Panama: the jewel of ecotourism

From Pirre Mountain, hikers can look out over the vast primary rain forest of the Darien.

Hernan Arauz, a guide for Ancon Expeditions, takes birdwatchers on a stroll through Panama's primeval forest.


		By Christian Kallen SPECIAL TO MSNBC

		April 8, 1999 — When the Panama Canal returns to Panamanian rule in December, more travelers than ever will begin flocking to this small Central American country. But there’s life beyond the Canal Zone: Panama is a rare ecotourism jewel that’s home to more than 900 bird species, enough to make any birdwatcher’s heart take flight.

QUICK: NAME THE North American country that claims the first permanent Spanish settlement. Now, guess where the richest gold mine in the New World was found? Which small Central American country has the most bird species in the Western hemisphere? If you answered Mexico, Peru and Costa Rica, you’re off the mark. One word says it all — Panama.
This narrow nation snaking between North and South America is best known for its Canal — the U.S.-built waterway that links the Atlantic across the isthmus to the Pacific. The Canal’s operations are being turned over to the Panamanians at noon on Dec. 31, 1999, the culmination of a long process negotiated between President Jimmy Carter and General Omar Torrijos in 1977.

Slipping through the lock



	A cargo ship is piloted through the locks of the Panama Canal. View the surround video

With Panama in the spotlight, the country is already seeing an increase in tourism, as travelers are discovering that this exotic place is at last coming out from under the shadow of the lengthy presence of the United States.
With almost 30 percent of its territory protected by national parks, and more bird species than the United States, Canada and Mexico combined, Panama is discovering its identity as a destination for the environmentally inclined traveler.
Panamanians are also newly aware that in addition to maintaining the canal’s machinery and labor, the handover means maintaining a healthy watershed for the reliable performance of the trans-continental passage.

Juan Carlos Navarro, a former director of the environmental group ANCON and presently a candidate for mayor of Panama City, zeroed in on this.
“After the Panama Canal Treaty,” said Navarro, “Panamanians started realizing that this is our country, this is our responsibility, and that no matter what happens if and when the Americans stay or leave, we need to take care of the Panama Canal watershed. Because it is the lifeblood of the Canal; it is what makes the Canal work.”

LOOK, UP IN THE SKY ...
Although I made it a point to take a one-day Canal transit on my visit there in February, I’ll it admit it right off: I visited Panama for the birds. I always tote my binoculars on my travels and collect bird books wherever I go. Last year when I took a trip to Costa Rica — which lists more than 830 recorded bird species — I did my best to enjoy what moments I could among the avifauna, and treasure the sighting and sound of the three-wattled bellbird at Monteverde. So when I caught a chunky glimpse of slate-blue on Panama’s famous Pipeline Road that hot and humid morning, I pointed it out to the group at once.

Birdwatching how-tos

Hark! Is that a white-tailed trogon? With 934 recorded bird species, Panama can claim the record for the Western Hemisphere. Fledgling birdwatcher Christian Kallen provides the details on which tour operators will take you to see the avifauna, plus how to fly there and where to stay.

Click for full story

“Look at that, some kind of parrot.”
“No,” said Hernan Arauz, our guide. “That’s not a parrot, that’s a — wait a minute. Wait ... a ... minute. That’s a white-tailed trogon. That’s a South American bird, you don’t usually find it here. Life sighting for me. Good work, Christian.”
“Oh that’s all right,” I said modestly. But like everyone else in this small mixed flock — with birders from France, Canada, California and Arizona — I was fully aware that a trogon ain’t a parrot. It’s only Day One of a 10-day birdwatching tour of eastern Panama, and I’ve already marked myself as a dabbler among experts, a wannabe to the world class.
Hernan’s rhyme about trogons came to mind:

“Birders like the trogon’s style
They’re big and bright and stay awhile.
In fact a native with a blowgun
Could easily knock off a trogon.”

The other birders were way beyond trogons, be they white-tailed, black-throated or orange-bellied. They were the Life Listers, bird-watchers whose interest can be called obsession, the restless quest to check off items from a regional list.
Then there was our guide, Hernan Aráuz. A former diplomat, the burly 37-year-old naturalist for Ancon Expeditions had Panama — and its birds — in his blood. Not only had he sighted nearly every one of Panama’s 900-plus bird species, he knew more than 700 by their call alone, and he could mimic most of those calls with weird accuracy. He even eschewed taping bird songs and playing them back to lure specimens in closer, the stock-in-trade of less gifted bird guides.

