Out to Sea

Day 9 of Nine.

While eating breakfast on our hotel balcony we got our first lifer of the day, 2 Mangrove Swallows swooping around the homes in our neighborhood.  An hour later we chartered a small boat to take us out to Isla de Pájaros—Bird Island.  It was a sturdy fiberglass boat about 20 feet long, equipped with a canvas canopy and a 75 horsepower Yamaha outboard engine.  The captain was a young man, a member of the Boatmen’s Union. 

We were advised to go out in the morning, when the water is calm, because in the afternoons the ocean swells get large.  Well, if that was calm water this morning, I am never going out there in the afternoon!  The swells were quite large, and the currents swirled around the small, but very picturesque Isla de Pájaros.  Binoculars were useless because the boat bobbed relentlessly on the rough water.  As we drew close to the island we first saw large brown birds flying, then more delicate white ones.  Brown Boobies and Red-billed Tropicbirds.  The latter was our target, a white bird with a red bill, black markings on the back, and two white, long, streaming tail feathers.  A beautiful sea bird. 

On the way back we swung behind the lee of Isla Colon (the big island we live on) and once back in calm water we looked for herons and other birds among the mangroves.  We saw a few birds we hadn’t seen before in Panama, but they were all familiar birds we’d seen in the USA.

After we got our “land legs” back, we at lunch at a small restaurant on the bay, watching Magnificent Frigatebirds wheel high in the sky.

The life birds for the day:

Mangrove Swallow
Red-billed Tropicbird

Two lifers for the day and 48 for the week.  I still think it possible to have gotten 100 in the week, but we would have had to work harder and approach it differently than we did.  Anyway, it was lots of fun trying.  And there is still the rest of the month to get the next 52.  


Tomorrow it's back to Spanish lessons for us.