of the higher areas of Panama and hoping to see a few nice birds.

Well some of the scenery was beautiful, especially the cloud forest above, but sadly this area - Los Altos del Maria - is all privately owned (I entered with a tour group), marked out in lots, and those who buy the lots are slowly chopping down the forest to build their weekend homes.  A real crime.  & so pointless, as once the homes are built there will be no more cloud forest there, no more toucanets and sloths in the trees, and so not really much reason left to want to live there.

But for now it retains much of its beauty and much of its wildlife, even though the afternoon rain kept away the yellow-eared toucanets I had so wanted to see.  The vegetation is beautiful, the trees dripping with lichens and epiphytes and providing a home and a larder for creatures like these colourful caterpillars, which presumably will one day turn into beautiful butterflies or enormous moths.  A semi-transparent glass frog and a stunning coral snake were not so easy to photograph.

& the birds ... well I suspect too many bird photos would be boring for most of those who read this blog, so I shall content myself with one.  I've been dithering between the spectacled owl and the tody motmot - everyone likes owls, don't they?  But the tody motmot is such a cute little bird, found in all the countries of Central America but only in the high altitude parts and so pretty hard to see.  Here's the one that we eventually found, after a hard search, that then sat there patiently whilst we all took photos: