“Follow me,” Nando said. “I know where it lives.”
It was late morning, hot, humid and quiet. Shafts of sunlight cut through the jungle as we followed a path through the latticed shade. A few hundred yards away, gigantic cargo ships stacked with containers chugged along the Panama Canal. But that was another world.
Where we were walking was a strip of loamy-smelling rainforest that lines the canal banks and serves as home to hundreds of species of birds. We were looking for a specific one.
At an overgrown spot in the forest that to me looked like any other, Nando, our guide, stopped.
“Whoit, whoit, whoit,” he gently whistled. Then he listened.
“You can’t just use your eyes,” he whispered. “You have to use your ears.”
The third time he called, I heard, faintly calling back, “Whoit, whoit, whoit.”
It was remarkable. Nando was speaking bird.
A plump little streak-chested antpitta fluttered down onto a stick, a few feet away. I stood, awe-struck, as man and bird softly called back and forth.
“This is the same bird I’ve been calling for years,” Nando said, happiness lacing his voice.
“You mean the same species of bird?” I asked.
“No, no,” he smiled. “The same individual. That bird has become quite special to me.”
It was a moment of connection between a person and a tiny animal, lasting only a few minutes. But memorable trips are made of moments like these and our recent trip to Panama was full of them.
This past December, my family and I went bird-watching in Panama. It’s a country rapidly building up its ecotourism industry. It lies in the same time zone as Chicago, thus no jet lag for most Americans, and boasts a rich, cosmopolitan history because of the canal. And Panama is home to a thousand species of birds, both migrant and native, from the magnificent frigate bird that soars on air currents for thousands of miles, to a dizzying variety of small, charismatic forest birds like the streak-chested antpitta that Nando so delicately summoned.
The same reason that the Panama Canal was created in the early 20th century, revolutionizing world trade, explains why so many birds can be spotted here. This is a land between — between two continents, North and South America; between the world’s biggest oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic; and between dramatically different elevations and climates, from flat sunny beaches to cool, rainforest-covered mountains rising more than 10,000 feet.
We planned our one-week trip months before…
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