Panama can boast this bevy of birds because the country bridges two large land masses, each of which had its own evolutionary course lasting as much as 200 million years.

Panama can boast this bevy of birds because the country bridges two large land masses, each of which had its own evolutionary course lasting as much as 200 million years. The land masses were separate biological worlds floating on planetary plates, once divided but brought together again within the last 3 million years — by sultry, slim-waisted Panama.
Birds weren’t the only critters using this land bridge over the next 3 million years. Opossums, sloths, anteaters and armadillos spread from South America into North, while bears, deer, canines and the big cats migrated into South America. Some species went extinct, like the ground sloth. Others thrived, like the cougars now found from Canada to Argentina. Complex exchanges marked this conjunction of biological universes, and neither continent was the same again.
If there is a crux to the land bridge, a crucial link without which the ecology of the New World is endangered, it’s the Darién. Panama swerves like a snake between the Americas; the east end (the head or tail, depending on how you look at it) is the Darién, more than half a million hectares of near-virgin rain forest isolating North America from South. Perhaps this is a good thing: Colombia is a troubling neighbor at present, and armed border guards drifted through our last birding encampment at Santa Cruz de Cana, just 10 kilometers from Colombia’s border.
Our birding tour built up to our encounter with the Darién, but it was far from wasted time until we got there. We spotted manakins and woodnymphs at Pipeline Road, ibis and kingfishers among the Juan Diaz mangroves near Panama City, toucans and oropendulas at Nusagandi in the San Blas Mountains. (We also saw tamarinds, capuchin and howler monkeys, as well as three- and two-toed sloths and jaguar tracks.) Every night we’d settle down with our copies of Robert Ridgely’s “Birds of Panama” and the official Audubon “Lisa de las Aves de Panama,” checking off the species we had sighted. By the time we reached Cana, our total was just 187, but we had high hopes of cresting 300, since no less an authority than Ridgely himself had declared Cana “surely the single finest locality in the province and well worth the effort to get there.”
Our effort consisted of jumping aboard a chartered Twin Otter from Panama City to Cana, but the high point came, most literally, a day’s hike away. Cerro Pirre is a long ridge marking the southernmost extension of the Continental Divide, running south through the Darién to the border with Colombia. From the Ancon field station at Cana it was a climb of almost half a mile’s elevation, to 5,000 feet, on a steep and muddy trail. Even though we were used to the high humidity and temperature of Panama — at 7 degrees north, deep within the tropic zone — the five-hour trek was exhausting.

A coral snake - banded red, yellow, black, and red again - slithered between hikers, tracking down the prey it had just bitten.

Neither was it without incident. At one point we found a dying tree mouse on the trail, its clean gray-and-white body twitching its last. “Be careful,” cautioned Hernan when I stepped off trail to get a photo. “The snake that bit it is probably somewhere around here.” Indeed it was. Twenty yards farther along, a coral snake — banded red, yellow, black, and red again — slithered between hikers, tracking down the prey it had just bitten. Farther on, a dead salamander suggested a similar fate. Howler monkeys roared in the distance, lending an uneasy atmosphere to the deep forest.
Reaching the simple cleared camp at Cerro Pirre made it all worthwhile. Moments after shedding our day packs and quaffing a quart of water each, a tree on the edge of camp exploded with tanagers, a mixed flock working the seeding crown with frantic haste. Six species were sighted in the first minute, most of them new to most of us — including the Pirre bush-tanager, one of several Darién endemics found only on the slopes of this mountain. Here at the end of the trail, the farthest point our avian odyssey would take us, we were closest to our goal.
Then we had time to look around, and were struck by the vista — uninterrupted miles of tropical rain forest, stretching in every direction. There wasn’t a homestead on the horizon, not a power line, not a dirt road. This is the way the New World looked to the first human eyes to see it, and as it remained until Balboa traversed these same acres in 1514. This is a verdant landscape clinging to its antiquity, mature, hopeful, self-aware.

It was both inspiring and depressing to take in this panorama, for there are so few like it left. The Darién is important enough that UNESCO has named it a Global Biosphere Reserve, one of the 10 most important regions on earth — and it surely ranks toward the top of such a list. Sitting there with field glasses in hand, comparing notes and sightings with my fellow travelers, it struck me that if being a birder means helping sustain this untrammeled domain, these aboriginal acres, then let’s all raise our binoculars and say, “Save the Rain Forest — Start a Life List.”

Christian Kallen is co-author of three travel books and former managing editor of Mungo Park. He won the Lowell Thomas Award for Best Travel Book in 1989.

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